Downward trend in COVID infections “expected to continue,” says former FDA director Gottlieb

Washington – Dr Scott Gottlieb, former head of the Food and Drug Administration under the Trump administration, predicted on Sunday that the drop in COVID-19 infection rates is “likely to continue” due to the surge in Americans receiving their vaccines and the number of people who have already contracted coronavirus.

“It had a tragic impact on the United States, but we have to be optimistic, in my opinion,” Gottlieb said in an interview with “Face the Nation”. “I think we’re going to continue to see infection rates going down in the spring and summer. Right now they’re dropping dramatically. I think those trends are likely to continue.”

There have been more than 28 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the United States and the death toll is approaching 500,000, according to Johns Hopkins University. But there has been a drop in new COVID-19 cases in recent weeks, and hospitalizations continue to drop.

Gottlieb said the new variants of the virus first identified in the UK, South Africa and Brazil create a new risk and could become more widespread in the US, but not enough to reverse the decline at this point .

“I think it’s too little, too late in most parts of the country,” he said. “With vaccination rates rising and also the fact that we have infected about a third of the public, that’s enough protective immunity that we can see these trends continue.”

Vaccine makers, meanwhile, are developing boosters and working to rethink their vaccines to protect against the new strains.

The Biden administration has worked to speed up the pace of vaccinations and increased vaccine supply to states. More than 61.2 million doses of COVD-19 vaccines have been administered and nearly 75 million doses were delivered on Saturday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Gottlieb said it wouldn’t be possible for the United States to achieve herd immunity without children being vaccinated, and compared COVID-19 to measles and smallpox, which have all been essentially eradicated after successful vaccination efforts.

“COVID will continue to circulate at a low level,” he said. “I hope we will continue to immunize the vulnerable population, so we will protect them from hospitalization or serious illness and dying. But it will continue to spread.”

As the Trump administrations and now Biden push China to share more data on the origins of the coronavirus, Gottlieb said Beijing should make information available on antibody tests in people who worked in a laboratory in Wuhan, in. China, where the first cases of the coronavirus were detected, as well as the original strains to allow scientists to study the evolution of the coronavirus over time. The World Health Organization is investigating the origins, but the White House has expressed concerns about China’s possible intervention in those efforts.

“The most likely scenario here is that it came from nature, that it bounced between people and animals for a while and finally erupted,” he said. “I think the lab leak theory, the fact that it could have been an accident outside of that lab will never be completely dispelled. And the WHO shouldn’t be moved away so easily.”