Analysis: Regulator surprises by approving 12-week gap between first and second shots of vaccine as well as Pfizer/BioNTech shot
It’s a pragmatic solution to an incredibly urgent problem – how to immunise very large numbers of people at risk from a rampaging variant of Covid-19 in the shortest possible time. The answer that government advisers have come up with is to give them all – more than 20 million of them – a single shot of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine so that they have some protection and postpone the second dose to three months afterwards, when hopefully there will be plenty of vaccine available for boosters.
Related: How well does the Oxford vaccine work? What we know so far
