Bay Area health experts: Covid vaccines are safe and effective

Public health officials from all nine Bay Area counties including Sonoma issued a joint statement reaffirming that all three Covid vaccines now in use, including Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose version, are safe and highly effective.

Though it’s difficult to compare their efficacy, “As local health officers, we fully support all three currently available vaccines for COVID-19.”

The statement released in March declares that the clinical trials for all three vaccines demonstrated that they were 100 percent effective in preventing deaths from COVID-19. “There is also growing evidence that all three vaccines help prevent asymptomatic illness, too. This means that people who have been vaccinated are not likely to spread of COVID-19 to others who are not vaccinated.”

Though the different brands of COVID- 19 vaccines have not been studied in head-to-head comparisons, the vaccines have each been studied in slightly different groups of people and tested at different phases of the pandemic.

“What we can say with certainty is 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.”

The collective medical advice is this: the best vaccine is the one you can get the soonest. “The different vaccines have different storage requirements and with supplies of vaccine currently limited, the same brand may not be available at each vaccine site consistently.”