Washington – Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former director of the Food and Drug Administration, said on Sunday that the country’s strategy to manage coronavirus vaccines “are not working” and encouraged public health officials to “restart” and adopt a new approach to inoculate Americans more quickly.
“We really need to distribute this vaccine more quickly because this is really our only tool, our only support against the spread of these new variants. If we can vaccinate many people quickly, we can get enough protective immunity for the population that stops spreading at the rate it is, “Gottlieb said in an interview with” Face the Nation “. Therefore, we need to recognize that it is not working. We need to restart and adopt a new strategy when trying to reach patients. “
The launch of the two coronavirus vaccines, from Pfizer and BioNTech from Germany, and Moderna, encountered obstacles, as hospitals and health departments already overloaded faced shortages and logistical problems. With the vaccine being offered to older Americans and healthcare professionals, some hospital systems have started offering incentives for workers to get their photos.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 22.1 million doses of the vaccines were distributed and nearly 6.7 million people received the first of the two doses. To speed up the distribution of vaccines, President-elect Joe Biden plans to release all available doses instead of withholding the vaccine supply, as the Trump administration is doing, once he takes office.
Gottlieb also suggested releasing all available supplies and last week said state leaders should consider applying coronavirus vaccines most widely available for people aged 65 and over.
“At the moment, there are 40 million doses on a shelf somewhere. So the feds say it is up to the states. The states say it is up to the feds. It doesn’t really matter for the patient who is not having access to the injection,” he reiterated on Sunday. “You have 40 million on the shelf. We have 50 million Americans over 65 years old. So we have supplies to push this population more aggressively.”
Gottlieb said the government needs to take an “all of the above approach” and distribute vaccines through a number of channels, including large stores and federal websites.
“We need to try everything now to create multiple points of distribution,” he said. “Many elderly people will not want to go to, you know, a stadium to get vaccinated. They will want to go to a pharmacy, a local pharmacy or a doctor’s office. So we need to provide more opportunities for people to be vaccinated where they are feel comfortable. But we need to distribute them more aggressively. “
While the current problem with vaccines is in distribution, Gottlieb will become a supply problem once the logistics are improved.
“We are not doing a good job of getting this to patients,” he said.
There were more than 22.1 million confirmed cases of coronavirus in the U.S., and more than 372,000 people died of COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins University. The number of infections is expected to stabilize this month after a post-holiday peak, but new variants of the coronavirus have been discovered in the UK and South Africa.
Gottlieb said the new strains are probably not contributing much to the current increase in the U.S. and predicted that the UK variant is about 0.2% to 0.3% of infections here, although he said the country is not doing sequencing at a scale large enough to detect the variants.
“We don’t think that these new variants are currently contributing to the increase in the infection we’re seeing,” he said. “We think it’s a post-holiday recovery, 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 that viruses will evolve, so vaccines, antibody drugs and other therapies will have to be updated regularly to keep up with the new variants.
“This virus has spread across the world, around the world, running around the world unchecked,” he said. “It has been under some selective pressure with the widespread use, for example, of convalescent plasma. So it is inevitable that we will see these types of mutations in this virus. And this is likely to be a constant struggle.”