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Dr. Scott Gottlieb told CNBC Wednesday that he believes enough Americans have been fully vaccinated to delay the risk posed by Delta Covid.
“The question is: Are there enough unvaccinated people that this can reach the population and start spreading more widely? I think it’s not likely that this will be a threat until the fall, perhaps,” the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner said on Squawk. Box”.
Gottlieb’s comments come as speculation grows that the UK could delay lifting all lockdown measures in England, due on June 21, due to the increased spread of the delta variant, which was first detected in India.
Gottlieb noted that the most severe cases involving the delta variant appear in people who are not immunized or who have only been partially vaccinated. “It appears to be a more risky alternative. However, two doses of the vaccine appear to be very protective.”
“I think people who are fully vaccinated are well protected against this new variant based on accumulating evidence,” added Gottlieb, who led the Trump administration’s Food and Drug Administration from 2017 to 2019. He is now a member of the board of directors of Pfizer, the vaccine maker. .
On Tuesday, White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci stressed the importance of fully vaccinating Americans to protect against the delta variant. Currently, Fauci said it is responsible for more than 6% of coronavirus infections in the United States that scientists have genetically sequenced.
In the meantime, the delta variant has become the dominant variant in the UK. The US and UK now have about 53% of adults fully vaccinated against Covid. However, Gottlieb said England’s decision to delay giving second doses in order to give more initial doses “may have opened the door to this spreading a little bit wider”.
In a White House briefing on Tuesday, Fauci described as examples Pfizer and AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccines – which are used in the UK but not in the US – saying they were 33% effective at protecting against delta variant after a single dose. For Pfizer, its effectiveness rose to 88% after the second dose, Fauci said, while the AstraZeneca vaccine was 60% effective, according to the National Institutes of Health.
“It appears that two doses of the vaccine are more important against these variants than the older strain of the virus,” Gottlieb said.
Despite progress in vaccination in the United States, Gottlieb acknowledged that there may be worrisome situations in the country involving the delta variant. “If you have a community where there are a lot of people who are not immunized and you have a widespread event with delta … you can have an outbreak here.”
Cases of COVID-19 in the United States have continued to decline. The average daily infection with the new coronavirus for seven days in the country is about 14,400, according to a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins University data. That’s about 17% less than it was a week ago. It’s also more than 60% down from about a month ago. The highest single day of new cases in the US was 300,462 on January 2.
Disclosure: Scott Gottlieb is a CNBC contributor and a member of the boards of directors of Pfizer, genetic testing startup Tempus, healthcare technology company Aetion and biotech company Illumina. He also serves as co-chair of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings and Royal Caribbean’s Healthy Sail Panel.
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