Can you mix-and-match your COVID-19 vaccines? It’s unclear right now, but new data is coming, said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director for the Centers for the Disease Control and Prevention.
Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration authorized the use of a booster shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for specific patients who have already received the two-dose Pfizer vaccine.
So that leaves Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccine recipients without a booster for now. But could they soon mix-and-match their vaccine with another?
Walensky recently told Yahoo Finance that data to answer that question is on the way.
- “We’re starting to see some of the mix-and-match data,” she said
- “As soon as we have those data to present, both to the FDA and to the CDC, we’ll have recommendations there as well,” Walensky said.
Countries across the world have approved different vaccine combinations, per The Washington Post. For example, Thailand approved a plan that allows people to mix the Chinese Sinovac vaccine with doses of AstraZeneca or Pfizer vaccines, per The New York Times.
But WHO scientist Soumya Swaminathan said mixing COVID-19 vaccines as booster shots is a “dangerous trend,” per The Washington Post.
- Mixing the vaccines could be “a chaotic situation … if citizens start deciding when and who will be taking a second, a third and a fourth dose,” she said.
- “We are in a bit of a data-free, evidence-free zone as far as ‘mix-and-match,’” she said.