- The United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) is conducting research to discover the effectiveness of combining two different vaccines.
- The purpose of this 13-month trial is to see how well people’s immune systems respond once they’re “primed” with one type of vaccine and then boosted with another.
- Experts say at this point it’s still just a trial, and it’s not clear it will be helpful.
Even as COVID-19 vaccinations increase across the globe, experts have wondered whether it’s possible to get people vaccinated more quickly if vaccines can be mixed and matched.
Evidence of vaccine supply chain issues show that potentially allowing people to use different vaccines may help people get fully vaccinated more quickly.
In an attempt to create more flexible COVID-19 vaccination programs, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) is conducting research to discover the effectiveness of combining two different vaccines.
It’s called the Com-COV study, and it’s raising important questions, like whether this can increase or decrease vaccine effectiveness.
“By using two different vaccines, there is not going to be a greater magnitude of protection against the disease,” Dr. Nikhil Bhayani, infectious disease specialist with Texas Health Resources, told Healthline.
However, Bhayani emphasized that at this time, “[the] use of two different vaccines is not recommended.”
Bhayani also cautioned that while the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines do offer a degree of protection against COVID-19, “as we see more variant strains the expectation of the vaccine protecting you from the disease could decrease. However, clinical trials will be warranted to prove this.”
Source: healthline