Washington – Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former head of the Food and Drug Administration during the Trump administration, predicted on Sunday that declining COVID-19 infection rates “are likely to continue” due to more Americans receiving their vaccines and the number of people who have already contracted the coronavirus.
“It had a tragic impact on the United States, but we should be optimistic, in my view,” said Gottlieb in an interview with “Face the Nation”. “I think we will continue to see infection rates dropping in the spring and summer. At the moment, they are dropping dramatically. I think these trends are likely to continue.”
There have been more than 28 million confirmed cases of coronavirus in the United States, and the death toll is approaching 500,000, according to Johns Hopkins University. But there has been a decline in new cases of COVID-19 in recent weeks and hospitalizations continue to decline.
Gottlieb said that new variants of the virus first identified in the UK, South Africa and Brazil create new risks and may become more prevalent in the United States, but not enough to reverse the decline at this point.
“I think it is too little, too late in most of the country,” he said. “With the increase in vaccination rates and also the fact that we infect about a third of the population, this is sufficient protective immunity for us to see these trends continue.”
Meanwhile, vaccine manufacturers are developing reinforcements and working to re-engineer their vaccines to protect against new strains.
The Biden administration has been working to accelerate the pace of vaccinations and boost the supply of vaccines to states. More than 61.2 million doses of COVD-19 vaccines have been administered and nearly 75 million doses have been delivered by Saturday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Gottlieb said it will not be possible for the United States to achieve collective immunity without children being vaccinated, and compared COVID-19 with measles and smallpox, 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, to protect them from hospitalizations or serious illnesses and to die from it. But it will continue to spread.”
With the Trump and now Biden governments lobbying China to share more data on the origins of the coronavirus, Gottlieb said Beijing should make information about antibody testing available to people who worked in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, where the first cases of the coronavirus occurred. were detected, as well as the original strains to allow scientists to study how the coronavirus evolved over time. The World Health Organization is investigating the origins, but the White House raised concerns about possible Chinese intervention in these efforts.
“The most likely scenario here is that it came from nature, which has been bouncing back and forth between people and animals for a period of time and has finally burst,” he said. “I think the lab leak theory, the fact that it could have been an accident outside that lab, is never going to be completely dispelled. And WHO shouldn’t be able to get away from that so easily.”