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Comment by transitorykris | Hacker News Reader

Does getting a leftover dose grant you the right to the second dose within the window?

There is no "window" for the second dose. It's a booster; it doesn't really matter when you get it, so long as it is more than 3-ish weeks from the first injection.

My understanding is that it's not especially important to get the second dose within a particular window. A surgeon friend got her first dose and said she was planning to delay the second one for a while so that more first doses could go out to others, and that it would be just as effective for her if she got it later. She's also relatively young (under 40), so she isn't as concerned as some people might be.

Honestly I don't know how she can be that confident that timing of the second dose doesn't matter, since this doesn't seem to have been tested with COVID vaccines. Perhaps it is a feature of vaccines in general?

In terms of individual results, having the second vaccine would be best, but in terms of getting partial immunity to most people, getting the first one only would be better for everyone.

If the population was homogenously vulnerable this might be the case, but with a millionfold difference in mortality between the aged and young and healthy prioritizing a second dose is the ethical choice.

>Honestly I don't know how she can be that confident that timing of the second dose doesn't matter, since this doesn't seem to have been tested with COVID vaccines. Perhaps it is a feature of vaccines in general?

Given that this is a completely novel vaccine, and there is zero clinical data to support that statement, there is literally no way she can know that for sure.

However, the Moderna vaccine confers an immunity approximately equivalent to convalescent COVID-19 patients within two weeks of the first dose, so she's probably fine.

This position is not supported by Pfizer: https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/pfizer-pushes-back-after-quebec-...

Like quite a few things--for example, whether a vaccinated person can still spread the virus or if there could be long-term effects--the companies are quite correctly saying that they have no data to make a definitive statement. That doesn't mean that health professionals can't have fairly strong suspicions based on their experience with other things.

So, yes, Pfizer's position is (and should be) this is the data from the tests we ran. Pretty much anything else is speculation.

Yes.

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