Gottlieb says likelihood "extremely low" for COVID-19 vaccine available for use in 2020
Source: cbs news
By Audrey McNamara CBS News September 6, 2020, 1:20 PM
Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, told "Face the Nation" on Sunday that it's unlikely a coronavirus vaccine will be available in the U.S. by the end of 2020.
"I think the likelihood that we're going to have a vaccine for widespread use in 2020 is extremely low, I think we need to think of that as largely a 2021 event," Gottlieb said. "And if we do have a vaccine available in 2020, it's likely to be used in a much more targeted fashion."
According to Gottlieb, if the vaccine is produced before next year, it would be distributed through a "staged introduction" that prioritizes high-risk groups, like nursing home residents and health care workers.
"You can almost think of the vaccine being used in a therapeutic sense, to try to protect very high risk populations," he explained. "... Not in the way we traditionally think about vaccines, in terms of trying to provide broad based immunity in a population."
The same methodology was used in 2009 when H1N1, also known as the swine flu, took hold. According to Gottlieb, that vaccine was also distributed to doctors and frontline health care workers first. "We were able to do that very efficiently with the swine flu," he said.
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Read more: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gottlieb-says-likelihood-extremely-low-for-covid-19-vaccine-available-for-use-in-2020/
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