Former FDA Chief and Pfizer board member Dr. Scott Gottlieb has expressed optimism over Covid vaccine supply in 2021.
He reiterated that he is hopeful about having an adequate Covid vaccine supply next year despite a Wall Street Journal report saying Pfizer had to reduce its original calculation for the amount of vaccine doses this year amidst supply-chain problems.
“The supply ramps very quickly as you move out and the more you push out that timeframe into 2021 by a week or two weeks, you have less supply in 2020,” Gottlieb said. “I’m hopeful that we’re going to have adequate supply in 2021 and it’s going to ramp very quickly, but hopefully these do get into the market this year.”
Dr. Bruce Becker, adjunct professor of behavioral medicine and social science at Brown University’s School of Public Health, is concerned about the death toll in the approaching months.
“I expect the death rate to continue at this level or increase, maybe even double in the next month,” Becker said. “Every winter we see significant death rates from influenza, other respiratory viruses, and bacterial pneumonia, especially in the population most susceptible to severe Covid-19 infection. Expect this population to suffer severe Covid-19 disease and mortality in the next three to four months.”
Gottlieb told host Shepard Smith that he thinks the “U.K. is a good regulatory authority.” The vaccine from Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech will be rolled out in the U.K. next week after British regulators cleared it for emergency use Wednesday.
“I worked closely with them. A lot of the people who are there now are from the European regulatory authority and went back to the U.K. after Brexit. So, I think that they did a good job looking through this data,” said Gottlieb.
He pointed out that the FDA’s system is different from the British system due to the FDA’s commitment to running a public advisory committee and distribution of information. That step requires a couple of weeks to the vaccine approval process.
“We think that there’s public health dividends to having a public airing of this information, having that public advisory committee meeting, having the FDA’s external advisors, independent advisors validate the process, and provide objective opinions in an open setting,” said Gottlieb on “The News with Shepard Smith”. “I think that that’s going to go a long way to building public confidence, so it might be worth the time it takes to do that.”
Gottlieb said that the vaccines will be sent to special sites and rationed for a period of time.
“There’s going to be an inflection point where I think there’s going to be sufficient supply in the market that we’re going to see this rationing system start to erode and it’s going to be more widely available to larger groups of people,” Gottlieb said. “My guess is that’s going to be in the March timeframe.”
“Do not skip out on the second dose because the first dose gave you a headache or a low fever or achy muscles,” Becker said. “These symptoms are not Covid! They happen with most vaccinations from tetanus to flu, that’s just the way that your body makes antibodies to protect you.”
