VERIFY: No, you can't get sick with COVID-19 from the vaccine

WASHINGTON — QUESTION:

Can getting a COVID-19 vaccine to make you sick with COVID-19?

ANSWER:

No.

SOURCES:

• Dr. Linda Nabha- Infectious Diseases Specialist 
• Dr. David Diemert-  Associate professor of Medicine and Microbiology, Immunology and Tropical Medicine at The George Washington University, School of Medicine & Health Sciences
• Dr. Stuart Ray - Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins Medicine
• Dr. William Schaffner- Professor of Preventative Medicine, Health Policy and Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases- Vanderbilt University 
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: "Busting Myths and Misconceptions about COVID-19 Vaccination"

PROCESS:

We’re verifying this claim: "Can a vaccine give you COVID-19?”

Our Verify researchers spoke with four medical experts who all confirmed that's false.

"These leading vaccine trials don't have live virus in them," Dr. Linda Nabha, an infectious diseases specialist, said. "So you can't, for example, get COVID from these vaccines that don't have the live virus in them."

That fact was backed up by other experts that spoke with our VERIFY researchers.

"You cannot get COVID from the vaccine itself because the vaccine doesn't include the full COVID virus," Dr. David Diemert, an associate professor of medicine at the George Washington University said. "So it's not possible for the vaccine to suddenly make the virus in the person's body."

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Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University, agrees that you can't catch coronavirus from the vaccines, though you may not feel great immediately after getting one. 

"No, you won't get sick with COVID with the vaccine, but these vaccines, the early ones, are what we call 'reactogenic,'" Schaffner said. "They hurt going in, lots of people get sore arms. Some people actually feel really poorly, fatigued, headache, not energetic, some may even get some fever for a day or two. That's the body working on the vaccine, you're not getting ill."

"None of the vaccines carries the coronavirus in them that's live, so you can't get the coronavirus from the vaccine," Dr. Stuart Ray, professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, said. "None of them are infectious and none of them could be spread among people.”

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The CDC also addresses this claim on COVID-19 vaccine myth-busting page.

So we can Verify, no, getting the COVID-19 vaccine will not make you sick with the virus. Our experts say none of them carry live virus.