The government seems incapable of acting sensibly or even rationally when it comes to protecting the public’s health. Not content with its catastrophic mismanagement of the epidemic, it now wants to take another gamble with our lives by administering the second dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine up to 12 weeks after the first.
This is in contravention of the manufacturer’s guidelines which stipulate that the follow-up booster dose must be dispensed 21 days after the first injection.
The rationale put forward by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation for this risky move is that by delaying the second dose, more people will receive their first. It argues that from a public health perspective it is better for greater numbers of people to have some protection against Sars-CoV-2 and severe Covid-19 than it is for fewer numbers to be fully immunised against the virus.
Yet, there is no clinical evidence to show that this strategy is effective. Pfizer/BioNTech says it can provide no data to show that a person receives lasting immunity from the virus on a single shot. In Israel, a similar strategy led to a surge in cases amongst the partially inoculated.
Official data from its health ministry published at the end of January revealed that 42% of the country’s 834 critically ill patients had received a single shot of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. That figure dropped to 2% for the fully vaccinated. Israel has now abandoned the delayed second dose policy.
To add fuel to the fire, just days after the government announced its new dosing strategy, Public Health England gave its blessing to the mixing of the Pfizer/BioNTech and the AstraZeneca/Oxford University vaccines should there be a shortage of one or the other.
Most virologists would advise against interchanging vaccines especially if there is no empirical data to demonstrate the reliability of the immune response if these vaccines are mixed. What’s more, in a letter to NHS trusts, Sir Simon Stevens, NHS chief executive, said each person’s second dose of the vaccine must be from the same manufacturer as their first.
Regrettably, this rash new strategy of delaying the second dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, leaving people susceptible to infection, and the mixing of two different vaccines bears all the hallmarks of an avoidable disaster just waiting to unfold.
