having a painful, heavy feeling and tenderness in the arm where you had your injection.Side effects from the Pfizer vaccine Common side effects are: Further studies will help us to know how long protection will last. Benefits of a second doseĪ second dose helps to improve protection in the longer term. This suggests that young people who get both infection and vaccine will have high levels of protection. People who have had previous COVID-19 infection who then get 1 dose of vaccine, and those who get infected after the first dose, make a good immune response – at least as good as people who have had 2 doses. This protection is expected to last for a few months in young people. Studies suggest that even after 1 dose of vaccine your risk of serious complications from COVID-19 infection are greatly reduced. This guide is aimed at those young people who are not considered at greater risk. Those young people who are at greater risk of serious illness if they catch COVID-19 will already have been offered 2 doses of vaccine, given 8 weeks apart. This guide contains information that will help you make the decision about the right time for you to get the second dose. You may have recently had a first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. “Longer term follow-up of this cohort will help us to understand which vaccine interval will be optimal in the future, once the immediate crisis is over.The NHS is now offering 2 doses of coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine to all young people aged 16 to 17 years to help give them longer lasting protection. “Overall, these data add considerable support to the policy of delaying the second dose of Covid-19 vaccine when vaccine availability is limited and the at-risk population is large,” said Eleanor Riley, professor of immunology and infectious disease at the University of Edinburgh. The findings come as new data from Public Health England suggested that the vaccination programme had prevented 11,700 deaths by the end of April 2021 in those aged 60 and over, and at least 33,000 hospitalisations in those aged 65 and over in the same period. “Individuals need to really complete their second dose when it’s offered to them because it not only provides additional protection but potentially longer lasting protection against Covid-19.” “This study further supports the growing body of evidence that the approach taken in the UK of delaying that second dose has really paid off,” said Dr Gayatri Amirthalingam, consultant epidemiologist at Public Health England. Details are published in pre-print form and have yet to be peer reviewed. They found that T cell responses were weaker when the booster was delayed, but settled down to similar levels when people were tested more than three months after the first shot. The researchers then looked at another arm of the immune system, the T cells that destroy infected cells. After the second dose, all had antibodies against the virus’s spike protein, but the level was 3.5 times higher in the 12-week group. Among the participants 99 had the second shot after three weeks, while 73 waited 12 weeks. The scientists analysed blood samples from 175 over-80s after their first vaccine and again two to three weeks after the booster. But the latest study is the first to compare immune responses after different timings with the Pfizer/BioNTech jab. Researchers from Oxford University showed in February that antibody responses were more than twice as strong when boosters of their vaccine were delayed for 12 weeks. The move was controversial because medicines regulators approved both the Pfizer/BioNTech and Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines on the basis of clinical trials that spaced out the doses by only three or four weeks. In the first weeks of the vaccine programme the UK took the bold decision to delay administering booster shots so that more elderly and vulnerable people could more quickly receive their first shots. There is a marked difference between these two schedules in terms of antibody responses we see.” Most people who have both shots of the vaccine will be well protected regardless of the timing, but the stronger response from the extra delay might prolong protection because antibody levels naturally wane over time.ĭr Helen Parry, a senior author on the study at Birmingham, said: “We’ve shown that peak antibody responses after the second Pfizer vaccination are really strongly boosted in older people when this is delayed to 11 to 12 weeks.
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