It's Thursday, January seven. I'm Oscar Ramiras from the Daily Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America with a new strain of coronavirus spreading throughout the UK and a very strict lockdown. Britain has taken a different approach to vaccinating its people. Instead of following the two shot protocol of the Fiser vaccine, taking about three weeks apart, officials have said they will try to give more people their first dose of the shot and delay the second
shot by as much as three months. Helen bron Swell, senior writer at stat News, joins us for this modified rollout. Thanks for joining us, Helen Helly, thanks for having me. We're all looking at the rollout of the vaccines right now. In the United States. It's going a little slower than expected. It's been pretty uneven right now. But in the UK something interesting is happening. They're actually gonna be taking kind of a gamble, I guess, with the way they're setting
out the doses right now. They have the Fiser vaccine approved there, the astro Zenica vaccine approved there, and you know it's two shot protocol, so you take the first shot, I think three or four weeks later you take the next one. But what they're trying to do is maybe extend where that second dose gets administered and maybe try to administer the first dose to as many people as possible. And there's all sorts of questions that arise from this, so Helen help us walk through some of what's going
on there. Right, So it is exactly as you have described. The frisure vaccine is given three weeks apart the two doses, and maderna vaccine is given four weeks apart. The astrogenic A vaccine, which is also being used in the UK but not yet in the US. The timeline and that is a little bit different. They have some data suggesting that if you actually space out the two doses longer that you get a better response. So what the UK is trying to do is deal with a huge problem.
Obviously everybody's got a problem. But as your listeners will know, there's a new strain or variant of the virus that has emerged in the United Kingdom that it appears to be substantially more transmissible, about more transfers, and they're seeing their cases skyrocket and in an attempt to try to
get on top of that. They decided to try to get as many people as possible a first dose as quickly as possible and worry about delivering a second dose at a later interval somewhere like free latch or something like that. And to add to that confusion too, they said, well maybe if the uh you know, because you take two shots of the fiser vaccine or two shots of the astroseneca vaccine, if that dose is not available, maybe
you can switch to the other one, which hasn't been tested. Really, So that was another wrinkle in this whole thing where you know, a lot of people that were objecting to this or saying, well, you're making the country a living laboratory really. And some of the other criticism that popped up was you could be fostering, you know, maybe some
vaccine resistant forms of the virus. As you mentioned, they're battling a different strain already, and if people are only getting half doses, will the virus be able to adapt and mutate to be more resistant to that? So those are some of the other big questions popping up, as I said, with the astronetic ofvaccine which they're using they do have some data, but on the issue of elongating the interval between doses for the Fiser or the Maderna vaccine,
which they've just approved, those data don't exist. In theory, people think that it might not be a problem, and in fact, it's known in vaccinology that if you can go a longer period of time between doses, you probably get a more durable and more long lasting response later on. But no one's clear with these new vaccines, the Fiser and Maderna ones, how long or how how long the protection between the doses lass or how strong the protection
engendered by the first dose is. And so the concern is as you say that you're going to partially protect people, but that might not be enough to keep them from becoming infected. And if they become infected, there's a possibility that they could effectively give rise to new strains of the virus that are more adept at sidestepping the antibodies that the vaccine creates. Now in the United States, the
FDA has kind of warned against this. They said that they are not going to go with this type of protocol. They're going to follow the rules that were already developed and what they saw on the clinical trials. Has there been any response from the manufacturers, from Viser or even astro Zenica on this plan by Britain to go about
this way. I'm not sure about astro Zenica. I do know that Viser has said that their vaccine should be used the way it was tested, and you know, yes, the FDA has said in this country that it will not be modifying the schedules. Really, at this point in the United States, the issue isn't trying to get first doses into more people. It's trying to get the vaccine that exists into arms in the first place. The distribution system isn't working that well yet. I mean, that's kind
of to be expected. It's early days, but I think people are thinking, like, let's not bite off that before we even are able to administer all the first doses that we have out. Well, it's an interesting approach to this. I mean, as we kind of said, we're gonna have to see how it develops over the course of the
next few months. If this is the course that they're gonna go with, more people will be getting that first dose, but they won't get that booster for quite some time after that, and We'll see you know, as this new variant of coronavirus is spreading a lot more quickly, you know, will these first doses offer enough protection in the meantime, So something definitely to keep an eye on. Helen brand Swell, Senior writer atstat News, Thank you very much for joining us.
Thanks again for having me. I'm Oscar Ramires and this has been reopening America. Don't forget effort today's big news stories. You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday the Friday, so follow us on I Heart radio or wherever you get your podcast.