Experts Tout Delaying 2nd COVID Vaccine Dose as U.S. Deaths Mount
“When we get there it’s too late. Our best opportunity to save lives is to vaccinate more people now.”
Rethinking the Approach During Crisis
Osterholm said he has always been and remains in favor of using vaccines in their approved two-dose form, but said the issue of maximizing one-dose recipients first needs to be reviewed.
“Time is of the essence. Can we space out doses?” he said. “We need to bring all the science to the table as quickly as possible.”
Osterholm said those who argue against the approach say it goes against the science. Marc Lipsitch, DPhil, of Harvard University, said that argument misses the mark during a public health emergency.
“I think this [strategy] is something on which reasonable people could disagree, but saying you should only do something supported by randomized evidence when there’s an emergency would have precluded us from using masks, social distancing, from doing all the things we know are good public health practices,” he said.
“There’s an old saying that we wouldn’t use parachutes or aspirin if we waited for randomized trials, either.”
Lipsitch said the emergence of variant strains adds urgency to the dose-delaying question. Data from both Pfizer and Moderna show those vaccines are effective in protecting against the highly contagious B117 variant first identified in England, and at least somewhat protective against infections caused by variants that were first identified in Brazil and South Africa.
“The goal of vaccination under the approach we are using is to reduce the morbidity and mortality, not only to stop transmission,” Lipsitch said. “With [variants] it’s just a stronger reason to try to use get as many people as partially immunized as possible.”
Record Deaths in January
January was the deadliest month of the COVD-19 pandemic in the United States, with 95,254 Americans deaths attributed to the virus, officials noted Sunday.
During a White House coronavirus briefing, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH, said that, despite some downward trends, Americans were still getting sick and hospitalized at extremely high rates.
For the first time in 2 months, the number of Americans hospitalized with COVID-19 dropped below 100,000, to 95,013 patients in US hospitals, according to the COVID Tracking Project. To date, 26,278,706 million of Americans have been infected with COVID-19, including 442,710 deaths.
But that number could jump within the next 6 to 12 weeks if variant strains of the virus, especially B117, become the dominant strain in the United States before many Americans have been vaccinated.
To date, the CDC’s COVID Data Tracker shows 49,933,250 COVID-19 vaccines have been distributed in the country, and 31,123,299 doses have been administered. According to a New York Times database, these numbers mean 7.6% of all Americans have received one dose of vaccine, while only 1.7% are considered fully vaccinated.
Second State Identifies South African Variant
Over the weekend Maryland became the second state to identify a case of B1351, a variant strain first seen in South Africa. The CDC says there are now three known cases of B1351 in the United States, 467 cases of B117, and 1 case of P.1, which was first identified in Brazil.
The patient in Maryland had no known travel history.
In other news, Andy Slavitt, MBA, senior adviser for the Biden administration’s COVID-19 response team, announced Sunday that the federal government will buy 8.5 million rapid coronavirus home test kits from Ellume, an Australian company that manufactures a 15-minute test for the virus that’s 95% accurate.
The $230 million contract will help Ellume quickly scale up to producing 19 million tests per month by the end of 2021. The over-the-counter test uses a mid-nasal swab and costs $30. Slavitt said that cost is expected to come down.
This articleis published courtesy of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy (CIDRAP).
