In a new study, researchers call for the testing of fractional doses of COVID-19 vaccines to stretch the supply and accelerate global vaccination against the coronavirus.
By utilizing half doses of some COVID-19 vaccines, their projections suggest that vaccine supply could be expanded by half-a-billion doses per month.
The team says vaccinating more people more quickly could help reduce illness and death. This is especially important for low- and middle-income countries that have limited access to COVID-19 vaccine supplies.
With 436 million COVID-19 cases reported and approaching 6 million deaths and the continued emergence of new variants, COVID-19 doesn’t appear to be going away anytime soon.
About 63% of the world’s population have received one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine but only 13% of people in low-income countries have received one dose.
In the study, the team applied a three-pronged approach, involving clinical, epidemiological, and economic analysis, to examine the potential efficacy of fractional COVID-19 vaccine doses.
The results suggest that cutting the dosage of COVID-19 vaccines—at least those that are highly effective against hospitalizations and severe disease to start with—should not be expected to cause too much of an efficacy falloff, based on projections from existing, small-scale studies of antibody responses from different dosages.
The modeling suggests that fractional doses can be good for public health at the population level even if the efficacy fell off more than expected based on the clinical evidence.
More deaths would be averted when a higher percentage of the population is vaccinated even with a moderately less effective dose.
For primary or booster shots, the researchers propose that governments support either experimental or observational evaluations of fractional dosing.
If a major falloff in efficacy is observed, governments can always reverse course and stop the rollout and just re-vaccinate people with a stronger dosage.
The researchers say fractional dosing could not only provide immediate benefits by relaxing those supply constraints but that the benefits could redound in the future as well.
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The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was conducted by Christopher Snyder et al.
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