Skip to content

Friday, Jan. 7, 2022

Do people who get the polio vaccine never have a breakthrough case?

Alexis Tereszcuk, Lead Stories

no

There is a post circulating on social media that someone would "have questions" if they had gotten several polio vaccines and still got polio. Another post makes the same statement about smallpox.

However, this is missing context. The polio vaccine does not offer absolute and complete protection against the disease. While three doses of the vaccine is considered 99% to 100% effective, polio breakthrough infections do rarely happen.

Due to a successful vaccination campaign, the World Health Assembly declared smallpox eradicated in 1980, and no cases of naturally occurring smallpox have happened since.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

About fact briefs

Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by Gigafact contributor publications.

See all fact briefs

Lead Stories is a fact checking and debunking website at the intersection of big data and journalism that launched in 2015. It scouts for trending stories, images, videos and posts that contain false information in order to fact check them as quickly as possible. It actively monitors the fake-news ecosystem and doesn’t wait for reader tips or reports before getting started on a story.

Learn More

Be a Friend of facts

Help us fund more great fact briefs like this one.