More than half of cancer patients are not protected against coronavirus after one dose of the Pfizer vaccine. Therefore, experts and charities are calling on the British government to abandon the 12-week break between the first and second injections, according to The Daily Mail.
A study by researchers from King’s College London with 150 people showed that one shot of the vaccine stimulates the production of antibodies in only 39% of patients with solid tumors such as breast or prostate cancer, and this happens after three weeks.
A single dosage was even less effective among patients with malignant neoplasms of the blood and bone marrow. Only 13% of them have developed proteins that fight the coronavirus. In comparison, in people without cancer, the vaccine caused the production of these proteins 97% of the time. If patients with tumors received a second injection after 21 days, the number of antibodies that developed a protective level more than doubled – up to 95%.
Among those who did not receive the second dose of the vaccine, there was no improvement after three weeks. At the same time, signs of immunity remained in only 8-43% of patients. In this regard, oncologists and charities for cancer patients are calling on the British government to provide the 2 million cancer patients in the country with a second dose much faster than currently implied by vaccination protocols.
