Speaker 1: It's Thursday, January seven. I'm Oscar Ramiras from the Daily
Speaker 1: Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America
Speaker 1: with a new strain of coronavirus spreading throughout the UK
Speaker 1: and a very strict lockdown. Britain has taken a different
Speaker 1: approach to vaccinating its people. Instead of following the two
Speaker 1: shot protocol of the Fiser vaccine, taking about three weeks apart,
Speaker 1: officials have said they will try to give more people
Speaker 1: their first dose of the shot and delay the second
Speaker 1: shot by as much as three months. Helen bron Swell,
Speaker 1: senior writer at stat News, joins us for this modified rollout.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us, Helen Helly, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: We're all looking at the rollout of the vaccines right now.
Speaker 1: In the United States. It's going a little slower than expected.
Speaker 1: It's been pretty uneven right now. But in the UK
Speaker 1: something interesting is happening. They're actually gonna be taking kind
Speaker 1: of a gamble, I guess, with the way they're setting
Speaker 1: out the doses right now. They have the Fiser vaccine
Speaker 1: approved there, the astro Zenica vaccine approved there, and you
Speaker 1: know it's two shot protocol, so you take the first shot,
Speaker 1: I think three or four weeks later you take the
Speaker 1: next one. But what they're trying to do is maybe
Speaker 1: extend where that second dose gets administered and maybe try
Speaker 1: to administer the first dose to as many people as possible.
Speaker 1: And there's all sorts of questions that arise from this,
Speaker 1: so Helen help us walk through some of what's going
Speaker 1: on there. Right, So it is exactly as you have described.
Speaker 1: The frisure vaccine is given three weeks apart the two doses,
Speaker 1: and maderna vaccine is given four weeks apart. The astrogenic
Speaker 1: A vaccine, which is also being used in the UK
Speaker 1: but not yet in the US. The timeline and that
Speaker 1: is a little bit different. They have some data suggesting
Speaker 1: that if you actually space out the two doses longer
Speaker 1: that you get a better response. So what the UK
Speaker 1: is trying to do is deal with a huge problem.
Speaker 1: Obviously everybody's got a problem. But as your listeners will know,
Speaker 1: there's a new strain or variant of the virus that
Speaker 1: has emerged in the United Kingdom that it appears to
Speaker 1: be substantially more transmissible, about more transfers, and they're seeing
Speaker 1: their cases skyrocket and in an attempt to try to
Speaker 1: get on top of that. They decided to try to
Speaker 1: get as many people as possible a first dose as
Speaker 1: quickly as possible and worry about delivering a second dose
Speaker 1: at a later interval somewhere like free latch or something
Speaker 1: like that. And to add to that confusion too, they said,
Speaker 1: well maybe if the uh you know, because you take
Speaker 1: two shots of the fiser vaccine or two shots of
Speaker 1: the astroseneca vaccine, if that dose is not available, maybe
Speaker 1: you can switch to the other one, which hasn't been tested. Really,
Speaker 1: So that was another wrinkle in this whole thing where
Speaker 1: you know, a lot of people that were objecting to
Speaker 1: this or saying, well, you're making the country a living
Speaker 1: laboratory really. And some of the other criticism that popped
Speaker 1: up was you could be fostering, you know, maybe some
Speaker 1: vaccine resistant forms of the virus. As you mentioned, they're
Speaker 1: battling a different strain already, and if people are only
Speaker 1: getting half doses, will the virus be able to adapt
Speaker 1: and mutate to be more resistant to that? So those
Speaker 1: are some of the other big questions popping up, as
Speaker 1: I said, with the astronetic ofvaccine which they're using they
Speaker 1: do have some data, but on the issue of elongating
Speaker 1: the interval between doses for the Fiser or the Maderna vaccine,
Speaker 1: which they've just approved, those data don't exist. In theory,
Speaker 1: people think that it might not be a problem, and
Speaker 1: in fact, it's known in vaccinology that if you can
Speaker 1: go a longer period of time between doses, you probably
Speaker 1: get a more durable and more long lasting response later on.
Speaker 1: But no one's clear with these new vaccines, the Fiser
Speaker 1: and Maderna ones, how long or how how long the
Speaker 1: protection between the doses lass or how strong the protection
Speaker 1: engendered by the first dose is. And so the concern
Speaker 1: is as you say that you're going to partially protect people,
Speaker 1: but that might not be enough to keep them from
Speaker 1: becoming infected. And if they become infected, there's a possibility
Speaker 1: that they could effectively give rise to new strains of
Speaker 1: the virus that are more adept at sidestepping the antibodies
Speaker 1: that the vaccine creates. Now in the United States, the
Speaker 1: FDA has kind of warned against this. They said that
Speaker 1: they are not going to go with this type of protocol.
Speaker 1: They're going to follow the rules that were already developed
Speaker 1: and what they saw on the clinical trials. Has there
Speaker 1: been any response from the manufacturers, from Viser or even
Speaker 1: astro Zenica on this plan by Britain to go about
Speaker 1: this way. I'm not sure about astro Zenica. I do
Speaker 1: know that Viser has said that their vaccine should be
Speaker 1: used the way it was tested, and you know, yes,
Speaker 1: the FDA has said in this country that it will
Speaker 1: not be modifying the schedules. Really, at this point in
Speaker 1: the United States, the issue isn't trying to get first
Speaker 1: doses into more people. It's trying to get the vaccine
Speaker 1: that exists into arms in the first place. The distribution
Speaker 1: system isn't working that well yet. I mean, that's kind
Speaker 1: of to be expected. It's early days, but I think
Speaker 1: people are thinking, like, let's not bite off that before
Speaker 1: we even are able to administer all the first doses
Speaker 1: that we have out. Well, it's an interesting approach to this.
Speaker 1: I mean, as we kind of said, we're gonna have
Speaker 1: to see how it develops over the course of the
Speaker 1: next few months. If this is the course that they're
Speaker 1: gonna go with, more people will be getting that first dose,
Speaker 1: but they won't get that booster for quite some time
Speaker 1: after that, and We'll see you know, as this new
Speaker 1: variant of coronavirus is spreading a lot more quickly, you know,
Speaker 1: will these first doses offer enough protection in the meantime,
Speaker 1: So something definitely to keep an eye on. Helen brand Swell,
Speaker 1: Senior writer atstat News, Thank you very much for joining us.
Speaker 1: Thanks again for having me. I'm Oscar Ramires and this
Speaker 1: has been reopening America. Don't forget effort today's big news stories.
Speaker 1: You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast
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