Washington – Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former director of the Food and Drug Administration, said Sunday that the country’s strategy for administering it coronavirus vaccines “don’t work” and encouraged public health officials to “reproduce” and take a new approach to inoculating Americans more quickly.
“We really need to get this vaccine out faster because this is really our only tool, our only support against the spread of these new variants. If we can vaccinate a lot of people quickly, we could get enough protective immunity in the population that this it stops spreading at the pace it has, ”Gottlieb said in an interview with“ Face the Nation ”. Therefore, we must recognize that it does not work. We need to achieve recovery and adopt a new strategy to try to reach patients. “
The launch of the two coronavirus vaccines, from Pfizer and the German BioNTech, and Moderna, has affected the problems, as hospitals and health departments already stretched were facing staff shortages and logistical problems. With the vaccine being offered to older Americans and health care workers, some hospital systems have begun offering incentives to workers to get their shots.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 22.1 million doses of vaccines have been distributed and nearly 6.7 million people have received the first of the two doses. To speed up the distribution of vaccines, President-elect Joe Biden plans to do so release all available doses instead of slowing down the supply of vaccines, as the Trump administration does, once he takes office.
Gottlieb, too, has suggested releasing all available supply and last week said state leaders should consider making coronavirus shots more widely available to people 65 years or older.
“Right now, there are 40 million doses sitting on a shelf somewhere. So the feds say it’s with the states. The states say it’s with the feds. It really doesn’t matter to the patient that they don’t have access to the injection “. he reiterated Sunday. “You have 40 million on the shelves. We have 50 million Americans over the age of 65. So we have supply to get it to that population more aggressively.”
Gottlieb said the government should take a “widespread approach” and push vaccines through various channels, including department stores and federal sites.
“We have to try everything right now to create multiple distribution points,” he said. “Many seniors will not want to go to a stadium, you know, to have an inoculation. They will want to go to a pharmacy, a local pharmacy or a doctor’s office. We need to offer more opportunities for people to get vaccinated. where it feels comfortable. But we need to get them out more aggressively. “
Although the current problem with vaccinations is in distribution, Gottlieb will become a supply problem once logistics are perfected.
“We’re not doing a good job of getting this to patients,” he said.
There have been more than 22.1 million confirmed cases of coronavirus in the U.S. and more than 372,000 people have died from COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins University. The number of infections is expected to decline this month after an increase in holidays, but new variants of the coronavirus have been discovered in the UK and South Africa.
Gottlieb said the new strains probably don’t contribute much to the current rise in the U.S. and predicted the UK variant is about 0.2% to 0.3% of infections here, though he said the country is not sequencing on a scale large enough to detect variants.
“We don’t think these new variants right now are contributing to the increase in infection we’re seeing,” he said. “We think it’s a rebound after the holidays, but the bottom line is that we need a better system to detect these things, so we can have an adequate public health response.”
Gottlieb said the viruses will evolve, so vaccines, antibody drugs and other therapeutic products will need to be updated regularly to keep up to date with new variants.
“This virus has been running all over the world, all over the world, running all over the world without control,” he said. “It has been subjected to some selective pressure with the widespread use, for example, of convalescent plasma. Therefore, it is inevitable that we will see this type of mutation in this virus. And it will probably be a constant struggle.”