The New York Times’s UK vaccine shocker

FACT CHECK

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The New York Times (Getty)
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The New York Times really does have it in for poor old Britain, doesn’t it? Not content with portraying the UK as a nation of boiled mutton eating swamp dwellers, America’s liberal paper of record is now suggesting Brits are being pumped full of a dangerous cocktail of COVID vaccines. ‘Britain Opts for Mix-and-Match Vaccinations, Confounding Experts’ screams the headline.
https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1345121388718391296
The reality? A different second dose will only be considered in very limited circumstances where there is an ‘immediate high risk’ to health. And that’s only if the previous type of vaccine isn’t known or isn’t available. Surely a reasonable precautionary measure…

The New York Times really does have it in for poor old Britain, doesn’t it? Not content with portraying the UK as a nation of boiled mutton eating swamp dwellers, America’s liberal paper of record is now suggesting Brits are being pumped full of a dangerous cocktail of COVID vaccines. ‘Britain Opts for Mix-and-Match Vaccinations, Confounding Experts’ screams the headline.

The reality? A different second dose will only be considered in very limited circumstances where there is an ‘immediate high risk’ to health. And that’s only if the previous type of vaccine isn’t known or isn’t available. Surely a reasonable precautionary measure if all else fails?

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As Jonathan Stoye of the Francis Crick Institute notes, such a plan ‘does not seem unreasonable and is akin to wartime medicine’. UK Department of Health officials have also been keen to emphasize this precautionary step is for exceptional circumstances only. Barely the ‘mix-and-match’ program the Times seems to suggest the UK has adopted.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.