Former FDA commissioner says Covid-19 to become endemic due to Delta

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb predicts the COVID-19 pandemic will soon become endemic.
• An endemic is an outbreak regularly present in particular areas but can be managed, like chickenpox or malaria.
• Gottlieb said that the delta surge will likely peak in the U.S. in late September.

Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said on Friday that he believes the coronavirus pandemic will become endemic.

The World Health Organization defines a pandemic as a fast-spreading disease outbreak that covers wide regions of the world while an endemic is an outbreak that’s always present in particular regions but is more manageable, like malaria or the common cold.

“We’re transitioning from this being a pandemic to being more of an endemic virus, at least here in the United States and probably other western markets,” Gottlieb said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Gottlieb added that other countries will continue to have difficulty handling Covid-19, especially those “where you don’t have high vaccination rates.”

A Duke University researcher recently told Nature, a British scientific journal, that they forecast poorer countries will have to wait two years to have enough vaccines for their populations to reach sufficient immunity. Our World in Data, an online scientific publication, says only about 1.2% of people living in low-income countries have received at least one dose against the coronavirus.

“It’s not a binary point in time, but I think after we get through this Delta wave, this is going to become more of an endemic illness where you just see sort of a persistent infection through the winter,” Gottlieb added. “But not at the levels we’re experiencing right now.”

Officials are still urging all Americans to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, especially as the Delta variant continues to spike in various parts of the country. About 52% of the US population is fully vaccinated, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

Gottlieb has recently raised the alarm for the US Northeast, saying the region is particularly susceptible to another surge in positive COVID-19 cases.

Last week, Gottlieb said the pandemic in the US is “certainly getting worse” in an interview with CBS’ “Face the Nation,”

“I think the northern states are more impervious to the kind of spread we saw in the South, but they’re not completely impervious,” Gottlieb said. “They have higher vaccination rates. There’s been more prior infection. But there’s still people who are vulnerable in those states. And the challenge right now is that the infection is going to start to collide with the opening of school.”

Gottlieb was the FDA commissioner from 2017 to 2019 under the Trump administration. He now serves as a board member at Pfizer, among other companies.

Source: Yahoo News