Washington – Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former director of the Food and Drug Administration, said Sunday that the national administration strategy coronavirus vaccines “don’t work” and encouraged public health officials to “implement the reset” and take a new approach to inoculate Americans more quickly.
“We really need to get this vaccine to market faster because this is really our only tool, our only backstop against the spread of these new variants. If we can get a lot of people vaccinated quickly, maybe we can get enough protective immunity. population that this will stop spreading at the rate it is, “Gottlieb said in an interview with Face the Nation.” So we have to recognize that it is not working. We have to do the reset and adopt a new strategy to get patients out of the come close. “
The roll-out of the two coronavirus vaccines, from Germany’s Pfizer and BioNTech, and Moderna, has been hit by snags as hospitals and health departments already stretched from staff shortages and logistical issues. With the vaccine being offered to the older Americans and health professionals, some hospital systems have started offering incentives to workers to take their photos.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 22.1 million doses of the vaccines have been distributed and nearly 6.7 million people have received their first of two doses. President-elect Joe Biden plans to speed up the distribution of the vaccines release all available doses instead of blocking the supply of vaccines, as the Trump administration does, as soon as he takes office.
Gottlieb has also proposed to release all available offerings and last week, state leaders said should consider taking the coronavirus footage more widely available for people aged 65 and over.
“Right now, there are 40 million doses on a shelf somewhere. So the FBI says it’s with the states. The states say it’s with the FBI. It really doesn’t matter to the patient who doesn’t get access to the injection. , ”he repeated Sunday. “You have 40 million on the shelf. We have 50 million Americans over 65. So we have stock to push it more aggressively towards that population.”
Gottlieb said the government should take an “all-above-the-above approach” and distribute the vaccines through a variety of channels, including big-box stores and federal sites.
“We must now try everything to create multiple distribution points,” he said. “A lot of seniors aren’t going to want to go to, you know, a stadium to get a shot. They’re going to want to go to a pharmacy, a local pharmacy, or a doctor’s office. Give people more opportunity to get a vaccination. get where they find it easy. But we need to remove these more aggressively. “
While the current problem with vaccinations is in distribution, Gottlieb will become a supply problem once logistics are perfected.
“We’re not doing well to get this to patients,” he said.
According to Johns Hopkins University, there are more than 22.1 million confirmed coronavirus cases in the US and more than 372,000 people have died from COVID-19. The number of infections is expected to level off this month after a sharp increase after the holiday, but new variants of the corona virus have been discovered in the United Kingdom and South Africa.
Gottlieb said the new species are unlikely to contribute much to the current peak in the US and predicted that the UK variety is about 0.2% to 0.3% of infections here, although he said the country is not sequencing on a scale large enough to accommodate the variants.
“We don’t think these new variants are currently contributing to the increase in infections we are seeing,” he said. “We think this is an uptick after the holidays, but the bottom line is that we need a better system to detect these things so that we can have an adequate public health response.”
Gottlieb said the viruses will evolve, so vaccines, antibody drugs and other therapies will need to be updated regularly to keep up with the new variants.
“This virus has been circulating around the world, largely uncontrolled around the world,” he said. “It is under some selective pressure from the widespread use of, for example, restorative plasma. So it is inevitable that we will see these kinds of mutations in this virus. And this is likely to be a constant battle.”