As the pandemic death toll mounts, governments delay administration of second vaccine dose

Almost 1.9 million people around the world have thus far perished in the coronavirus pandemic. Since the beginning of December, a seven-day average of some 600,000 new cases has been registered worldwide each day, with little evidence of the current winter surge abating.

The United States is the global epicenter of the pandemic. It reported a single-day record of 3,738 deaths on Tuesday, with another 233,513 new cases pushing hospital admissions for COVID-19 to a new one-day high of 131,215. The case fatality rate hovers around 1.6 percent. But with infections at the present rate, the death toll will inevitably be even more ghastly.The evidence for these assertions remains to be presented. 

In the case of Moderna’s vaccine, the author of another New England Journal of Medicine study, published on December 30, Lindsey R. Baden, MD, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, reported that a secondary analysis demonstrated a 95.2 percent efficacy 14 days after the first shot of the vaccine. However, this was not the protocol for the trial and remains speculative, requiring additional studies to confirm such a one-dose regimen.

Shortcuts are often reactionary knee-jerk reactions, and scientists are no less immune to them than politicians and heads of state. In the present instance, they are a response to the ever-growing social crisis emerging from the refusal of governments, all of which are controlled by capitalist elites, to take the measures needed to protect and care for the population at large. Attempts to depart from the science behind the vaccine trials will only instill further distrust in the public and create new and unforeseen crises.