The British government and U.S. authorities are planning to postpone the second dose of the vaccine due to insufficient supplies of the CCP virus vaccine. But virus experts warn that this is dangerous because a weakly effective vaccine could stimulate harmful evolution of the virus, which would be catastrophic if the virus develops the ability to escape immunity through mutation.
The United Kingdom and the United States have been successively launching large-scale vaccination against CCP pneumonia (COVID-19) since the end of last year, but the number of pharmaceutical companies supplying the vaccine could not meet the government’s expected target. The British government has decided to extend the second dose of the vaccine from the original 3 weeks to 4 weeks, and even wants to extend it to 12 weeks, and the U.S. government also intends to follow the British government’s practice. According to some media, postponing or canceling the second vaccination is becoming a new program in some countries. But the strategy of postponing the second vaccination has caused great controversy among virus experts, many of whom strongly question it.
According to the latest news from Science magazine, virologist Paul Bienias of Rockefeller University believes that delaying the second dose of the vaccine could lead to the emergence of viruses with the ability to escape immunity. Because millions of people are only partially immune while waiting for a second dose of the vaccine, a less potent vaccine could stimulate the virus to evolve in a harmful way.
Deutsche Welle reports that Philip Krause, head of the WHO’s working group on vaccines against the Chinese Communist Party virus, says there is no indication so far that the virus is resistant to the vaccine.
At the same Time, however, Krause wrote in a scientific journal that the rapid development of variants of the CCP virus suggests that the virus could mutate into immune-resistant strains at a faster rate than we thought.
Andrew Read, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania, also warns that using a weak vaccine or delaying the second dose too long may have the opposite effect, as in some cases a less potent vaccine may facilitate the development of a dangerous strain.
Other experts who share Reid’s view also point out that when the first dose of vaccine is administered, the person has received initial protection but has not yet developed a strong enough immunity. Delaying the second dose of vaccine at this point gives the virus more time to evolve in a dangerous direction and facilitates the mutation of a strain of virus that is resistant to the vaccine. If such a virus meets an unvaccinated person, the consequences can be catastrophic. This is especially likely to happen with massive delays in second vaccination.
However, other virologists believe that the risk of uncontrolled transmission due to increased viral infectivity is greater than the risk of virus mutation described above. They say that in the case of insufficient vaccine supply, the option should be to have as many people as possible get vaccinated once first, and that “it is better for more than twice as many people to have partial immunity than for half as many to have full immunity.”
The Deutsche Welle report also highlighted the outbreak in Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonas. Three quarters of the city’s residents had already been infected with the Chinese Communist virus in August last year, a rate that experts had previously found to be sufficient to create a so-called “herd immunity” in the area. However, since December last year, a large number of people in the city have been infected with the CCP virus, leading experts to suspect that a large number of patients may have been infected with a mutated strain of the virus, and that some of the mutated virus has “escaped” the body’s immune response in some people. Whether this speculation is correct has yet to be further sequenced and analyzed by experts on the sampled viruses.
Scientists are still testing the ability of vaccine-induced antibodies to neutralize different types of viruses, and human trials to extend the vaccination interval in the UK are also underway.
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