Posted on 07/17/22
| News Source: Newsmax
Former FDA commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb on Sunday said the United States has “failed to contain” the monkeypox outbreak.
In an interview on CBS News’ “Face The Nation,” Gottlieb said the virus is probably now going to become endemic.
“I think [the Centers for Disease Control] is going to be reluctant to use the word pandemic, because it implies that they've failed to contain this,” he said. “And I think at this point, we've failed to contain this. We're now at the cusp of this becoming an endemic virus where this now becomes something that's persistent that we need to continue to deal with.”
But according to Gottlieb, the virus spread “isn't going to explode like COVID.”
“This is a slower moving virus, which is why we could have gotten control of this if we had been more aggressive up front,” he said.
But “we made a lot of the same mistakes that we made with COVID with this,” Gottlieb said, including “having a very narrow case definition, not having enough testing early enough, not deploying vaccines in an aggressive fashion.”
“Now this is firmly embedded in the community,” he said. “And while it's not going to explode, because it's harder for this virus to spread, it's probably going to be persistent —you'll have this as a sort of a fact of life, maybe spreading as a sexually transmitted disease, but also breaking out of those settings.”