The new COVID-19 infections could lead to a potentially dangerous spring and summer if more vaccinations aren’t released, according to Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former Food and Drug Administration chief.
What’s going on?
Gottlieb told CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith” on Thursday evening that COVID-19 could become a “perpetual infection” before the spring and summer as more variants become real.
- “If we can’t get more protective immunity into the population, we could be facing a situation where we have, sort of, a perpetual infection heading into the spring and summer as these variants get a foothold here,” he said.
For example, researchers at Ohio State University found a new COVID-19 strain in the U.S. with mutations that haven’t been discovered elsewhere yet, as I wrote about for the Deseret News.
- Gottlieb said that the new variants could lead to “a summer where we have more infection because these variants are now circulating and they spread more easily, even in the warm months, when we really shouldn’t have had a lot of coronavirus spreading.”
COVID-19 will be around forever
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel recently warned the American public that the coronavirus will be around “forever,” as I wrote about for the Deseret News.
- “We are going to live with this virus, we think, forever,” Bancel said at a panel discussion at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference
Similarly, a new study published in the journal Science suggests the novel coronavirus will resemble the common cold in the future, as I wrote about for the Deseret News.