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Comment by ageitgey | Hacker News Reader

The UK is giving both doses. It's just that they are spacing them out at 12 weeks instead of 3-4 weeks. The idea is that this gives more at-risk people substantial protection more quickly.

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> The UK is giving both doses. It's just that they are spacing them out at 12 weeks instead of 3-4 weeks.

Are they doing that for all vaccines, or just the Oxford/AstraZeneca one? Because that appears to be the recommended and most effective interval for the Oxford vaccine, but not for the others. (Note that the mix of vaccines approved for use differs considerably from country to country; Oxford/AstraZeneca is not in use on the US, only Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech.

They're doing it for both Oxford/AstraZeneca and Pfizer, which are the two approved vaccines in the UK at the moment.

Moderna is also approved, although there doesn't seem to be much supply. Novavax should also be approved within the next few weeks.

There’s not really much data on what the most effective interval is, though I think some data might come out of Israel and the NHS will probably try to conduct some randomised controlled trials. The choices made in the phase 3 clinical trials were driven by trying to pick a sufficiently large dose that the trial would succeed and as short an interval as reasonable to make the trials take less time. For other vaccines, larger intervals have been more effective. Given how unwilling politicians were to speed up rollout, I think aiming for maximum efficacy with minimum trial latency was the best decision the drug companies could have made.

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