Can I Give Someone COVID-19 Just From Getting The Shot?

What are your questions about the coronavirus vaccine?

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Judy asks: "If given the Johnson & Johnson shot, can I give somebody COVID even if I don't have it, just because I got the shot?"

There is no live virus in any of the COVID-19 vaccines being used in the U.S. so, it is not possible to spread COVID-19 from getting the shot, said University Hospitals Pediatric Infectious Disease Specialist Dr. Amy Edwards.

"It's not a functioning virus at all," Edwards said. "It is a copy of the outside of the virus, and so you cannot spread it in any form or fashion to another person because it's not what we call a fully replicating or fully functioning virus."

Edwards can understand where the question comes from. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is called a viral vector vaccine, which can make it sound like it has the virus in it when it doesn't, Edwards said.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Viral vector vaccinesuse a modified version of a different virus (the vector) to deliver important instructions to our cells.

First, the vector (not the virus that causes COVID-19, but a different, harmless virus) will enter a cell in our body and then use the cell’s machinery to produce a harmless  piece of the virus that causes COVID-19. This piece is known as a spike protein and it is only found on the surface of the virus that causes COVID-19.

But there are some vaccines for other viruses that do have the live virus in them.

"The measles vaccine is a live virus vaccine, and so if there's somebody who's immune-compromised in the household, you have to be very careful about giving the measles vaccine to somebody, because you can give the immune-compromised person measles," Edwards said. 

Yellow fever, rotavirus, typhoid, and the oral polio vaccines are all live virus vaccines. 

The U.S. doesn't use the oral polio vaccine, Edwards said, but in places where is it used, vaccine-derived polio is becoming more prevalent than wild polio because people are contagious after receiving the vaccine. 

Both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 are mRNA vaccines. According to the CDC, mRNA vaccines are a new type of vaccine to protect against infectious diseases. The mRNA vaccines teach our cells how to make a protein—or even just a piece of a protein—that triggers an immune response inside our bodies.