During the Dec. 10, 2020, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) meeting when the first mRNA vaccines were authorized, FDA adviser Dr. Patrick Moore
stated, “Pfizer has presented no evidence in its data today that the vaccine has any effect on virus carriage or shedding, which is the fundamental basis for herd immunity.” Despite the data presented for individual efficacy, he continued, “we really, as of right now, do not have any evidence that it will have an impact, social-wide, on the epidemic.” The FDA EUA press release from December 2020 also
confirms that there was no “evidence that the vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-COV-2 from person to person.”
Simply put, the reason many people believed the vaccines stopped transmission was because government officials and media outlets across the Western world were either careless with their words or did not tell the truth. In 2021, for instance, Director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Rochelle Walensky
claimed that vaccinated people “do not carry the virus,” and Dr. Anthony Fauci
said they would become “dead ends” for the virus. Any speculation that the vaccines significantly reduced transmission was based on limited results from independent studies and the false assumption that the vaccine would
prevent infection. Without adequate evidence, vaccination campaigns called on people to get vaccinated not just for their own protection, but to help “protect others” and “save lives.”
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It was not until August 2022 that the CDC issued guidance that called for vaccinated and unvaccinated people to no longer be subjected to different testing or quarantine protocols. To justify this change in guidance, the CDC
cited the protection provided by previous infection as well as breakthrough infections. Yet studies had already shown by the fall of 2021 that the vaccines did not prevent infection, that natural immunity was at least as
protective, that vaccinated people had
similar viral loads to unvaccinated people, and that vaccinated people had a role in
transmission.