Do Coronavirus Vaccines Prevent Spread? UW Students Join Study

SEATTLE — The University of Washington has joined 20 other universities for a study that aims to answer an important question in the fight against COVID-19: Do vaccines prevent people from spreading the coronavirus?

Around 12,000 students are participating in the study, which is expected to take five months. Although only the Moderna vaccine will be used in the trial, the results will apply "equally well" to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which uses a similar technology, researchers said.

“Whatever one learns from Moderna applies to Pfizer,” said Fred Hutch virologist Dr. Larry Corey. “The strand of RNA is identical.”

The study, 'PreventCOVIDU,' is led by the COVID-19 Prevention Network at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

The trial will help to determine whether a person can become infected after they've been vaccinated and if the vaccines can stop the virus from spreading from person-to-person. Organizers with Fred Hutch say the limited data already available suggests vaccines do slow the spread, but that their study will help find out for sure.

“What we would like to see is that the vaccine recipients who become infected have lower levels of virus in the nose or a shorter duration of infection than participants who became infected and are not vaccinated,” said Dr. Holly James, who helped design the study.

Researchers will vaccinate half the students right away, and then vaccinate the other half four months later. Volunteers will then be asked to swab their nose every day, get tested twice weekly and complete daily questionnaires about symptoms via an app on their phone. They'll also have their blood drawn periodically.

“We needed a different kind of study design — one that uses intensive sampling of the nose, the site of first infection, and can detect the exact time-course of infection," Corey said.

Around 25,500 close contacts of the participants will be tracked nationwide, the study's leaders said. A report on the results is expected before the fall.

Fred Hutchison says the study is particularly important because colleges have been a hotbed for COVID-19 infections — there have been 535,000 coronavirus cases recorded in U.S. college students, 120,000 in 2021 alone.

“I can’t overstate the enormous service these students are doing for public health by participating in this study,” Dr. Elizabeth Brown said. "They are really giving a lot of themselves to do this, and we really appreciate their effort and contribution to science.”

The trial is funded by the federal COVID-19 Response Program and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Patch Staffer Amber Fisher contributed to this report.