The former head of the Food and Drug Administration said New York’s homegrown COVID-19 variant can infect people who already have the virus or have been vaccinated.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb said it is unclear whether the COVID-19 variant known as B.1.526 is driving viral surges in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.
“What we don’t understand with 1.526 is whether people are being re-infected with it or not and people who may or may not have been vaccinated are now getting infected with it,” Gottlieb Told CBS anchor Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation”.
The New York version contains a mutation similar to the South African version B.1.351, which has been shown to “in some cases” re-infect people who have already bugged, Gottlieb said.
“The question is whether [B.1.526] It is responsible for some of the growth that we are seeing in New York right now and whether this is the beginning of a new outbreak inside the city, ”he said.
A former Trump administration official said public-health experts currently lack sufficient data to draw any clear conclusions.
He called on the CDC to work with New York officials to identify potential coronavirus infections associated with B.1.526, which he warned were “far more prevalent than what we are detecting.”
He said of the federal agency, “They need to be aggressively marketed to doctors, to help doctors come forward and report cases.”
“We don’t know if this is happening, but anecdotally, some doctors are reporting that now, and this could potentially explain why you’re seeing fluctuations in cases.”
Gottlieb said the federal government’s vaccine effort should serve as a “backstop” against another wave of COVID-19 cases – but warned that there was a push by authorities in New York and other states to reopen business Can occur, resulting in “ttick” cases.
He said, ‘We removed our leg shortly before the break. March was always going to be a difficult month. People want to bow down, but we really should have waited till April, ”he said.
“The fact that we have done that now probably means that we are probably going to the plateau, maybe we will look upwards in some parts of the country.”
City health officials said variants of COVID-19 comprise more than half of B-1.526 accounts of New York City’s new coronovirus cases.
On Saturday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office confirmed the city’s first P1 version, which could make vaccines less effective, like the New York version.
The Governor’s Office stated, “While additional research has been approved, researchers at the University of Oxford have recently released non-peer reviewed data that indicates that p.
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