Vaccine rollout: Ongoing debate on the dosing schedule

Medicines and Healthcare products regulatory agency is up with their approval for the first global COVID-19 vaccine available for emergency usage on December 2. Products under consideration are BioNTech’s, Pfizer, BNT162b2 and mRNA vaccine. UK Health authorities have decided to roll out the first batch of this vaccination in certain hospitals, while they schedule the second dose to be implemented three weeks later.

The emergency regulators have already approved its second vaccine, AstraZeneca with adenovirus candidate. Meanwhile, with the AZ and Oxford approval, MHRA have also declared the dosing schedule for the two vaccines. The authoritative regulator has certain recommendation about spacing out the two doses of these two vaccines within 12 weeks to optimize the scheduled COVID-19 vaccination program and extending all previously recommended dose intervals of three to four weeks significantly for BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine. These regulators have also looked forward to the existing appointments that are scheduled for the second dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine that are likely to be rescheduled.

Approval for the third vaccination developed by Moderna is announced and till now we have seen no confirmation that the vaccine will be considered within this 12-week dose schedule, but we may expect some announcement very soon.

MHRA’s have made their decision clear in the context of spiking COVID-19 situations in the UK. It has been calculated by the Officers that one out of every 50 people living in UK have COVID-19 symptoms, which is much higher than the initial April peaks. There are some major concerns that are raised in regard to hospitals, especially in South East of England and London, which are more likely to being overwhelmed.

UK on the other hand is witnessing a steep rise in COVID cases since the beginning of this New year and has resulted in more than 3,000 deaths so far, raising the overall death counts estimation caused by coronavirus to be more than 81,000. These consequences have brought UK as the country with fifth largest death rate in the world, according to the latest researches conducted by Covid-19 university dashboard. As per the current scenario, the only country that are lagging behind UK is US, Brazil, India and Mexico, which have significantly larger populations than UK.