(Reuters) – The United States must stick to a two-dose strategy for the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, Anthony Fauci, a leading U.S. infectious official, told the Washington Post.
Fauci said that postponing a second dose to inoculate more Americans creates risks.
He warned that switching to a single dose strategy for vaccines could leave people less protected, allow variants to spread and possibly increase skepticism among Americans who are already hesitant to get vaccines.
“There are risks on both sides,” Fauci told the Washington Post in a report published late on Monday.
“We are telling people that (two shots) is what you should do … and then we say, ‘Oops, have we changed our minds’?” Fauci said. “I think it would be a messaging challenge, to say the least.”
He added that he spoke with UK health officials on Monday, who opted to postpone second doses to maximize the quickest injection of people. Fauci said that this strategy would not make sense in the United States.
He said that science does not support the postponement of a second dose for these vaccines, citing research that a two-dose regimen creates enough protection to help ward off the most transmissible coronavirus variants, while a single dose could leave Americans at risk of variants such as the first detected in South Africa.
“You don’t know how durable this protection is,” he said.
Fauci said on Sunday that he was encouraging Americans to accept any of the three available COVID-19 vaccines, including the newly approved Johnson & Johnson injection.
The US government authorized Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose COVID-19 vaccine on Saturday, making it the third vaccine available in the country after Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna that require two doses.
COVID-19 has claimed more than half a million lives in the United States, and states are calling for more doses to contain cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Himani Sarkar and Ana Nicolaci da Costa)