New Delhi: The central government is reportedly looking at bridging the gap between the two doses of the Kovidshield vaccine as a 12-week gap was prescribed between the two vaccines.
News agency ANI quoted government sources as saying that the idea is to reduce the gap between the Kovidshield doses and the issue will be discussed at NTAGI, the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization in India.
Earlier, India’s two largest public health associations had written to the central government urging the two-dose gap to be reduced from 12 weeks to 8 weeks.
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The Indian Public Health Association and the Indian Association of Preventive and Social Medicine have written to the government in this regard. It was postulated that a reduction in the interval could help prevent recurrent mutations and infections.
The Indian Public Health Association and the Indian Association of Preventive and Social Medicine are the bodies of community medicine. According to public health experts, when the vaccine trial started, the gap was four weeks which seemed to be effective, but later it was observed that the efficacy increases with increasing interval, and the side effects decrease.
However, in this period, no new variants of the virus had emerged and infection was not occurring, said Dr Sanjay Rai, president of the Dean Public Health Association.
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