One dose of Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine.
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UGO AMEZ
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) on Thursday recommended an interval of three weeks between the two injections of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, while the spacing of the doses for the Covid-19 vaccines is debated.
The updated product information "now recommends the administration of the second dose three weeks after the first," the Amsterdam-based agency said in a statement.
The updated label
This information previously indicated "that the interval should be + at least 21 days +", added the EMA, specifying that this decision was taken by its Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use "in order to clarify its position" on the dose spacing.
The vaccine against Covid-19 developed by the American Pfizer and the German BioNTech, the first to be authorized in the European Union on December 21, is based on the injection of two doses.
The EMA recalled that participants whose data were used to assess vaccine effectiveness received the second dose "within 19-42 days of the first", and that 93.1% of them received the received within "19-23 days".
"There is currently no clinical data on the efficacy of the vaccine administered beyond the intervals used in the clinical trial," the agency said.
Intervals that make debate
This announcement comes at a time when the possibility of spacing out the doses of Covid-19 vaccines by six weeks instead of three or four is being debated, with doctors fearing that this will affect the effectiveness of the vaccination.
On Tuesday, the French Minister of Health Olivier Véran announced that the delay between the two doses of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine will be maintained at “3 or 4 weeks”, despite the opinions of two health authorities who considered that it could be extend to six weeks to vaccinate more people.
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