Will a single dose of a COVID-19 vaccine protect me out of two?
Yes, but not as much as the two doses would.
Experts recommend completing vaccination, especially in the face of worrisome coronavirus mutations such as delta, first identified in India.
The vaccines that are administered around the world were developed to attack the original version of the virus detected in late 2019.
Although they appear to work against newer versions, there is concern that the drugs could lose their efficacy if the variants evolve sufficiently.
With the delta variant, a study by British researchers found that the population is well protected if it has the two doses of the vaccines developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford or by Pfizer and BioNTech. But with a single dose, the protection was significantly reduced.
In slowing the spread of the delta variant in Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently delayed the end of the latest restrictions so that more people can complete the immunization schedule.
Health authorities are also concerned about the dozens of countries that do not yet have enough vaccines to ensure the application of the second dose within the recommended time frame.
The director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has said that vaccinating just one dose will not be enough to stop the outbreaks fueled by the new variants, and that the population must continue to maintain social distance and other measures until there are more fully immunized people.
The second dose of a two-shot vaccine is critical because it is the one that “really boosts the immune system so that the antibody response is very strong,” said Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, WHO chief scientist.
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