Do vaccinated people spread Covid as much as unvaccinated people?
Denominators (still) matter
A couple of weeks ago, internal CDC data about the Delta variant leaked to the public. There was a lot to process in this tranche of data—like, for example, the fact that Delta is way more transmissible than the original version of Covid-19.
Perhaps predictably, however, the anti-vaccine movement has latched on to one particular finding: the amount of virus (aka the “viral load”) in the noses of infected vaccinated people mimics the viral load in the noses of unvaccinated people.
Because we believe that Covid is airborne—and that it’s therefore transmitted from people’s mouths and noses—an appropriate potential conclusion from this finding is that, all other things being equal, infected vaccinated people may be able to transmit Covid as well as infected unvaccinated people.
That’s not ideal, obviously, but it’s also not where the antivaxxers stopped. They, instead, have concluded this:
