[ad_1]
The following is a transcript of an interview with former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb aired Sunday August 16, 2020 on “Face the Nation”.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Now we’ll go to the former commissioner of the FDA, Dr. Scott Gottlieb. He’s in Westport, Connecticut this morning. Hello to you, doctor. Good to see you back with us.
DR. SCOTT GOTTLIEB: Hello.
MARGARET BRENNAN: I want to start where we always do, that’s where we are now. 1,500 dead Wednesday. This rate returns to where we were in the spring. You’ve heard Jared Kushner say basically not as bad as Spring, but what does he say about where we are right now that we are at these levels and where are we going?
DR. GOTTLIEB: Well, it’s been pretty persistent. We thought we were going to fall now, we would see a spike in deaths and start to decline as epidemics in the southern states begin to peak and decline. But there has been a fairly persistent level of infections, hospitalizations and deaths over the past two weeks. We’ve had over a thousand deaths a day for at least two weeks now, over 50,000 infections a day on average. We hit 55,000 on the last day. Hospitalizations have gone down a bit, but they haven’t really started to decrease very quickly. What is happening is when the cases start to decline in the southern states, Arizona, Texas and Florida, we start to see infections multiply in other parts of the country. California continues to increase. Really, the only state that seems to have declined a bit from the Sun Belt epidemic states is Arizona. And we now have 14 states with positivity rates above 10%. Mississippi 21%, Nevada 17%, Florida 18%. So there are still a lot of states with fairly high positivity rates.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Speaking with Mr. Kushner, he said most of the dying people were over 70 years old. covid. Do you know where these numbers come from? Does this suit you?
DR. GOTTLIEB: Well, I don’t know where the six times come from. We have to be careful, I think, to make comparisons to the flu. This infection is not as prevalent in children as the flu each year, there have been approximately 330,000 infections diagnosed. If you think we diagnose one in five to one in ten infections in children, maybe around three million children have been infected with it. The flu is estimated to cause symptomatic illness in more than 11 million children each season. It was a 2018-2019 season. And it also causes a certain degree of asymptomatic infection in children. The prevalence is therefore much higher. With the flu, we see over 400 tragic deaths a year. We have already seen 90 deaths from COVID in children. And it’s not – probably not as prevalent in children. And we also see, concerning indications of post viral syndromes, this multisystemic inflammatory syndrome, which has affected 570 children, which has been recorded so far. So there is a lot of things we don’t understand about COVID in children. I think we have to be careful to make comparisons with the flu and the death and illness that we see in the flu versus COVID.
MARGARET BRENNAN: The CDC said this week that people who have recovered from COVID are essentially immune for at least three months. What do we know about immunity?
DR. GOTTLIEB: That’s right. And so this was the first study where they could say for sure that for at least three months you had immunity that would protect you from re-infection. They actually said that people who have been exposed to COVID and who have had an infection in the past three months do not need to self-quarantine because the immunity is absolute. This doesn’t mean that you won’t have immunity for a longer period of time. The study only covered three months. COVID hasn’t been around long enough that we can really study long-term immunity in a practical way in people in the community. But it is likely that you will have a period of immunity that will last for six to 12 months. It will be very variable. Some people will have less immunity, others a little more. But it’s good news that they are able to document that people have truly sterile immunity. They will not be re-infected for at least three months and probably longer after infection.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But is this concept of collective immunity – and I mean, how close are we to that? What do you think about it?
DR. GOTTLIEB: Probably – probably a long way from collective immunity. If you look at the seroprevalence studies as a whole, maybe 8% of the population as a whole has been exposed to it. In epidemic states like Arizona it could be higher, closer to 25% according to some models, perhaps as high as 20% in Florida based on some models and 15% in Texas. We know that the seroprevalence in New York is 20%. So this is approaching a level of immunity where the rate of transmission will begin to decline. It’s not quite herd immunity, but you’re going to see a drop in the transmission rate because of this level of infection. There is also speculation about T cell immunity, whether or not people who have been previously infected with coronavirus have residual T cell memory which confers immunity. We don’t know if T cells confer immunity, but we now know that people who were previously infected with coronaviruses, other coronaviruses have what we call cross-reactive T cells. So they have T cells that cross react with that particular coronavirus. Now if this confers a level of immunity needs to be shown and we are not sure. If so, it is probably helping you prevent yourself from contracting the disease from COVID, but you are still going to get the infection from the coronavirus and maybe even be able to pass it on.
MARGARET BRENNAN: The president announced on Friday that McKesson Corporation will be a central distributor of a COVID vaccine and its supplies. But he also said the military was ready to distribute doses. Do you think it should be the private sector or the government that distributes vaccines?
DR. GOTTLIEB: I think what the government should do is take advantage of the private sector, the – the companies, the distributors, the manufacturers know how to distribute the vaccines through the existing supply chain. I think if the government tries to take physical possession of these vaccines and then distribute them through the channels they have put in place, it could ultimately lead to hiccups and delays in getting vaccines to consumers. What they should do is tell the existing supply chain where to allocate these vaccines based on where they perceive the need and what allocation system is going to be, depending on who for whom. vaccines are finally approved, upon their approval. initially licensed frontline health care workers for high risk individuals. But I wouldn’t try to recreate the wheel here. I would use the existing supply chain which has worked very well to distribute a lot of different vaccines very quickly. We were able to distribute the flu vaccine very efficiently through the existing supply chain.
MARGARET BRENNAN: OK, well, if and when we get there. And thank you very much, Dr Gottlieb. We will come back in a moment.
[ad_2]
Source link