Santa Clara Co. Health Officer Affirms Support For All 3 Vaccines

SANTA CLARA COUNTY, CA — Health officers across the Bay Area issued a joint statement Monday to encourage the public to view all three COVID-19 vaccines available in America as safe and highly effective.

The Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson/Janssen vaccines were all 100 percent effective in preventing death from COVID-19, health officers in each of the nine Bay Area counties, plus Santa Cruz County, said in the statement. Mounting evidence also showed that vaccinated people are not likely to spread COVID-19 to people who are not vaccinated.

The health officers said they fully support all three vaccines.

"With COVID-19 continuing to circulate as we work toward community immunity, our collective medical advice is this: The best vaccine is the one you can get the soonest," they said. "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."

It's difficult to compare the vaccines to each other, health officers said in the statement. Each has been tested on different groups of people at different times in areas with differing rates of community transmission. Tests were administered in some areas with COVID-19 variants and in others without.

"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," they said.

Health officers encouraged anyone with questions about the vaccine to contact his or her medical provider or visit the state's website.