Vaccine: One shot now, one shot long after | Columnist

Triage is always crude, awkward, and always wrong, but the goal is to save as many lives as possible in an emergency when there are not enough medical resources to save everyone. That certainly applies to the Covid-19 pandemic, which is currently undergoing rough triage in hospitals around the world.

But now, in the UK, something close to triage is happening when it comes to vaccines. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has blamed the media for almost half of his life. But this is only once, he may be wrong.

The UK was one of the first countries to start vaccination of people when the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine became available last month (8 December) and is now the first country to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine. , Both require a second vaccination after the first 3 weeks.

But at the same time, the UK went to zero with a new strain of the Covid-19 virus, romantically named VUI / 202012/01 (or B.1.1.7 for short). More than half of the infections reported worldwide are there, and the reason it spreads so rapidly is that it is three times more infectious than older variants.

Daily infections in the UK have tripled in three weeks and now regularly exceed 60,000. Deaths from Covid-19 now far exceed 1,000 per day and could remain there until a sufficient proportion of the population is vaccinated. Therefore, if vaccination can be done quickly, fewer people will die or suffer from “long covid” symptoms.

As a result, Professor Chris Whitti, Chief Health Officer of England, and his counterparts in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have made brave and potentially significant decisions. They announced that the planned second vaccination would be postponed 12 weeks after the first vaccination to everyone who had not yet been vaccinated, virtually everyone in the country. did.

The benefits of doing so are clear. No matter how fast the vaccination is done, if you don’t have to spend half of your resources on giving a second shot at the same time, you’ll be processing twice as many people at the same time.

In the United Kingdom, Donald Trump’s pathetic “warp speed” prevention in the United States, which promised 20 million vaccinations and about 4 million vaccinations by the end of December under the administration of Prime Minister Boris Johnson Nothing beats the vaccination program.

From stupid delayed lockdowns to chambolic test and trace programs that still don’t work, the UK government has failed all the tests it has set up. The UK remains the United States in the coveted world title competition of “The Second Worst Covid-19 Mortality in Large Developed Countries.” (Italy is still a leader in the field.) But the reason for speeding up vaccination is even more so.

Now, the obvious drawback of this one-shot-now one-shot-12-week approach is that no one gets the full protection you get with a booster shot after just three weeks. Or, at least it’s consensus, but later you can find researchers who claim to be better.

Professor Andrew Pollard of the United Kingdom’s Joint Committee on Immunization and Immunization is one of them. “If there is a long gap between the first and second doses, the booster strength tends to be stronger …. as seen in almost all other vaccines tested so far. . “

This certainly has a triage element. A few people who couldn’t get a second shot on their original schedule could get infected with the virus and die while waiting for the booster for 12 weeks. But twice as many people received that single shot at the same time, so far more people avoid dying in Covid-19.

Currently, the number of spokespersons for the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture these vaccines is steadily increasing, publicly warning that there is “no evidence” that a single dose will protect them for more than three weeks. Of course not. All tests were done on the second shot just three weeks later, so what should I do?

However, there is no evidence that vaccine prophylaxis fails after 3 weeks, and it is far more relevant. Lawyers told these spokespersons to say what they said to protect the company from the possibility of proceedings, but if single-shot protection fails so quickly, it’s almost a precedent in vaccine history. Will not be.

It’s not how the vaccine works.

The short-term efficacy of the first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is approximately 90%. For AstraZeneca jabs, this is 70%. As Professor Pollard said, “three weeks after the first dose, the vaccinated person will not be hospitalized or develop a serious illness.”

In a pandemic, this fundamental measure is common sense and others need to be careful.