Vaccines and institutions: Transparency and credibility
Dear Editor,
Ontario faces the most aggressive surge of contagions by COVID-19 and a large part of the citizenship makes it full of great uncertainty and distrust, a product of the inconsistent and contradictory management of information.
One of the most serious contradictions is the one that exists between the way the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is applied and what the official website of the Government of Canada (Canada. CA) as the Pfizer portal says in that regard.
The official website Canada.com says that for the vaccine to work best, you need to get two doses: a single dose and then a second dose 21 days later, fully coinciding with what is indicated by Pfizer. However, what happens in reality contradicts both since the second dose is being applied 112 days after the first.
Given that incongruity, it is worth asking: have clinical trials been carried out to evaluate the effect that the greatest period of time, between the first and the second dose, could have in the effectiveness of the vaccine? If so, what have been the results of such clinical tests? Is the effectiveness of the vaccine and the alleged protection, during the additional days of waiting for the second dose, maintained? Does the vaccine maintain the same effectiveness after a second dose that is applied 91 days later than recommended? Has there been any pronouncement by Pfizer-BioNTech about the effectiveness of the vaccine when the second dose is applied 112 days after the first one?
If answers to such questions are not disseminated, people will continue questioning decision transparency such as increasing time lapse between the first and second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
It is not a secret that the success of any process involving the acceptance and participation of society goes through a transparent management of all information, as a single mechanism to have confidence, support and credibility in institutions that handle such processes.
Dirimo Marin
Toronto, ON