Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, the chief scientist of the World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday advised people against mixing covid vaccines from separate manufacturers. “It is a dangerous trend since there is little data available about its health impact,” she explained.
The dangerous trend of mixing covid vaccines
“There are people who are thinking about mixing and matching. We receive a lot of queries from people who say they have taken one [dose] and are planning to take another one (doses). It’s a little bit of a dangerous trend here. We are in a data-free, evidence-free zone as far as to mix and match,” said Dr. Swaminathan in an online briefing.
“It will be a chaotic situation in countries if citizens start deciding when and who will be taking a second, a third, and a fourth dose,” she added.
All about mixing and matching covid-19 vaccines
Mixing and matching of covid vaccines is an immunization method where you use two doses of vaccines from different companies. After all most vaccines including the ones by Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, Bharat Biotech, Sputnik V, and Oxford-AstraZeneca are two-dose vaccines. However, Sputnik V Lite and the Johnson & Johnson are single-dose shots and cannot be used by mixing with others.
“There is limited data on mix and match. There are studies going on, we need to wait for that. Maybe it will be a very good approach. But, at the moment we only have data on the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, followed by Pfizer,” added Dr. Swaminathan.
