Moderna's chief medical officer says that vaccine trial results only show that they prevent people from getting severely sick — not necessarily that recipients won't still be able to transmit the virus

Lab tech Sendy Puerto processes blood samples from Moderna's coronavirus vaccine clinical trials study participants September 2, 2020 in Miami, Florida.

Taimy Alvarez/AP

• Moderna Chief Medical Officer Tal Zaks told Axios that the public should not "over-interpret" the vaccine trial results to assume life could go back to normal after adults are vaccinated.
• "They do not show that they prevent you from potentially carrying this virus transiently and infecting others," Zaks told Axios. 
• While he believes, based on the science, that it's likely that vaccine does prevent transmission, but said there's still no solid proof of that yet.
• "I think it's important that we don't change behavior solely on the basis of vaccination," he said.
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Moderna Chief Medical Officer Tal Zaks told Axios that the public should not "over-interpret" the vaccine trial results to assume life could go back to normal after adults are vaccinated. 

Zaks warned that the trial results show that the vaccine can prevent someone from getting sick or "severely sick," as Zaks puts it, from COVID-19, however, the results don't show that the vaccine prevents transmission of the virus. 

"They do not show that they prevent you from potentially carrying this virus transiently and infecting others," Zaks said in an interview for "Axios," the outlet's show on HBO.

Zaks added: "When we start the deployment of this vaccine we will not have sufficient concrete data to prove that this vaccine reduces transmission."

While he believes based on the science that it's likely that vaccine does prevent transmission, there's still no solid proof of that. 

"I think it's important that we don't change behavior solely on the basis of vaccination," he said. 

Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine is one of three vaccines that have shown effectiveness in trial results. The company said its vaccine is 94.5% effective at protecting people against COVID-19.

Moncef Slaoui, the head of Operation Warp Speed, the White House effort to develop and administer the vaccine, said on Sunday that the company will seek emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for its COVID-19 vaccine by the end of November. 

Pfizer who formulated another vaccine applied for FDA emergency authorization on Friday. 

On Monday, AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford also reported that their vaccine was effective towards COVID-19. 

There have been at least 12.4 million infections in the US so far with over 257,000 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Daily cases in the US repeatedly hit record highs in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, and many public experts have warned that this could be the deadliest wave of the virus in the US. 

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