Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness

January 29, 2021

Evaluation of COVID-19 vaccination strategies with a delayed second dose

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[Pre-print, not peer-reviewed] Extending the interval between doses of the Moderna vaccine from 4 weeks to 9-12 weeks could prevent additional infections, hospitalizations, and deaths according to an agent-based model. However, there was no clear advantage for delaying the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines beyond the standard 3-week interval. This is largely attributable to the differences in efficacy used for the first dose of each vaccine (52% for the Pfizer-BioNTech versus 80% for the Moderna vaccine). The authors note uncertainty about how quickly immunity wanes following vaccination, and developed scenarios with different assumptions for this parameter.

Moghadas et al. (Jan 29, 2021). Evaluation of COVID-19 vaccination strategies with a delayed second dose. Pre-print downloaded Jan 29 from https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.01.27.21250619