July 13, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – The World Health Organization is warning the public not to “mix and match” COVID-19 vaccine doses from different manufacturers, as the media accentuate fears about new virus strains even to people who have already been vaccinated.
“It's a little bit of a dangerous trend here. We are in a data-free, evidence-free zone as far as mix and match,” Soumya Swaminathan, the chief scientist of the pro-abortion United Nations entity, said during an online briefing Monday, Reuters reports. ‘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.”
Yet Canadian officials are standing by their decision to encourage exactly that, CTV News reports.
“Vaccine interchangeability is not a new concept. Similar vaccines from different manufacturers are used when vaccine supply or public health programs change,” claimed the Public Health Agency of Canada, defending advice from the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI). “Different vaccine products have been used to complete a vaccine series for influenza, hepatitis A, and others.”
Perhaps in response to such pushback, Swaminathan later “clarified” her Monday comments to allow room for public health officials to recommend such mixing:
Individuals should not decide for themselves, public health agencies can, based on available data. Data from mix and match studies of different vaccines are awaited – immunogenicity and safety both need to be evaluated https://t.co/3pdYj4LUdz
— Soumya Swaminathan (@doctorsoumya) July 12, 2021
To the frustration of vaccine advocates and their allies around the world, many remain concerned that the coronavirus vaccines have not been sufficiently studied for negative effects given how quickly they were developed. In the United States, for instance, clinical trials for the currently-authorized COVID-19 vaccines were performed in less than a year, when such trials traditionally take a minimum of two to four years.
Others harbor ethical reservations about the use of cells from aborted babies in some of the vaccine candidates’ development, or simply consider the vaccines unnecessary for them given COVID-19’s high survivability among most groups, low risk of asymptomatic spread, and research indicating that post-infection natural immunity is equally protective against reinfection.
Public health bureaucracies and their media allies have also invoked the specter of the recently-discovered “Delta variant” of COVID-19 to reinforce their calls for vaccination and to extend “emergency” measures such as masking. Some figures, such as liberal writer Andrew Sullivan, have specifically cited Delta as their reason for “complementing” one vaccination with another vaccination from a different manufacturer:
Got my first Pfizer shot today to complement my J & J. Worried about Delta.
— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) June 30, 2021
The Blaze’s Daniel Horowitz recently wrote that “if people would actually look at the data, they'd realize that the Delta variant is actually less deadly … India has one-seventh the death rate per capita of the U.S.; it's just that India got the major winter wave later, when the Western countries were largely done with it, thereby giving the illusion that India somehow suffered worse.”
Horowitz cited a British government report showing a lower case-fatality rate (CFR) for the delta variant than for previous COVID strains and the same rate as the flu. “This is exactly what every respiratory pandemic has done through history: morphed into more transmissible and less virulent form that forces the other mutations out since you get that one,” he summarized. “Nothing about masks, lockdowns, or experimental shots did this.”
LifeSiteNews has produced an extensive COVID-19 vaccines resources page. View it here.