COVID-19 vaccines can't be spread through sexual contact | Fact check

Joedy McCreary, USA TODAY
·4 min read
19

The claim: COVID-19 vaccines can spread to unvaccinated people through sexual contact

A Sept. 27 Facebook video (direct link, archive link) shows microscopic images of blood purportedly drawn from a person who did not receive a COVID-19 vaccine but had sex with someone who did.

“We’ve finally proven that it can spread through sexual intercourse,” a narrator in the video says, referring to the vaccine. Part of the post’s caption states, “Don’t have sex with a vaccinated person.”

The post was shared more than 600 times in seven days. The post's caption includes a link to a post on X, formerly Twitter, that shares the same claim and was reposted more than 7,000 times in eight days.

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Our rating: False

Experts say the COVID-19 vaccine cannot be transmitted from person to person through any type of contact, sexual or otherwise, because the vaccine does not contain the live virus.

‘You don’t catch this vaccine’

Two medical experts told USA TODAY the post's claims are not possible.

“You don’t catch this vaccine – it’s just a protein,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the division of infectious diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Fact check: COVID-19 vaccinated people don’t ‘shed’ viral particles from the vaccine

Vaccine shedding, the release or discharge of a component of the vaccine in or outside of the body, can only occur if a vaccine contains a live, weakened version of the virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That does not apply to any of the COVID-19 vaccines recommended for use in the U.S. as they do not use live viruses, the agency states.

The most widely used COVID-19 vaccines, produced by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, rely on messenger RNA to effectively teach human cells how to produce the spike protein found on the surface of viral particles, according to the CDC. That generates an immune response that includes the production of antibodies.

A few days later, that mRNA is broken down and destroyed by cells in the immune system, Offit said.

He says the body has hundreds of thousands of pieces of mRNA, which occurs naturally in cells and is essential for life, with other versions of it producing hemoglobin, insulin and other necessary compounds in the body.

“You don’t transmit those proteins from one person to the next,” Offit said.

The video shows slides of blood purportedly drawn from an unvaccinated person who had sex with someone who received a vaccine. The narrator states, “It’s actually looking like a vaccinated person’s blood.”

But Offit said the blood of a vaccinated person is indistinguishable from that found in someone who is unvaccinated.

Dr. David Gorski, a professor of surgery and oncology at Wayne State University who has debunked claims about "shedding" the COVID-19 vaccine, told USA TODAY that the discussion in the video about the person’s blood was “generally nonsense.”

“Blood analysis is an old form of quackery where you just, basically, take somebody’s blood, stick it in a slide and look at it, and people may infer all these things from it,” Gorski said.

The video's narrator identifies himself only as “Dr. Lewis.” Near the end of the 3-minute video, he directs viewers to a Telegram profile belonging to a man named Aaron Lewis, the operator of an alternative medicine clinic in Trinidad and Tobago.

USA TODAY reached out to Lewis and to the social media users who shared the post but did not immediately receive responses.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: False claim COVID-19 vaccines can be transmitted sexually | Fact check