Dr. Scott Gottlieb stressed the importance of vaccinating as many people as possible and warned of a potentially terrible spring and summer without protective immunity as new Covid variants appear around the globe.
“If we can’t get more protection immunity in the population, we could be facing a situation where we have, in a way, a perpetual infection heading into spring and summer, because these variants are settling here,” he said. said the former head of the FDA in the Trump administration in an interview with CNBC “The News with Shepard Smith” on Thursday night.
Researchers at Ohio State have discovered a new Covid strain in the United States with mutations that scientists have not seen before. They also revealed that they found another strain identical to the highly transmissible one in the United Kingdom. The researchers say that these mutations “are likely to make the virus more infectious.”
Gottlieb warned that the variants could turn what could have been a relatively quiet spring and summer into a “summer when we have more infections, because these variants are now circulating and spreading more easily, even in the warmer months.” , when it shouldn’t I have had a large spread of coronavirus. “
Dr. David Edwards, a longtime professor at Harvard University, echoed Gottlieb’s feelings about the timing and importance of an effective vaccine launch.
“Time counts, of course, when faced with any organism,” said Edwards, founder of FEND, a nasal hygiene spray developed for the coronavirus pandemic. “Our main goal this winter, however, should be to vaccinate as many people as possible with the highly effective vaccines we have today.”
The United States has distributed 30.6 million vaccines and put 11 million of them in people’s arms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, an overall forecast by the CDC projected that an additional 92,000 Americans would die from Covid in the next three weeks.
The United States has suffered 8,400 deaths in the past two days and nearly 40,000 in less than two weeks in 2021, according to a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins data. The pandemic kills, on average, more than 3,300 Americans a day.
Gottlieb told host Shepard Smith that he was “encouraged” by the Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccine and “confident” in the company’s ability to expand production to help strengthen the launch of the Covid vaccine in the United States.
“The early data seemed encouraging,” Gottlieb said. One of the things we saw in the data was that the antibody response continued to build, even after about two and a half months.
Disclosure: Scott Gottlieb is a CNBC contributor and is a board member of Pfizer, start-up Tempus for genetic testing and biotechnology company Illumina. Pfizer has a manufacturing agreement with Gilead for remdesivir. Gottlieb is also co-chair of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings‘ and Royal Caribbean“Healthy navigation panel”.