Community concerns about the efficacy of one COVID-19 vaccine brand over another has prompted Bay Area health officials to issue a statement declaring that the vaccines made by Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson are all safe and effective.
The statement supporting the vaccines was approved by health officials from the city of Berkeley, as well as the counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Solano and Sonoma.
The Bay Area health officials stated, “we fully support all three currently available vaccines for COVID-19,” noting that “all three vaccines are safe and have been shown to be highly effective at preventing symptomatic illness and hospitalization.”
As part of their collective statement, the health officials added that the clinical trials for all three vaccines have shown that they were “100 percent effective in preventing deaths from COVID-19” and that “there is also growing evidence that all three vaccines help prevent asymptomatic illness, too.” Thus, per their statement, those who have been vaccinated are not likely to spread of COVID-19 to others who are unvaccinated.
Health officials went on to underscore that the different COVID-19 vaccine brands have not been studied in head-to-head comparisons but they can say with certainty that “all three vaccines provide levels of protection that are comparable to some of the best vaccines we have for other serious infectious diseases for which we routinely vaccinate people.”
Amid the continuing pandemic and as we all work toward community immunity, the health officials’ stated that their collective medical advice is that “the best vaccine is the one you can get the soonest.”
For questions about the vaccine, the statement directed community members to speak with their medical provider or learn more the state’s COVID-19 website.
Photo courtesy of the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention
