The UK will focus on giving as many people as possible a first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, even if it delays the administration of a second, the government said on Tuesday, despite the lack of data on the extent of the disease. immunity conferred by a single dose.
The news comes as scientists in Europe are debating whether recipients should receive one dose instead of two, due to the shortage of the vaccine, difficulties in preventing the increase of infections in winter and the rapid increase in the number of deaths.
The problem: although scientists say that a single dose may well confer sufficient immunity to stop the virus from spreading, there is insufficient data to confirm this because the clinical trials for available vaccines and those that are in the process of being authorized were all done in around a two-dose regimen.
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Britain, which is under heavy pressure amid the spread of a new, more infectious variant of the virus, is the first European government to change its policy. He emphasized that recipients of the vaccine would still receive a second dose, just three months later than planned.
Some provinces in Canada have postponed the second dose to inoculate more people at once, and Belgium is considering a similar approach.
“The priority should be to give the largest number of people in risk groups their first dose, rather than providing the two necessary doses in the shortest possible time,” said a spokesman for the British health department.
A vaccine made by Pfizer Inc.
and BioNTech SE was the first to be authorized in the West. It is now being rolled out globally following emergency authorizations by several regulators based on a successful test of months that involved giving two injections to more than 20,000 volunteers. The second injection was administered 21 days after the first.
Although the trial data shows that the vaccine conferred immunity to more than 50% of participants after the first dose, the marketing of just one injection would require a new study in which only one dose would be administered to another group of volunteers, said Uğur, president -Executive of BioNTech Şahin.
“It could be that the next generation of the vaccine consists of just one dose,” said Sahin.
While pharmaceutical companies distribute Covid-19 vaccines, cybersecurity experts warn against the growing threat of adulteration and theft by organized crime networks.
He added that production bottlenecks meant that vaccines would not tangibly delay the spread of the virus for months, meaning that social restrictions should remain in place.
“We need other vaccine producers to get market approval next year, ideally in the first quarter … We simply need more companies to deliver more doses,” said Dr. Sahin.
A vaccine developed by Moderna Inc.,
which was authorized in the United States and can receive a green light from the European Union regulator in January, also consists of two doses. A third vaccine, developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca PLC and authorized by the UK on Wednesday, likewise has two doses.
Proponents of a single-dose approach say this may be the only way to vaccinate enough people to prevent another huge increase in infections next winter, due to limited availability.
EU governments have purchased only enough Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines to inoculate 150 million people out of a total population of almost 450 million. This quota will not be fully delivered until the end of next year.
Scientists are working at breakneck speed to develop a coronavirus vaccine. Its ultimate goal: to immunize enough of the world population to achieve collective immunity. (Originally published on July 24, 2020)
Most scientists agree that well over 60% of the population would need to be immunized to achieve herd immunity, in which a sufficient number of people are immune, either by vaccination or contracting the disease, to prevent the spread of a pathogen.
In Belgium, Health Minister Frank Vandenbroucke asked the country’s vaccination task force to decide whether to postpone the second injection in order to give the first dose to more people more quickly.
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Pierre Van Damme, a senior member of the task force, said on Monday that using just one injection would allow most of Belgium’s 11.5 million inhabitants to be vaccinated before the summer. A government spokesman said a decision would be made in the next two weeks.
In Britain, Professor David Salisbury, formerly responsible for the country’s immunization program, campaigned to postpone the second injection until all high-risk people received the first dose. After two weeks of decreasing infections, new cases have increased dramatically in the UK since the beginning of December.
On December 22, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair told the Independent newspaper that continuing with the previously planned second attempt schedule would result in “colossal” damage in terms of infection rates, deaths and economic impact.
Write to Bojan Pancevski at [email protected]
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