Recently, in a joint statement, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said that the combination of viral vector vaccines and mRNA vaccines may provide better protection against the SARs-COV-2 virus.

According to a study involving 1070 participants, published in the Lancet, a first dose of Oxford-AstraZeneca or Pfizer-BioNTech followed by a second dose of Novavax or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines with an interval of nine weeks is said to generate a robust immune response.

Additionally, the study found that a dose of AstraZeneca vaccine (known as Covishield in India) followed by a second dose of Moderna/Novavax triggered higher antibodies and T-cell responses than getting a two-dose shot of AstraZeneca.

The study therefore promotes flexible dosing of existing vaccines and believes it to be effective.

Professor Matthew Snape, Associate Professor in Paediatrics and Vaccinology at the University of Oxford, and lead author of the study, said, “Thanks to studies such as these, we are now getting a more complete picture of how different COVID-19 vaccines can be used together in the same vaccine schedule.”

“Encouragingly, all these schedules generated antibody concentrations above that of the licensed and effective two dose Oxford-AstraZeneca schedule. When it comes to cellular immunity, having a first dose of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine followed by any of the other study vaccines generates a particularly robust response,” he further explains.