Washington – Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former head of the Food and Drug Administration during the Trump administration, predicted on Sunday that declining COVID-19 infection rates are “likely to continue” because of the number of Americans receiving vaccines and the number of people receiving they have already contracted coronavirus.
“This has tragically affected the United States, but we should be optimistic, in my opinion,” Gottlieb said in an interview with “Face the Nation.” “I think we will continue to see infection rates fall in the spring and summer. At the moment, they are going down quite dramatically. I think these trends will continue.”
There have been more than 28 million confirmed cases of coronavirus in the United States, and the death toll is approaching 500,000, according to Johns Hopkins University. But there has been a decline in new COVID-19 cases in recent weeks, and hospitalizations continue to decline.
Gottlieb said the new variants of the virus, first identified in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil, pose new risks and could become more widespread in the United States, but are not enough to reverse the current decline.
“I think it’s too little, too late in most parts of the country,” he said. “With rising vaccination rates and also the fact that we have infected about a third of the public, there is enough protective immunity to see these trends continue.”
Meanwhile, vaccine manufacturers are developing boosters and working to redesign their fires to protect against new strains.
The Biden administration has worked to accelerate the pace of vaccinations and increase the supply of vaccines to states. More than 61.2 million doses of COVD-19 vaccines have been administered and nearly 75 million doses have been administered since Saturday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Gottlieb said it would not be possible for the US to achieve herd immunity without vaccinating children and contrasted COVID-19 with measles and smallpox, which were essentially eradicated after successful vaccination efforts.
“COVID will continue to circulate at a low level,” he said. “We hope that we will continue to vaccinate the vulnerable population, so we will protect them from hospitalizations or serious illnesses and we will die because of it. But this will continue to spread.”
Both the Trump administration and the current Biden administration are pushing China to share more data on the origins of the coronavirus, Gottlieb said Beijing should provide information on antibody tests to people who have worked in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, where the first cases of coronavirus were detected, as well as the original strains, to allow scientists to study the evolution of the coronavirus over time. The World Health Organization is investigating the origins, but the White House has expressed concern about possible intervention in China’s efforts.
“The most likely scenario here is that this came from nature, that it jumped back and forth between humans and animals for a while and eventually erupted,” he said. “I think the theory of laboratory leaks, the fact that it could have been an accident in that laboratory, will never be completely dispelled. And the WHO should not move so easily away from that.”