Ongoing vaccinations against COVID-19 are likely to bring the nation back to some level of normalcy by midyear, said Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration who served during the Trump administration.
“I think this summer is going to be back to doing what we want to do,” Gottlieb said Wednesday during the Credit Union National Association’s online Governmental Affairs Conference. While new variants of the virus have created some uncertainty in recent weeks, the overall trend lines continue to show improvement and the nation is on track to have 100 million adults vaccinated by the end of March, he added.
However, the public needs to begin thinking differently about the number of infections. Ten thousand diagnoses per day has a vastly different impact now than that same statistic did 10 months ago, said Gottlieb, since so many nursing home residents and older Americans have received the vaccine.
“We can’t look at the prevalence of disease as the only metric we use to gauge risk,” he said. “Now that more vulnerable populations are vaccinated, it’s different.” Ten thousand daily infections now pose a far lower risk than 10,000 daily infections did when 60% of those cases were coming from nursing homes, he noted.
However, Gottlieb was frank about the possibility that people might get too comfortable too fast.
“We’re going to try to return to normal too quickly – that’s just what we do in this country,” he quipped. Despite ongoing improvements, March will be a difficult month, in part because of the emergence of variants of the virus and different weather patterns throughout the country that will continue to keep many people stuck inside.
Still, he said April and May will likely be good and once summer hits it’s unlikely that infections will really pick up again until fall, after which much of the nation will be better equipped to deal with it. He added that some studies are underway examining whether a third booster of existing vaccines might be necessary “to give people an extra immune kick heading into fall that could provide coverage against variants.”
Gottlieb’s remarks came as part of a conversation with Ryan Donovan, chief advocacy officer at CUNA. The pair did not discuss vaccine possibilities for frontline credit union employees who work in branches and interact with the public, which some industry groups have previously lobbied for. However, the former FDA chief did suggest that as the vaccine becomes more readily available, by early April “everyone’s going to be able to go online and book an appointment,” though they may not actually be able to have the vaccine administered for several weeks.
