Officials are looking into the possibility of giving only one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine to people who had already been infected with the virus, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday.
The Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said data from administering a single shot to virus survivors is “really quite impressive.”
“The boost that you get with that single dose is really enormous,” Fauci told NBC anchor Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press.”
“So we’re looking very carefully about that. And that is one thing that you might want to consider, but we want to really carefully look at the data first.”
A small study from the University of Maryland School of Medicine found that healthcare workers who had recovered from the virus generated dramatically higher antibody levels after a single dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines.
Two weeks after their first shot, their neutralizing antibody levels were about 500 times higher than people who had not been sick before, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“They had a faster response and a higher response than those that had seen the virus the first time,” the study co-author Mohammad Sajadi told the paper. “If I had COVID myself, I’d be OK with the single shot.”