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The Telegraph

America's top disease control expert has questioned Britain's plan to delay giving follow-up shots of Covid vaccines in order to focus on a greater roll-out of first doses. Dr Anthony Fauci said he would "not be in favour" of the newly announced British strategy, which sanctions a time lag of up to 12 weeks between an initial dose of the vaccine and a follow-up shot. British health chiefs believe the move will allow them to give more people the initial dose, conferring greater overall protection. But some critics say the vaccine has only been reliably tested with a time lag of around three weeks. In an interview with CNN on Friday, Dr Fauci, who is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, appeared to side with the critics of the plan, saying America had no plans to follow Britains lead. I would not be in favour of that, he said. Were going to keep doing what were doing. Under the British plans, the Oxford University-AstraZeneca vaccine will be administered initially as one jab initially, with efforts focusing on giving a degree of protection to as many of the most vulnerable as possible. A second dose will then be administered four to 12 weeks later. The Pfizer vaccine, the first to gain approval in the UK, will also be given as a single dose initially. This is despite the fact it was given the green light on the basis of clinical trials of two doses, administered 21 days apart. In a statement Pfizer said that any "alternative" dosing regimens should be followed with surveillance by health authorities. Critics of the plan told the New York Times that widening the gap between vaccination shots could impair its effectiveness. Dr Phyllis Tien, an infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco, said it was like going into the Wild West." Medics who have backed the British plan say that during vaccine trials, some patients were given second doses at different time intervals, which showed that the vaccine remained up to 80 per cent effective after a 12-week delay. The Astra Zeneca campaign will be rolled out on Monday with an initial four million doses. Another 16 million doses will be available by mid-January, with a total of 40 million being available by the end of March.

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