Why Some Experts Think We Should Delay the Second COVID-19 Vaccine Doses
Amid a slower than expected coronavirus vaccine rollout in the U.S., health officials in the U.K. will focus on giving more people one COVID-19 vaccine dose, which will likely delay their second doses, CNBC reports. Now experts in the U.S. are discussing whether or not an approach like this is worth the risks of deviating from the original vaccine schedule.
There are now two COVID-19 vaccines available in the U.S., one developed by Pfizer and BioNTech and one developed by Moderna. Both of them are administered in two separate doses that are meant to be given a few weeks apart.
Currently in the U.S., for every first dose given, a second dose is reserved for a few weeks down the line to complete the dosing schedule according to the clinical trials. On the other hand, with the U.K. approach, the priority is to use the currently available doses to give as many people as possible their first dose, knowing that this will extend the time between doses beyond the time period studied in the clinical trials while the supply catches up.
But considering the slow roll-out of vaccines across the U.S. (only about 2 million out of an expected 20 million doses were given by the end of 2020) and COVID-19 cases continuing to rise, experts are grappling with a new set of questions: Should we stick to the original plan and give everyone in the first priority groups both shots of the vaccines, which might mean holding onto half of those doses for now? Or would it be more valuable to give more people their first dose of the vaccines knowing that we may not have a predictable, steady supply of doses in the future and, therefore, that people could have to wait longer than the recommended time between their doses? And on the more extreme end, could we just give people one COVID-19 vaccine dose without the second? Will we be so short on supply that we need to stretch it out by giving two smaller doses?
Many experts say that it’s best to stick to the original plan for now because that’s what the pharmaceutical companies used in their clinical trials, which means that’s what we have the most relevant data for.
“Stick to the vaccine schedule,” Angela Rasmussen, Ph.D., virologist at Georgetown University Center for Global Health Science and Security, said on Twitter. Even Pfizer and BioNTech agree: “The safety and efficacy of the vaccine has not been evaluated on different dosing schedules as the majority of trial participants received the second dose within the window specified in the study design,” the companies said in a joint statement, Reuters reports.
“I think it would be good to give the second dose as soon as possible,” Florian Krammer, Ph.D., professor of vaccinology in the department of microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, said on Twitter. “It is likely that the second dose is needed to generate long-lived and strong immunity.” (To be clear, though, we still don’t know definitively how much protection either vaccine offers.)
On top of the concerns about vaccine efficacy, changing or delaying the schedule could have consequences for the public’s trust in science and medicine. “While there may be strong arguments for halving vaccine doses (and even a delayed dosing strategy) in order to vaccinate as many people as possible, any change from the protocols used in clinical trials will likely further undermine already eroded public trust in vaccines,” Uché Blackstock, M.D., emergency medicine physician and founder of Advancing Health Equity, wrote on Twitter.
https://www.self.com/story/covid-19-vaccine-dose-schedule-delay, GO TO SAUBIO DIGITAL FOR MORE ANSWERS AND INFORMATION ON ANY TOPIC
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