With the COVID vaccine in short supply nationwide, and states rushing to ramp up their ability to deliver doses, not all vaccine-eligible residents in Massachusetts may be able to secure an appointment in the coming weeks.
If you’ve received your first dose of the Moderna vaccine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends getting your second dose roughly one month after the first injection. For the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, federal health officials suggest getting the second shot at about the three-week mark.
So, given the ongoing delay in supply, and its impact on administration, how important is it that you get your second dose on time?
Experts say they are reasonably confident that the first dose offers sufficient protection. But how long it lasts is still not known.
“A week or two after first dose, there seems to be very high level of protection,” said Dr. Eric Rubin, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and professor in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard University. “We know a second dose of vaccine gives a booster effect. There’s a more substantial immune response after the second dose.”
The CDC currently recommends that the second dose be administered as close to each of the Moderna and Pfizer intervals as possible. If this isn’t possible, federal experts say second dose appointments can be scheduled up to six weeks, or 42 days, after the first injection. Officials stress that delaying the second shot is only okay if adhering to the recommended interval isn’t feasible.
“There are currently limited data on efficacy of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines administered beyond this window,” the CDC states. “If the second dose is administered beyond these intervals, there is no need to restart the series.”
The CDC also notes that people should not look to get the second dose earlier than recommended.
But Rubin says the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have only been tested at their respective dosage intervals. He says some experts believe having a smaller number of people who are fully vaccinated — meaning they’ve received both shots — is preferred to having twice as many people with only partial protection, adding that a more complete protection offers better assurance against emerging COVID variants. So far, health experts have stated that they feel confident the current versions of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines protect against the new strains; but more data is needed.
Amid nationwide frustrations over the vaccine rollout, Rubin says the supply issues affecting the race to inoculate the public are less political than they appear. Even if the U.S. government found a way to be more efficient in distributing the shots, it’s likely “we’d run out of vaccines even faster,” he says.
“People have never made these vaccines before, and learning how to make them at scale is something they’re doing at the same time as they’re being rolled out,” Rubin said.
But experts also acknowledge that, despite the highly specific timing of the two COVID vaccines, immunizations for other infectious diseases “don’t always happen exactly as planned.”
“We still give those vaccines,” said Dr. Brian D. W. Chow, attending physician and director of the Infectious Diseases Fellowship Program at Tufts Medical Center. “We just don’t know what that immune response will look like if it’s spaced out further.”
Moderna and Pfizer are on pace to deliver 100 million doses to the U.S. by the end of March, and another 100 million by the second quarter of 2021. And with news of Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine coming online, progress is expected to continue, even amid concerns about the new COVID strains beginning to take root across the country and other parts of the globe.
In Massachusetts, appointments for residents aged 75 and older, who top the priority list in Phase 2 of the state’s vaccination rollout, were allowed to begin. After residents and lawmakers expressed frustration over difficulties in booking appointments, state officials promised to set up a hotline to help those looking to navigate the online portal for scheduling shots.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
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