Never mind the Quality: Look at the Numbers!

More news about the plans for the roll-out of vaccination against Covid-19 in the UK. It appears that the UK's Medicines and Health products Regulatory Authority (MHRA) are playing a bit 'fast and loose' with their approvals (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/30/questions-hang-over-uks-rollout-of-oxfordastrazeneca-jab). Like them, I am very keen that we get as many people as possible, protected by vaccines, as quickly as possible. There is, however, a possibility that, in the rush to maximise numbers, we might endanger the level of final protection. The MHRA have approved both the Oxford/AstraZeneca and the Pfiser/BioNTech vaccines being given as a single dose, with the 2nd dose following up to 12 weeks later. Both vaccines were tested by their makers with a typical 3 week period between the 2 doses (and it's on this basis, that the much-acclaimed protection levels, offered by the vaccines, were calculated). As one of the makers says "there is no data to demonstrate that protection after a first dose is sustained after 21 days". So there might, at best, be a 9 week period between the 1st and 2nd doses, when people would assume they were protected, when this is not actually the case. There is even a worse possibility, that increasing the time between the 2 doses might compromise (to an uncertain extent) the final protection offered by the vaccines. Whilst I understand the urgency, I wonder if the MHRA are being influenced by the government's clear obsession with headline numbers (as is clearly evident in the test and trace debacle) and are going further than the evidence allows to accommodate them? I appreciate that it takes time to manufacture the vaccines but it might be better to have a smaller number of immunities that we can rely on?