England health officials defend contingency plan to mix Covid vaccines

Tek

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Jan 3, 2021

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Public Health England’s Covid “green book” recommends that “it is reasonable to offer one dose of the locally available product to complete the schedule” if the same vaccine used for the first dose is not available. But it adds: “There is no evidence on the interchangeability of the Covid-19 vaccines although studies are under way.”

Criticism erupted following the publication of a New York Times report which quoted the virologist Prof John Moore from Cornell University in the US, who said “there are no data on this idea whatsoever” and that British officials “seem to have abandoned science completely now and are just trying to guess their way out of a mess”.

The US infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci also said on Friday that he did he not agree with the UK’s approach of delaying the second dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. He told CNN that the US would not be following in the UK’s footsteps and would follow Pfizer and BioNTech’s guidance to administer the second dose of its vaccine three weeks after the first.

The head of immunisations at Public Health England, Dr Mary Ramsey, said mixing was not recommended and would only happen in exceptional circumstances.

She said: “If your first dose is the Pfizer vaccine you should not be given the AstraZeneca vaccine for your second dose and vice versa. There may be extremely rare occasions where the same vaccine is not available, or where it is not known what vaccine the patient received.

“Every effort should be made to give them the same vaccine, but where this is not possible it is better to give a second dose of another vaccine than not at all.”