Coronavirus Action Group condemns “dangerous” gap between vaccine jabs

LOCAL activists have expressed concern about the Government’s decision to extend the gap between doses of anti-Coronavirus vaccines from three weeks to twelve weeks. They say that expert medical opinion is agreed that increasing the interval between doses to four times that applied in the testing of the vaccines risks promoting the spread of variants of the virus that would be resistant to the vaccines.

Harlow Coronavirus People Before Profit Action Group points out that the developers of the first vaccine to become available in Britain, Pfizer and BioNTech, issued a joint statement in which they said that “There is no data to demonstrate that protection after the first dose is sustained after 21 days.”

The Action Group also draws attention to a statement by Paul Bieniasz, a scientist from Rockefeller University who is studying how the virus can acquire mutations, who said: “My concern, as a virologist, is that if you wanted to make a vaccine-resistant strain, what you would do is to build a cohort of partially immunized individuals in the teeth of a highly prevalent viral infection.”

The Chair of the World Health Organisation’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization, Alejandro Cravioto, told an online news briefing on 5th January that his organisation recommended that people should receive two doses of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine within 21 to 28 days.

The UK government’s Chief Medical Adviser, Professor Chris Whitty, when asked in a Downing Street briefing whether delaying second doses could increase the risk of the virus mutating, stated that it was a “real worry but quite a small real worry”.

“Increasing the gap between vaccine doses fourfold is a dangerous experiment,” said Coronavirus Action Group spokesperson John Wake. “It seems to us that a responsible government would have avoided finding itself in a situation where it feels obliged to embark upon a course of action that could have grave negative consequences, even if the risk of such consequences is very low,” he added. “The Government response to this pandemic has been late and inconsistent. We believe that its floundering is driven by an outlook that gives the profit of the few a higher priority than the health of the many”.■