Washington – Dr Scott Gottlieb, the former director of the Food and Drug Administration, said on Sunday that the country’s strategy for administration coronavirus vaccines “do not work” and encouraged public health officials to “hit the reset” and take a new approach to vaccinate Americans faster.
“We really need to get this vaccine out faster, because it’s actually our only tool, our only setback against the spread of these new variants. If we can get a lot of people vaccinated quickly, we can get enough protective immunity. In the population that it no longer spreads, “Gottlieb said in an interview with Face the Nation. “So we have to admit that it does not work. We need to start the reset and follow a new strategy to try to reach patients. ‘
The deployment of the two coronavirus vaccines, from Pfizer and the German BioNTech, and Moderna, has been hit hard, as hospitals and health departments have already had shortages and logistical problems. With the vaccine being offered to older Americans and health care workers, some hospital systems have started provide incentives to workers to get their shots.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 22.1 million doses of the vaccine were distributed, and nearly 6.7 million people received the first dose of two. Elected President Joe Biden plans to speed up the distribution of the vaccines release all available doses rather than halting the vaccine supply, as the Trump administration does, once he assumes office.
Gottlieb also suggested releasing all available stock and said last week that state leaders should consider making the coronavirus shots wider available to people 65 years and older.
“Right now there are 40 million doses sitting somewhere on a shelf. The collaborators say it’s with the states. The states say it’s with the feds. It really does not matter to the patient who does not have access to the injection not, “he repeated Sunday. “You have 40 million on the shelf. We have 50 million Americans over the age of 65. So we have the offer to push it out more aggressively to the population.”
Gottlieb said the government should take an “overall approach” and push the vaccines through various channels, including department stores and federal websites.
“We must now try everything to create multiple distribution points,” he said. ‘Many senior citizens do not want to go to a stadium to get vaccinated. They want to go to a pharmacy, a local pharmacy or a doctor’s office. should give people more opportunity to get a vaccine where they are comfortable getting it. But we need to eliminate it more aggressively. ‘
While the current problem with the vaccinations is spreading, Gottlieb will make it a supply issue once the logistics are perfected.
“We are not doing a good job of giving it to patients,” he said.
There have been more than 22.1 million confirmed cases of coronavirus in the U.S., and more than 372,000 people have died from COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins University. The number of infections is expected to decrease this month after a boom after the holidays, but new variants of the coronavirus have been discovered in the UK and South Africa.
Gottlieb said the new strains are unlikely to contribute much to the current rise in the US, and predicts that the British variant here is around 0.2% to 0.3% of infections, although he said the country does not order on a large scale around the variants.
“We do not think that these new variants are currently contributing to the increase in infection we are seeing,” he said. “We think it’s a bounce after the holidays, but the bottom line is that we need a better system to track these things down so we can have adequate health response.”
Gottlieb said the viruses will develop, so vaccines, antibody products and other medicines need to be updated regularly to keep up with the new variants.
“This virus is spreading around the world and is spreading largely unnoticed,” he said. “It was under some sort of selective pressure with the widespread use, for example, of recovery plasma. So it’s inevitable that we’re going to see these kinds of mutations in this virus. And it’s probably going to be an ongoing battle.”