(Reuters) – The U.S. government is considering giving some people half the dose of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine to speed up vaccinations, a federal official said on Sunday.
Moncef Slaoui, head of Operation Warp Speed, the federal vaccine program, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program that officials were talking to Moderna and the Food and Drug Administration about the idea. Moderna’s vaccine requires two injections.
“We know that for the Modern vaccine, giving half the dose to people between 18 and 55 years old, two doses, half the dose, which means exactly reaching the goal of immunizing twice the number of people with the doses we have,” said Slaoui.
“We know that it induces an identical immune response” to the full dose, he added.
Moderna and the FDA could not be reached immediately for comment.
The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they administered 4,225,756 first doses of COVID-19 vaccines in the country on Saturday morning and distributed 13,071,925 doses.
The United States has also approved a vaccine from Pfizer, which, like Moderna, requires two vaccines. Vaccinations fell far short of initial targets, as officials expected to have 20 million people vaccinated by the end of 2020.
Slaoui said he was optimistic about the acceleration of vaccination. He rejected the suggestion that the authorities should prioritize giving more people a single injection, rather than withholding the doses of the second dose, saying that cutting doses of the Modern vaccine in half was “a more responsible approach that would be based on facts and Dice”.
Slaoui said that it probably won’t be known until late spring whether vaccinated people can still pass the disease on to others.
Reporting by Brendan Pierson in New York; Chris Reese’s Edition