Former FDA chief Gottlieb says U.S. intelligence agencies should investigate virus outbreaks

Former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Dr Scott Gottlieb said on Monday that US intelligence agencies should be tasked with investigating emerging public health threats abroad in order to tackle future outbreaks. .

Gottlieb, who also sits on Pfizer’s board of directors, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that the public has lost faith in U.S. health agencies and called for more funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

He said identifying problematic viruses overseas and equipping the CDC with better crisis mitigation resources would improve the country’s ability to counter any new contagion that arises.

“I think in the future we can’t just depend on voluntary information sharing by countries,” Gottlieb said in an appearance promoting his book “Uncontrolled Spread”. “We’re going to have to come in and have the capacity to collect it and monitor these things, which means our foreign intelligence services are much more engaged in the global public health mission.”

World Health Organization officials have said they are not sure China has disclosed all of its data on the origins of Covid. Gottlieb has suggested that countries today are less open to details about diseases because they fear being isolated. He noted that the United States had avoided involving intelligence agencies in international public health issues because the CDC feared that “anyone wearing a white coat overseas would be seen as a spy.”

In addition to treating outbreaks as national security issues, Gottlieb said the CDC was ill-prepared at the start of the pandemic for the subsequent widespread rollout of Covid tests and vaccines.
The evolution of CDC messages around Covid prevention tactics has also undermined public confidence in the agency, Gottlieb said.

But the right resources, skills and logistics management could help the CDC better manage public health emergencies, Gottlieb said.

“I think as we came out of this pandemic a lot of people lost faith in public health officials,” Gottlieb said. “They felt that the advice was not well informed, it was not well articulated, it was not distributed so that we could assimilate it into our lives.”

The pandemic has also highlighted the systemic biases in healthcare faced by people of color, Gottlieb said, including uneven access to Covid testing and technology. Improving the nation’s preparedness for epidemics doesn’t just mean stepping up CDC and disease surveillance – it means finding solutions to the health care disparities and structural disadvantages that pervade American society, Gottlieb said.

“If we are to make ourselves more resilient in the face of these kinds of public health crises, we will need to address these inequalities and do more to ensure that we receive adequate health care for the people who have historically been excluded from these opportunities.” , Gottlieb said.

Disclosure: Scott Gottlieb is a contributor to CNBC and serves on the boards of directors of Pfizer, genetic testing startup Tempus, health technology company Aetion, and biotech company Illumina. He is also co-chair of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings ′ and Royal Caribbean’s Healthy Sail Panel.