The evidence that the second dose can be delayed for three months looks shaky – not even the manufacturers recommend it.
Vaccines have to work in the real world, not in the artificial bubble of a clinical trial.
So the findings from Israel’s impressively-rapid rollout of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine are troubling.
At the end of December, the JCVI announced that the efficacy of the vaccine was “around 90%”, starting 14 days after the first dose.
“Short term protection from dose 1 is very high,” the advisers announced in a statement. On the basis of that data they concluded it was safe to delay the second dose for up to 12 weeks and roll out the vaccine faster.
But the stats from Israel suggests that the efficacy of one dose is just 33%.
And that was in people over the age of 60, those who need protection the most.
So people in the UK who’ve had one shot of the vaccine, and perhaps feel the odds are now in their favour, are still seriously vulnerable to infection.
The Israeli research hasn’t been published or peer reviewed. And they haven’t said what impact the vaccine had on serious infections that required hospital admission.