Dr. Scott Gottlieb told CNBC on Monday that he believes cases of coronavirus in the US will continue to decline in the spring and summer, allowing Americans to take some pandemic precautions for the time being.
However, in an interview about “Squawk Box”, the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner did not entirely agree with the recent opinion in The Wall Street Journal entitled “We heard immunity by April.” It was written by Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and has been sparking debate since it was published Thursday.
The number of Covid cases in the US has fallen 77% in the past six weeks, Makary notes in the article, arguing that the decline is largely due to the fact that the level of natural immunity in the US population is “virtually”. certainly “higher than antibody testing suggests. Taking that into account the pace of the vaccinations, Makary writes, “I expect Covid to be largely gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal lives.”
Gottlieb said he doesn’t “necessarily agree” with some of the numbers Makary used to support his argument, but added, “I think the feeling is correct.”
Makary writes that about 55% of people in the country have natural immunity to a previous coronavirus infection. While agreeing that Johns Hopkins’ confirmed US case of a total of 28.1 million is an undercount, Gottlieb told CNBC that he believes that about 120 million people – or about 36% of the US population – suffered from cancer during the pandemic. the coronavirus are infected.
After taking vaccine data into account, Gottlieb estimated that about 40% of US residents currently have antibodies from a previous infection or inoculation – a percentage that will increase as more people are vaccinated. According to the CDC, 43.6 million Americans have received at least one dose of the Moderna and Pfizer dual Covid vaccines since they received emergency clearance from the FDA in December.
“If you reach 40% or 50% of the population with some form of protective immunity, you don’t have herd immunity, but you have enough immunity in the population that this [virus] “Just doesn’t pass that easily,” Gottlieb said.
“I think if we get into the warm weather, if we vaccinate more of the population and given that at least a third of Americans have had this, I think the infection level is going to drop dramatically over the course of the spring and summer. summer, ”Gottlieb said.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the White House, has previously said that 75% to 85% of the population would need to develop immunity to create an “umbrella” of protection. Officials at the CDC also recently said more than 85% of people would need to be covered to achieve so-called herd immunity as a fast-spreading virus variant, such as B117, which was first reported in the UK, the dominant strain is going to be. in the U.S.
The presence of more contagious virus variants means that some parts of the US will have higher infection rates this summer “than it otherwise would have been,” added Gottlieb. “But I don’t think it will change the overall trajectory.”
If that trajectory is accurate and it’s a “ low prevalence environment, ” Gottlieb said he expects kids to be able to safely attend summer camp, for example. “I think people are going to be doing a lot of things this summer, a lot of pent-up consumer spending,” he said.
“I think we will have to take certain precautions in the fall, but we will start doing things again. Then, when we go into deep winter as this starts circulating again … I think it will be December, maybe start. we withdraw, “said Gottlieb.” That doesn’t mean we’ll have shutdowns and do what we’ve done [past] December, but it means we may not have holiday parties, board meetings in December may be Zoom rather than in-person gatherings. “
Gottlieb stressed that he believes the US recovery from the pandemic will not be a “linear progression,” with the risk of coronavirus declining steadily month after month. Winter months can be more challenging because it’s a respiratory pathogen, he cautioned. “If winter comes back to winter in 2021 and 2022, we will have to take certain precautions. I think if there is a normal time in the next 12 months, it will probably be this spring and summer.”
Disclosure: Scott Gottlieb is a CNBC contributor and serves on the boards of Pfizer, genetic testing startup Tempus, healthcare company Aetion and biotech company IlluminaHe is also co-chair of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings‘and Royal Caribbean‘s “Healthy Sail Panel.