Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House’s leading infectious disease specialist, advised against adopting the vaccine strategy that the UK recently endorsed, which involves prioritizing the first inoculation and potentially delaying the second inoculation for up to 3 months.
“I would not be in favor of this,” said Dr. Fauci CNN host Elizabeth Cohen on New Year’s Day. “We will continue to do what we are doing”.
According to the British plan, which was approved earlier this week, the government will prioritize first-round vaccinations, extending the deadline for receiving the booster dose. “This will maximize the number of people vaccinated and therefore protected in the next 12 weeks,” said a group of British health officials who support the policy.
For the Pfizer vaccine, which means offering the second dose between 3 weeks and 12 weeks after the first dose of the recipient, instead of after three weeks; for the AstraZeneca vaccine, this means offering the second dose between 2 weeks and 12 weeks after the first dose.
According to The New York Times, the United Kingdom has also “quietly updated” its vaccine guidelines to allow, in some circumstances, recipients of a vaccine to receive the second dose of another vaccine if the manufacturer of the first dose is not known or if the same vaccine is not available.
From the updated UK vaccine guidelines:
There is no evidence on the interchangeability of the COVID-19 vaccines, although studies are ongoing. Therefore, every effort must be made to determine which vaccine the individual received and complete with the same vaccine. For individuals who have started the regimen and who come for vaccination in a place where the same vaccine is not available, or if the first product received is unknown, it is reasonable to offer a dose of the product locally available to complete the regimen. This option is preferred if the individual is likely to be at immediate high risk or if it is considered unlikely to participate again. In these circumstances, since both vaccines are based on the peak protein, the second dose is likely to help increase the response to the first dose. For this reason, until additional information is available, additional doses would not be necessary.
The country’s decision was met with skepticism by some scientists and researchers, who noted the lack of data behind the policy.
“There is no data on this idea,” said John Moore, a vaccine expert at Cornell University. Moore also said that British officials “seem to have completely abandoned science now and are just trying to guess how to get out of the mess.”
“None of this is being driven by data right now,” Dr. Phyllis Tien, an infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco, told the Times. “We are kind of in this Wild West.”
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that the COVID-19 vaccines “are not interchangeable”, but in the event that two different doses of the COVID-19 vaccine are accidentally administered to the same patient, “no additional doses of either products is recommended. “
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