By Brendan Pierson
(Reuters) – The U.S. government is considering giving some people half the dose of Modner’s COVID-19 vaccine to speed up vaccinations, a federal official said Sunday.
Moncef Slaoui, head of Operation Warp Speed, the federal vaccination program, said on CBS’s ‘Face the Nation’ that officials were in talks with Moderna and the Food and Drug Administration about the idea. Moderna’s vaccine requires two injections.
“We know that for the Moderna vaccine, half the dose is given to people between the ages of 18 and 55, two doses, half the dose, which means that we achieve exactly the goal of doubling the number of people. immunize with the doses we have, ‘Slaoui said.
“We know it causes the same immune response” to the full dose, he added.
Modern and the FDA could not be immediately reached for comment.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they administered 4,225,756 first-dose COVID-19 vaccines across the country on Saturday morning and distributed 13,071,925 doses.
The US has also approved a Pfizer vaccine, which, like Moderna’s, requires two shots. Vaccinations fell far short of early targets, as officials had hoped by the end of 2020 to get 20 million people vaccinated.
Slaoui said he was optimistic that vaccinations would accelerate. He rejects the proposal that officials should prioritize giving more people a single shot, rather than withholding doses for the second shot, saying that reducing the doses of Modern vaccines in half is a more responsible approach is that which would be based on facts and data. ‘
Slaoui said it would probably only be known in late spring whether people who had been vaccinated could still spread the disease to others.
(Posted by Brendan Pierson in New York; edited by Chris Reese)