US officials are considering giving people 2 half doses of Moderna's COVID-19 shot to speed up rollout, vaccine chief Slaoui says
- The US government is in talks with the drugmaker Moderna about the possibility of giving out its COVID-19 vaccine in half-volume doses, Moncef Slaoui told CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday.
- Slaoui, the chief of the US vaccine effort known as Operation Warp Speed, said the move could allow the US to vaccinate twice as many people with the same number of doses.
- Slaoui said this would be "more responsible" than adopting the UK's strategy of giving out as many initial full doses of the vaccine as possible and allowing delays in follow-up shots.
US public-health officials are considering giving out half doses of Moderna's COVID-19 shot, according to Moncef Slaoui, the chief of the US vaccine effort known as Operation Warp Speed.
Slaoui told CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday that doing so could allow the US to immunize twice as many people with the same number of doses after the country's vaccine rollout was dogged by a slow start.
As of Wednesday morning, only 2.8 million Americans had received their first dose of COVID-19 vaccines, far short of the Trump administration's heavily publicized goal of 20 million in 2020.
Slaoui argued that giving out half doses of Moderna's vaccine would induce an "identical immune response" to the 100-microgram dose in people ages 18 to 55.
"We are in discussions with Moderna and with the FDA - of course ultimately it will be an FDA decision - to accelerate injecting half the volume," Slaoui said, referring to the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates drugs in the US.
Slaoui described the idea as a "more responsible approach" than adopting the UK's strategy of giving out as many initial full doses of the vaccine as possible.
UK officials said on Wednesday that they would prioritize getting people their first doses of coronavirus vaccines instead of holding enough to ensure everyone could get a second dose in the recommended amount of time. The country is now allowing up to 12 weeks to pass between doses. Scientists are split on the untested strategy.
When asked by CBS' Margaret Brennan why the US was holding back more than half of its current vaccine supply rather than adopting a strategy similar to the UK's, Slaoui said all trial data was based on giving two shots of the vaccine, with the booster shot given three to four weeks after the primer shot.
He said without full trial data it "would not be responsible" to delay administering the second doses.
Slaoui added that the vaccine was only one-tenth as effective without the second shot. Waiting up to three months to give the second dose could leave people "with incomplete immunity, waning immunity, maybe even the wrong kind of immune response induced," he said.
"We always said that these vaccines would be developed on the basis of science, and all decisions will be made transparently on the basis of data," he added.
Though the rollout of the two vaccines authorized for emergency use in the US - one by Moderna, the other by Pfizer and BioNTech - had a slow start, public-health officials have expressed optimism that this could pick up speed.
"We are not where we want to be, there's no doubt about that, but I think we can get there if we really accelerate, get some momentum going, and see what happens as we get into the first couple of weeks of January," Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told ABC News on Sunday.
President-elect Joe Biden, who would be sworn in on January 20, plans to vaccinate 100 million people in his first 100 days in office, though he noted that it would take "years, not months," to vaccinate all Americans at the current rate.