To help speed up Covid-19 vaccinations across the United States, especially among high-risk older adults, one idea continues to surface: Postpone second doses. The idea is that delaying second doses for those who have already received a first dose would allow for more people in prioritized groups to get at least one dose if they haven’t received it already.
«We get down the list faster if we do all those first doses,» Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told CNN on Monday. «My view is that the weight of the evidence suggests that we would probably save more lives by delaying second doses than by insisting on the schedule that was tested in the trials,» he said. Yet not all experts agree that changing dosing schedules is a good idea. «We have two problems with that. The first — they may not get fully protected and that might accelerate the rate of variants taking over and causing us much more trouble in the future,» William Haseltine, chair and president of the global think tank ACCESS Health International, said during an appearance on CNN’s New Day on Monday. «Secondly, we really don’t know if delaying the second dose for a long time is going to give you the same degree of protection,» he said. In other words, there’s not much research as Covid-19 vaccines were developed only recently. Meanwhile, as debates around delaying second doses continue in the United States, so do a slow vaccine rollout, more Covid-19 deaths and the spread of newly identified coronavirus variants that appear to be more transmissible. Getting second doses is priority, but ‘there is some wiggle room’ It is still recommended for people to get their second dose of Covid-19 vaccine on time, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said during a virtual White House briefing on Monday. «Until we have further data,» Walensky said, people should continue to follow the data from trials by continuing the schedule of receiving two doses 21 days apart for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and 28 days apart for the Moderna vaccine. Those are the two vaccines currently authorized for emergency use in the United States. «The policy is that we certainly want everyone who gets a first dose to get their second dose,» Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to President Biden and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said during Monday’s briefing. But also on Monday, during a meeting of the International AIDS Society, Fauci said that if you’re late by just a couple of weeks there isn’t a cause for concern. «There is some wiggle room,» he said. «It’s not the end of the world if you delay a little bit. If you want to delay it by six months, that’s different.» Delaying second doses would go against the vaccine schedules that have been authorized under the US Food and Drug Administration.
