Gottlieb Says Likelihood of COVID-19 Vaccine for Widespread Use in 2020 Is ‘Extremely Low’

According to Dr. Scott Gottlieb — former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner for President Donald Trump — if a coronavirus vaccine becomes available by the end of this year, it will go to the most vulnerable first.

During his appearance on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Gottlieb told host John Dickerson if there is a vaccine made available this fall or winter, it is “likely to be a very staged introduction of the vaccine.”

He noted there will be a lot of data collection focusing on the use of the vaccine and it will only be for select groups of Americans who are “at high risk of contracting the coronavirus.”

“You can almost think of a vaccine being used in a therapeutic sense to try to protect very high risk populations and not in a way we traditionally think about a vaccine in terms of trying to provide broad based immunity in a population and really quell an epidemic,” Gottlieb said.

He added, “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.”

Watch his comments below:

Gottlieb suggested if the United States continues to experience the rate the coronavirus is spreading at now or a higher rate, “by the end of the year, upwards of 20%” of Americans “could have been exposed to this coronavirus.”

He indicated the spread of the coronavirus will likely “slow down.”

“This could run its course in 2020 and, as we get into 2021, start to slow down,” Gottlieb said.

He continued, “I think the tragic consequence of that is that there’s going to be a lot of death and disease along the way, but I think by the end of this year we’re likely to be through at least the most acute phase of this epidemic in part because it’s going to end up infecting a lot more people between now and then.”

The number of coronavirus infections continues to rise in 22 states, as IJR previously reported. There have been more than 6.2 million coronavirus cases in the United States alone and nearly 189,000 deaths.