Does a new study prove vaccine mRNA sheds?

A new article from anti-vaccine researchers, The McCullough Group, suggests that a person who has been vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine can spread it to others through breast milk and possibly saliva, breath, or sweat, and that the ingredients keep spreading between cells inside the body to cause harm.

• The article about COVID vaccine shedding has not been peer-reviewed.
• COVID vaccines cannot make a whole coronavirus that can multiply and spread.
• There is no evidence that everyday contact with vaccinated people causes vaccine side effects.

The paper shared by the McCullough Group is a preprint posted on Zenodo, a website for sharing research. Zenodo is not a scientific journal. Posting a paper there does not mean other experts have checked its methods or findings (https://help.zenodo.org/docs/deposit/about/).

There is no evidence that mRNA COVID vaccines spread through everyday contact or cause vaccine side effects in nearby people. The vaccines give cells instructions to make just one part of the coronavirus: the spike protein. They do not include the instructions needed to build the whole virus. The spike protein cannot multiply on its own or cause a COVID infection, so it cannot spread from person to person the way the virus does. Tiny amounts of vaccine mRNA have been found in some breast milk samples shortly after vaccination, but this does not show contagious “shedding” or harm to babies.