Thats an incredibly misleading attack they’ve come up with - it isn’t about letting vaccines sit in fridges, it’s about using them as intended and tested.
No vaccines are wasted by giving them out as prescribed, in fact the exact opposite may be true if the efficacy of the first dose doesn’t last more than 21 days as feared - all these extremely vulnerable people will need repeated doses rather than two, and what protection they do have may start to run out this month with this new wave raging.
Yeah for the UK I think that was misleading. However, at least in US, the “vaccines in fridges” does seem to be an issue.
There is much we don’t know about the new COVID-19 variant—but everything we know so far suggests a huge danger.
www.theatlantic.com
Meanwhile, the United States was reportedly planning to
hold back half the vaccine it has in freezers as a hedge against supply-chain issues, and some states may be slowed down by murky prioritization plans. Scott Gottlieb—the former FDA chief and a current board member of Pfizer—has argued that the U.S. should also go ahead with vaccinating as many people as possible right now and trust that the supply chain will be there for the booster.
Researchers in Canada—where some provinces decided to vaccinate now as much as possible without holding half in reserve, and will administer the booster with future supplies—estimate that this type of front-loading can help “avert between 34 and 42 per cent more symptomatic coronavirus infections, compared with a strategy of keeping half the shipments in reserve.” (Note that this strategy, which is different from the one the United Kingdom
just announced it will adopt in prioritizing the first dose, does not even necessarily involve explicitly changing booster timing protocols in order to maximize vaccination now; it just means not waiting to get shots into arms when the vaccines are currently available.) These were already important conversations to have, but given the threat posed by this new variant,
they are even more urgent.
abc13.com
