Operation Warp Speed’s chief scientific adviser, Moncef Slaoui, said on Sunday it could take months before researchers know for sure whether transmission of COVID-19 is possible from someone who received the vaccine.
On CBS’s ‘Face the Nation’, host Margaret Brennan asked Slaoui when scientists will know if such transmission is possible, an important factor in determining when the US will develop herd immunity against the virus.
“Do you have a date on which you will know if you can still pass the virus on to others once you have been vaccinated?” asked Brennan.
“No,” Slaoui replied. “These studies will honestly be based on observational data from the population. I do not think we will have data until late in the spring.”
Do it #OperationWarpSpeed have a timeline of once you have been vaccinated if you can still give #coronavirus to others?
Tell Slaoui @margbrennan “no” without projecting the data on the timeline until late spring pic.twitter.com/0Ibkk4YWl1
– Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) January 3, 2021
He also addressed reports of vaccination delays in the U.S., and indicated as Surgeon General Jerome Adams
Jerome AdamsSunday shows preview: Senate candidates support Georgia’s runoff; government continues to vaccinate coronavirus Sunday shows – Opposition bill on Trump over COVID-19 dominates surgeon general over medical racism: ‘We need to acknowledge these things’ MORE conducted a separate interview on Sunday with a figure indicating that 1.5 million Americans have received vaccines in the past 72 hours.
“Our assumption was that there was a plan to immunize,” Slaoui said of the state’s efforts to distribute the vaccine. “We stand here to assist any specific request. We will do the best we can, as we have done for the past eight months, to indeed make these vaccines into the arms of people.”
Top federal officials have been defending the U.S. deployment of Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines over the past few days amid reports of a significant gap between the number of vaccines distributed to states, amounting to more than 14 million, and the number of Americans actually vaccinated. Just over 4 million doses were administered in the US
“Somewhere there is a backlog in calculating the numbers, but it is certainly a smaller number than the 14 million doses available there,” Slaoui said last week. “We agree that the number is lower than we had hoped.”