Dr. Scott Gottlieb told CNBC on Monday that he believes that coronavirus cases in the United States will continue to decline in the spring and summer, allowing Americans to decrease some precautions against the pandemic for now.
However, in an interview in the “Squawk Box”, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration did not quite agree with the recent opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal entitled “We will have heard immunity in April”. It was written by Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and has sparked discussions since it was published on Thursday.
Covid cases in the United States have dropped 77% in the last six weeks, Makary notes in the article, and he says the decline is due in large part because the level of natural immunity in the American population is “almost certainly” higher than those antibody studies suggest. Taking this into account with the pace of vaccinations, Makary writes, “I hope that most of Covid left in April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.”
Gottlieb said he did not “necessarily agree” with some of the numbers that Makary used to support his argument, but added, “I think the feeling is right.”
Makary writes that about 55% of people in the country have natural immunity from a previous coronavirus infection. While agreeing that the total number of confirmed Johns Hopkins cases in the U.S. of 28.1 million is a lower count, Gottlieb told CNBC that he believes that about 120 million people – or about 36% of the American population – have been infected with the coronavirus during the pandemic.
After taking vaccination data into account, Gottlieb estimated that about 40% of residents in the United States now have antibodies from infection or previous 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 Covid vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer since they received emergency use authorization from the FDA in December.
“When 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 for that to happen [virus] it just doesn’t transfer so easily, “said Gottlieb.
“I think that, as we get into the hot climate, vaccinate the population more and in view of the fact that at least a third of Americans have already had this, I think the levels of infection will drop dramatically over the spring and summer “said Gottlieb.
The White House chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said earlier that 75% to 85% of the population would need to develop immunity to create a protective “umbrella”. CDC officials also recently said that more than 85% of people would need to be covered to achieve so-called herd immunity if a variant of the rapidly spreading virus, such as B117, which was first reported in the UK, became the strain dominant in the USA
The presence of more contagious virus variants means that parts of the U.S. have higher infection rates this summer “than they would have otherwise been,” added Gottlieb. “But I don’t think that will change the overall trajectory.”
If that trajectory continues and is a “low-prevalence environment” in the coming months, Gottlieb said he hopes that children can safely participate in summer camp, for example. “I think people are going to go out and do a lot of things this summer, a lot of pent-up demand for consumer spending,” he said.
“I think in the fall we will have to take some precautions, but we will do things again. So, when we get into the deep winter and start circulating again … I think it will be December, we can start to retreat,” said Gottlieb. “It does not mean that we will have stoppages and we will do what we did [past] December, but that means that we may not have holiday parties, board meetings in December may be Zoom instead of personal meetings. “
Gottlieb emphasized that he believes that the United States’ recovery from the pandemic will not be a “linear progression”, where the risk of coronavirus continually declines month after month. The winter months can be more challenging because it is a respiratory pathogen, he warned. “When winter comes again in 2021, 2022, we will need to take some precautions. I think that if there is a normal period in the next 12 months, it will probably be in the spring and summer.”
Disclosure: Scott Gottlieb is a CNBC contributor and board member of Pfizer, a beginner genetic testing company Tempus, health technology company Aetion and biotechnology company Illumina. He also serves as co-president of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings‘ and Royal Caribbeanof the “Healthy Candle Panel.