But Bernstein says that a mix-and-match strategy should not be adopted here without a full successful trial and Health Canada approval. “We risk losing the confidence that we’ve built up with Canadians over a long time now if we start willy-nilly [saying,] ‘Lets try this, or let’s try that.’ ”
Like Bernstein, other scientists think Britain is gambling with public confidence by going ahead with the policy without results from a completed study. “None of this is being data driven right now,” Dr. Phyllis Tien, an infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco,
told the New York Times. “We’re kind of in this Wild West.”
Eventually, Canada will be awash in vaccines, as more vaccines are approved and promised shipments of millions of doses arrive. While the impetus to use a mix-and-match strategy to deal with localized shortages may subside, the threat posed by variants of concern will still exist. So the British mix-and-match study may only be one part of examining new ways to keep the world safe from this novel coronavirus.
