Scott Gottlieb, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration, said this week that the long-term effects of the coronavirus on a person are still unknown and could be serious.
"I'm worried about it. I don't think we fully understand what these syndromes are," Gottlieb said on the American Enterprise Institute’s podcast “What the Hell is Going On?” on Monday.
"We've infected millions, tens of millions of people now with COVID in the United States. So, we don't know the answers to these questions. It does appear that there is a higher incidence of the serious post-viral syndromes associated with this virus, but we don't know that for sure," he added.
"I think we're not going to know that for some time, because, quite frankly, we haven't even really accurately characterized what these post-viral syndromes are at this point,” Gottlieb said.
He went on to say that part of the problem the country faces is due to the slow response to the pandemic, which he said can’t be blamed on “just one person,” noting that "the big failing here was the inability to deploy a diagnostic early, so we knew where [the coronavirus] was spreading.”
Gottlieb said the current FDA commissioner, Stephen Hahn, "made a deliberate decision not to get the clinical labs in the game early. We should have spun up LabCorp and Quest back in January. And then we would have had massive, well, much more massive testing capacity available by the end of February.”
He added, "You need agencies to execute, make independent decisions ... People in the White House who are generalists aren't going to know that what we really should be doing is getting LabCorp and Quest and BioReference labs working on a diagnostic test to backstop ourselves. That has to come from the people who know that. That's the FDA chief and maybe" the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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