Dr. Scott Gottlieb emphasized the importance of getting as many people vaccinated as possible and warned of a potentially bad spring and summer without protective immunity, as new Covid variants appear around the world.
“If we do not achieve more protective immunity against the population, we could be facing a situation in which we have, as a kind, a perpetual infection in the spring and summer, as these variants are imposed here,” he said. said the former FDA chief to the Trump administration in an interview on CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith” Thursday evening.
Ohio State researchers found a new Covid strain in the U.S. with mutations that scientists had not seen before. They also revealed that they found another strain identical to the highly transmissible one in the UK. The researchers say these mutations “will likely make the virus more infectious.”
Gottlieb warned that variants could transform what could have been a relatively quiet spring and summer, into “a summer where we have more infection because these variants now circulate and spread more easily, even in the warmer months, when we really shouldn’t do that. ” I’ve had a lot of coronavirus spread. “
David Edwards, a longtime professor at Harvard University, echoed Gottlieb’s feelings about the timing and importance of effective vaccine deployment.
“Time is important, of course, when facing any organism,” said Edwards, the founder of FEND, a nasal hygiene mist developed for the coronavirus pandemic. “Our main goal this winter should be to vaccinate as many people as we can with the highly effective vaccines we currently have.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States has distributed 30.6 million vaccines and put 11 million in their arms. An overall forecast compiled by the CDC, however, predicted that an additional 92,000 Americans will die from Covid in the next three weeks.
The United States has suffered 8,400 grueling deaths in the past two days and nearly 40,000 in less than two weeks from 2021, according to a CNBC analysis of data from Johns Hopkins. The pandemic kills, on average, more than 3,300 Americans a day.
Gottlieb told host Shepard Smith that he is “encouraged” by the Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccine and “trusts” the company’s ability to scale up its manufacturing to help strengthen the implementation of the Covid vaccine to the United States.
“The first data seemed encouraging,” Gottlieb said. “One of the things we saw in the data was that the antibody response continued to be generated, even after about two and a half months.”
Outreach: Scott Gottlieb is a CNBC contributor and board member of Pfizer, the start of Tempus genetic testing, and biotech company Illumina. Pfizer has a manufacturing agreement with Gilead to remdesivir. Gottlieb is also co-chair of Norway Cruise Line Holdings′ I Royal Caribbean“Healthy Candle Panel”.