Some family doctors in Britain said on Thursday that they would defy government instructions to postpone patient appointments for a second dose of the coronavirus vaccine, a sign of discomfort in the medical community about Britain’s new plan. to postpone the second injection as a way to give more people partial protection of a single dose.
British doctors, instructed to start rescheduling second dose appointments for next week, said they did not want to ask older, vulnerable patients to wait another two months for their booster doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. They said that these patients had full protection of two doses, had already provided caregivers to help them get to doctors’ offices and could not afford to rely on a new and untested vaccination strategy.
In addition, doctors said it was logistically impossible to contact thousands of older patients in a matter of days and then fill those vacancies with first-time receivers.
The British Medical Association, a doctors’ union, said on Thursday that it would support doctors who decide to keep second dose appointments scheduled for January.
“It is grossly and patently unfair for tens of thousands of our highest-risk patients to now try to reschedule their appointments,” said Dr. Richard Vautrey, chairman of the union’s family doctors committee, in a statement. “The government must see that it is fair for existing reservations for the oldest and most vulnerable members of our society to be honored, and it should also publish, as soon as possible, a scientifically validated justification for its new approach.”
Britain’s National Health Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Postponing the second dose of the vaccine could double the number of people eligible for vaccines in the coming weeks and eventually decrease the number of victims of the virus in Britain, where hospitals are facing a deluge of cases of a new variant of the coronavirus more contagious. While anyone can get better with two full doses, some scientists say, society as a whole benefits if more people receive partial protection from a single dose for now.
But other scientists believe Britain has outgrown the available evidence, potentially leaving the elderly and healthcare professionals without the full protection of two doses of vaccine amid terrible winter spikes. Britain made the decision without the public meetings or voluminous instructions that preceded American regulatory decisions. No trial has explicitly tested the long-term effectiveness of a single injection.
And the limited evidence that exists about the protection afforded by a single dose clashes with scientists’ fears that antibody responses will decline over time and may fall below a protective limit.
Some family doctors in Britain said they were concerned about the lack of evidence showing that patients would be protected for several weeks against Covid-19 after a single injection of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
“I was instructed to break my promise to my elderly patients,” Dr. Helen Salisbury, a family doctor at Oxford, said on Twitter Thursday morning, “And using a vaccine outside of its proven and approved schedule, probably putting them at risk”.