Fauci warns of risks from single-dose strategy for Pfizer, Moderna vaccines

“We’re telling people [two shots] is what you should do … and then we say, ‘Oops, we changed our mind?’” Fauci told The Washington Post on Monday. “I think that would be a messaging challenge, to say the least.”

Fauci warned that adopting a strategy to administer the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines with just a single dose in an effort to get more people vaccinated more quickly could render Americans too susceptible to infection and spark more doubts about the vaccines’ efficacy. 

“There’s risks on either side,” Fauci said. 

Health officials in the United Kingdom, who began administering doses weeks before the first shot was given in the U.S., have shifted their inoculation program to a one-dose strategy as they rush to vaccinate more Britons while variants of the coronavirus spread across the island. 

Fauci told the Post he had spoken with officials in the U.K and “we both agreed that both of our approaches were quite reasonable.”

The issue, Fauci said, is the gap between supply and demand. Public health officials in the U.S. are confident that discrepancy is narrow enough that with three drug makers, Pfizer, Moderna and now Johnson & Johnson, each manufacturing a vaccine, there will soon be enough to administer two doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to every American who wants one by the middle of the summer. The recently authorized Johnson & Johnson vaccine requires only one dose.