Why is Scott Gottlieb‘s viewpoint valuable?
He was early in sounding the alarm for COVID-19 and he was also one of the first U.S. government leaders who publicly went against the CDC & WHO recommendations in March by pushing governments to recommend public mask usage.
He’s the former Commissioner of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and now works for AEI, a conservative think tank.
From Scott Gottlieb on 6/28/20:
“This is a hard moment – but it’s a brief moment in our long history. It’s six months until we get to a technology to end the Covid epidemic through vaccines or medicines. We need to act collectively to reduce our overall threat during this time of risk and uncertainty.
The priority should be on preserving life, keeping kids safely in school this fall and businesses safely operating. That means maximizing measures that allow those things to happen, while reducing our individual risk of contracting and spreading Covid. Chief is universal masking.
We need to all work together to take steps to reduce our collective risk so we can maximize the opportunity to do those things most important: running our businesses, sending our kids to school, seeing grandparents and keeping them safe, getting medical care when we need it.
40K infections a day exhausts our ability to test and trace. Local districts won’t open schools this fall in South with the spread at the current rate. Businesses will make their own decision to close. To reclaim these opportunities, we must take individual steps to reduce transmission.
2020 will be a hard year but then we’ll more fully vanquish Covid with our technology. It will recede into a more manageable threat. Preserving things most central to our lives requires all of us to work together to reduce risks every day. Collectively we can stop these epidemics.
A vaccine is probably an early 2021 event based on publicly available data. But don’t lose sight of therapeutic antibodies. They should be available this fall and could be produced at scale by the end of the year. There’s a lot of technology in development in addition to vaccines.”
