Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease specialist, told CNN on Friday that the United States would not follow Britain’s example in the first vaccine injections, potentially delaying administration of the second doses.
© Photo of the pool by Patrick Semansky
Dr. Anthony Fauci disagrees with Britain’s plan to wait up to 12 weeks to administer the second dose of the vaccine.
Britain this week announced a plan to postpone the second injection of its two authorized vaccines, developed by Pfizer and AstraZeneca, in an attempt to distribute the partial protection afforded by a single dose to more people.
“I wouldn’t be in favor of that,” Fauci told CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen. “We will continue to do what we are doing”.
His opinion was received with approval by some experts, including Dr. Eric Topol, a clinical trial specialist at the Scripps Research Translational Institute in California, who tweeted, “This is good because it follows what we know, the trial data with extraordinary 95 percent effectiveness, avoiding extrapolation and the unknown.”
While clinical tests tested the effectiveness of the second doses given three or four weeks after the first, British officials said they would allow an interval of up to 12 weeks. These delays have not been rigorously tested in trials. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, for example, has been shown to be 95 percent effective in preventing Covid-19 when given in two doses, three weeks apart.
Moving away from this regime “is like going to the Wild West,” said Dr. Phyllis Tien, an infectious disease doctor at the University of California, San Francisco. “It needs to be data driven if they want to make a change.”
Increasing the interval between doses of the vaccine may impair the benefits of the second injection, which aims to increase the body’s defenses against the coronavirus, increasing the strength and durability of the immune response. In the meantime, the protective effects of the first shot may also decrease faster than anticipated.
“We don’t really know what happens when you take just one dose after, like, a month,” said Natalie Dean, a biostatistics at the University of Florida. “It is not just the way it was tested.”
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