Trump’s surgeon general questions guidance about getting 2 Covid vaccine shots

“Good protection for many (w/ 1 shot) is better than great protection for a few. 2000 people a day are dying because they can’t get a 1st #covid19 shot — not because they can’t get a 2nd,” Adams wrote in a Twitter thread. In another tweet, Adams wrote, “Push out all doses NOW, and lean into production!”

Adams included a link to an article published by The Washington Post on Monday in which Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Biden administration’s chief medical adviser, said the US must stick with a two-dose regimen for the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines.

On Tuesday, Adams sought to clarify his comments.

Fauci pushed back on Adams’ comments on Wednesday, telling CNN’s Erin Burnett on “OutFront” that while he respects Adams, “I think he’s incorrect on this,” in light of variants of the virus that reduce the vaccine’s effectiveness.

“If you look at the level of antibodies after the second dose, it’s 10 times higher,” Fauci said, using the Pfizer vaccine as an example. “So when you’re dealing with variants that diminish somewhat, sometimes fivefold, the efficacy of those vaccine-induced antibodies, you may bring it down to … well within the range of protection because you have a lot of cushion.”

Meanwhile, in just receiving one dose, Fauci continued, “you don’t know how durable it is, whether it’s going to just go off and further down within a period of a month or so. But importantly, you’re at a very tenuous level — good enough to do protection, but if you diminish it by fivefold, you fall off the chart of protection. So it’s really quite risky when you’re trying to deal with variants that we know are out there.”