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The UK’s chief medical officers warned of vaccine shortages for months as they defended a strategy to delay the second shots of its Covid-19 immunisation programme.
Britain decided to give as many people as possible the first of two jabs to try to ensure partial immunity to tackle the fast-rising number of coronavirus cases at the start of 2021.
The UK was the first country to approve the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which was followed this week by the regulator passing the cheaper University of Oxford-AstraZeneca treatment that the government said would be a game-changer for the programme.
But authorities decided to delay second doses by up to 12 weeks to stretch current supplies, a decision criticised by the main UK doctors’ organisation as “grossly unfair” for at-risk patients at the front of the queue.
Emergency healthcare staff at “battle stations” amid the rising number of coronavirus patients are at risk of burnout, a senior medic has warned.
Adrian Boyle, vice president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said people were “tired, frustrated and fed-up”, while Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, said the next few weeks would be “nail-bitingly difficult for the NHS”.
Dr Boyle told BBC Breakfast: “What is it going to be like over the next couple of months? I don’t know, I am worried.
“We are very much at battle stations.
“There will be short-term surges of morale but people are tired, frustrated and fed-up, as everybody is, whether they work in hospital or not.
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Emergency healthcare staff at “battle stations” amid the rising number of coronavirus patients are at risk of burnout, a senior medic has warned.
Adrian Boyle, vice president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said people were “tired, frustrated and fed-up”, while Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, said the next few weeks would be “nail-bitingly difficult for the NHS”.
Dr Boyle told BBC Breakfast: “What is it going to be like over the next couple of months? I don’t know, I am worried.
“We are very much at battle stations.
“There will be short-term surges of morale but people are tired, frustrated and fed-up, as everybody is, whether they work in hospital or not.
Pfizer Inc and
BioNTech Se plan to give volunteers who received a placebo in its Covid-19 vaccine trial an option to receive a first dose of the vaccine by 1 March 2021, while staying within the study, Reuters reports.
The trial’s Vaccine Transition Option allows all participants aged 16 or older the choice to discover whether they were given the placebo, “and for participants who learn they received the placebo, to have the option to receive the investigational vaccine while staying in the study,” the companies said on their website.
The
US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and a panel of its outside advisers have expressed concerns over Pfizer’s “unblinding” plan, saying it could make it harder to continue collecting data on safety and effectiveness needed to win full FDA approval of the vaccine.