Washington – Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said on Sunday that the US is entering a “grim month” as coronavirus infections continue to increase along the east and west coasts.
“We have a grim month ahead of us,” Gottlieb said in an interview with “Face the Nation.” “We have a very difficult month ahead of us. Right now, things are run by the shores.”
The number of coronavirus cases in the United States is approaching 19 million, while the death toll from the pandemic exceeded 332,000, Johns Hopkins University said. Infections are on the rise in California, Massachusetts, New York and Florida, while they are beginning to decline in the Midwest and the Great Lakes region.
Meanwhile, public health officials are warning that the country must prepare for the most difficult days of the pandemic, even as two coronavirus vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna are being administered to health professionals and residents of long-term care facilities.
Gottlieb said there is some evidence that the number of new daily cases is starting to level off, although he attributed that to the holidays, when there is underreporting. In addition, he said the nation is unlikely to see burdens on hospitals begin to diminish and deaths level off until the end of January.
“I don’t think any part of the country has really done that well with COVID,” said Gottlieb. “Every state has struggled with this and so I wouldn’t try to make comparisons between different states in terms of how they handled this. Every state has had to approach it differently because they’ve all had different challenges.”
More than 9.5 million doses of vaccines developed by Pfizer, in collaboration with Germany’s BioNTech and Moderna, and more than 1.9 million people have received their first of two doses of both vaccines since Saturday, according to the Centers for Disease. Control and Prevention (CDC).
Gottlieb said he believes the number of people who received their first shots is likely to be higher than currently reported, but said the pace is “slower” than what was publicly promised. Federal officials wanted to produce enough doses of coronavirus vaccines by the end of 2020 to inoculate 20 million Americans through Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s initiative to accelerate vaccine development and distribution.
“The idea that we will have 20 million vaccinations by the end of the year is probably unrealistic at this point,” said Gottlieb.
While health professionals and residents of long-term care facilities were among the first to receive the vaccines, a CDC advisory panel advised adults aged 75 and older and front-line workers in the next group to get their shot.
Gottlieb said that as more doses are produced and distributed, officials will have “better systems to distribute the vaccines more efficiently” and will be helped by companies like CVS and Walgreens.
But he warned that trying to vaccinate more difficult-to-reach populations poses its own challenges.
“It will be significantly more difficult to get those vaccines out, so the fact that we have struggled to vaccinate health workers and nursing home patients shows that we need to invest more in these efforts,” he said.