Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb struck an optimistic tone on Sunday, saying nursing homes could start seeing the effects of vaccination “as early as this week.”
Gottlieb noted that it would still take about three weeks to vaccinate nursing homes across the United States completely, but with more than 1.9 million vaccines administered across the country to front-line healthcare workers, essential workers, and the elderly, what vaccinations have been completed “will start to have an impact on mortality trends.”
“We will start to see some — some indication that the vaccines are probably having an effect maybe as early as this week because we know that immunity does start to kick in maybe a week after vaccination,” Gottlieb said. “They went into the skilled nursing facilities first and vaccinated there first because you have some of the highest-risk people in those facilities. So that will start to have an impact on mortality trends with COVID.”
The first COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. were administered on Dec. 14.
Despite the positive outlook, Gottlieb stressed that the vaccines are rolling out during the worst moments of the coronavirus pandemic so far and that full immunity, particularly among the elderly, will not occur until people receive the second dose of the vaccine, which should be administered 21 days after the first.
“You know, it’s coming late in the season, and it’s going to take a couple of weeks, maybe a week or 10 days for partial immunity to kick in,” Gottlieb said. “And to get full immunity, especially in an older population, you really need the booster. We do see in a younger population more robust immunity after that first dose. But in the older populations, it really requires a second dose to get the full effects of the immunity from the vaccine.”
Gottlieb added that the pace of vaccine distribution was “slower than what was stated” in projections from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and that it will be difficult for the CDC to reach its goal of vaccinating 20 million people by the end of the year, with just four days to go.
“The idea that we’re going to get to 20 million vaccines, vaccinations by the end of the year, that’s probably unrealistic at this point,” the former FDA chief said. “And remember, that’s after they cut in half. They only shipped about 45% of the vaccines to states. So the states weren’t able to absorb this.”
The U.S. has reported more than 19 million cases of COVID-19 since the pandemic began, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, and more than 332,000 people have died. Though Gottlieb pointed to signs that the new daily case numbers are showing signs of a plateau, surges in hospitalizations and deaths typically lag behind case surges.
“There are signs that the number of new daily cases is starting to plateau,” Gottlieb said. “But, once again, the number of hospitalizations and the number of deaths is likely to lag by about two to three weeks. So even if we start to see a plateau in cases and a decline in the first week in January, it’s really not going to be toward the end of January that we start to see the burden on hospitals begin to lessen, and we start to see deaths plateau.”
