Washington – Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former head of the Food and Drug Administration during the Trump administration, predicted on Sunday that the declining COVID-19 infection rates are “ likely to continue ” as more Americans receive their vaccines and the number of people infected with the coronavirus.
“This has taken a tragic toll on 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. Right now they are falling quite dramatically. I think these trends are likely to continue.”
According to Johns Hopkins University, there are more than 28 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the US, with the death toll approaching 500,000. But the number of new COVID-19 cases has declined in recent weeks and the number of hospital admissions continues to decline.
Gottlieb said new variants of the virus first identified in the UK, South Africa and Brazil do pose new risks and could be more common in the US, but not enough to reverse the declines at this point. to make.
“I think it’s too little, too late in most parts of the country,” he said. “With the rising vaccination coverage and also the fact that we’ve infected about a third of the public, that’s enough protective immunity that we’re likely to see these trends continue.”
Vaccine manufacturers, meanwhile, are developing boosters and are working on redesigning their injections to protect them from the new strains.
The Biden government has been working to speed up the pace of vaccinations and increase the supply of vaccines to the states. More than 61.2 million doses of COVD-19 vaccines have been delivered and nearly 75 million doses delivered since Saturday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Gottlieb said it will not be possible for the US to achieve herd immunity without children being vaccinated, contrasting COVID-19 with measles and smallpox, all of which were essentially eradicated after successful vaccination efforts.
“COVID will continue to circulate at a low level,” he said. “Hopefully we will continue to vaccinate the vulnerable population so that we will protect them from hospitalization or serious illness and die from it. But this will continue to spread.”
With both the Trump and now Biden administrations pushing China to share more data on the origin of the coronavirus, Gottlieb said Beijing should make information available about antibody testing in people who worked in a lab in Wuhan, China, where the first cases were of the coronavirus. were detected, as well as the original strains to allow scientists to study how the coronavirus has evolved over time. The World Health Organization is investigating its origins, but the White House has expressed concern about China’s possible intervention in those efforts.
“The most likely scenario here is that this came from nature, that this bounced back and forth between humans and animals for a time and eventually broke out,” he said. “I think the theory of the lab leak, the fact that this could have been an accident from that lab, will never be completely dislodged. And WHO shouldn’t walk away from that so easily.”