How Many Days Between COVID-19 Vaccine Doses?

The British Medical Association (BMA) urged England’s chief medical officer on January 23, 2021, to urgently review the U.K.’s current second dose recommendation after 12 weeks. In a BMA statement reported by PBS, the association said there was a growing concern from the medical profession regarding the delay of the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech Comirnaty vaccine.

“No other nation has adopted the U.K.’s approach,” Dr. Chaand Nagpaul, chairman of the BMA council, told the BBC. “I do understand the trade-off and the rationale, but if that were the right thing to do, then we would see other nations following suit,” Nagpaul added.

Yvonne Doyle, medical director of Public Health England, defended the decision as “a reasonable scientific balance based on both supply and also protecting the most people.”

On January 5, 2021, the World Health Organization recommended that the second Pfizer-BioNTech Comirnaty vaccine dose could be given up to six weeks after the first but only “in exceptional circumstances.”