On Monday, July 12, the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned against people mixing and matching COVID-19 vaccines from different manufacturers calling it a dangerous trend.
Addressing an online press briefing, WHO’s chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan also stated that there is very little data available about its health impact.
“There are people who are thinking about mixing and matching. We receive a lot of queries from people who say they have taken one [dose] and are planning to take another one (doses). It’s a little bit of a dangerous trend here. We are in a data-free, evidence-free zone as far as to mix and match,” Swaminathan was quoted as saying by news agency Reuters.
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She further mentioned that there is limited data on mix and match. There are studies going on, we need to wait for that. Maybe it will be a very good approach. But, at the moment we only have data on the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, followed by Pfizer. It will be a chaotic situation in countries if citizens start deciding when and who will be taking a second, a third and a fourth dose.
Moreover, stressing about equal distribution globally, Swaminathan stated that there are currently four countries that have announced booster programs and a few more that are thinking about it.
If 11 high and upper-middle-income countries decide that they will go for a booster for their population, or even sub-groups, this will require an additional 800 million doses of vaccine, she added.
WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the global gap in coronavirus vaccine supply is hugely uneven and inequitable. Some countries and regions are actually ordering millions of booster doses before other countries have had supplies to vaccinate their health workers and the most vulnerable.
Meanwhile, according to a study by Oxford University, alternating doses of the AstraZeneca and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines generate robust immune responses against the coronavirus. A mix-and-match approach to COVID-19 vaccines -- using different brands of jab for first and second doses -- gives good protection against the pandemic virus, a UK study has found.
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