If you’re vaccinated against COVID, can you still infect others? A look at new data from Israel

LA Mayor Eric Garcetti on Thursday addressed vaccine shortages: “Los Angeles isn’t receiving enough vaccines from the federal government to meet our daily capacity. Case in point: This week we were only allocated about 60,000 vaccine doses. That’s about 60% less than what we are capable today of delivering. So as soon as we get more, we will do much more, and protect so many more lives, restart our economy, reopen our schools. And I’ve said this to our state partners, and I’ll say this to our federal leaders: Give us the supply, and we can vaccinate everyone by July.”

He also said the winter storms battering the rest of the country caused distribution delays here. As a result, vaccine appointments for about 12,000 people in LA were postponed.

Garcetti’s target of vaccinating everyone by mid-summer means life may finally start to return to some semblance of normal.

But how should our behavior change once we are vaccinated? Even if vaccines prevent a severe COVID-19 infection, how well do they keep the virus from spreading?

Researchers are starting to get some answers to that last question. The data, for Pfizer’s vaccine, looks promising. The results are coming out of Israel, which is leading the world in distributing the coronavirus vaccines.