A ‘new normal’ with COVID is possible soon, says former FDA commissioner, now at Duke
The latest wave of COVID-19 cases appears to have crested in North Carolina and the rest of the country, and we now have the tools to ensure that there won’t be another, according to a health policy expert at Duke University.
Mark McClellan, a physician and economist who once headed the Food and Drug Administration, said while COVID-19 won’t disappear, governments and individuals can help prevent future outbreaks. It starts with vaccination, McClellan said, but also includes widespread testing and better access to treatments that prevent mild cases of COVID-19 from becoming serious.
“An important component of keeping COVID from really disrupting our lives and our health care system again is going to be the opportunity for people to get tested and, if they test positive, to get access to quick treatment that could help prevent a serious complication,” McClellan said during a press briefing Tuesday.
More than 8,750 new cases of COVID-19 were reported in North Carolina on Tuesday, according to the state Department of Health and Human Services. That’s down from an average of more than 22,000 a day in January, when the omicron variant of the coronavirus fueled a spike in cases nationwide.
The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in North Carolina also appears to have peaked, from more than 5,000 last week to 4,786 reported Tuesday.
But that’s still more people hospitalized at one time than in either of the surges in COVID-19 cases that took place in North Carolina late last summer and in January 2021. And the number of people dying from COVID-19 has not slowed yet; DHHS has reported nearly 500 deaths in the last week.
But the trends are moving in the right direction, McClellan said.
“If we’re able to continue the decline in the surge at the rate that’s been happening the past week, I do see some real opportunities for relaxing mask mandates, for relaxing our activities, just within the next month, not too far off at all,” he said.
While it may be up to the government to make testing and treatments more widely available, McClellan emphasized personal responsibility in helping to keep COVID-19 in check. There will be flare-ups, he said, and people may need to again wear masks or limit their interactions with others.
“Part of the future may be each American kind of having a plan, just like you do for a hurricane or bad weather event, for what you do if there is a surge to help keep you safe, help keep your family safe and help keep your community safe,” he said.
Parents not rushing to get young children vaccinated
McClellan heads the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy. He was FDA commissioner for 16 months under President George W. Bush, before heading the agency that oversees Medicare and Medicaid for 17 months.
McClellan said he expected the FDA to take a few weeks to review Pfizer-BioNTech’s request to allow use of its COVID-19 vaccine in children under age 5. He said making the vaccine available to young children will be an important step in fighting the pandemic, but noted that fewer than a third of children ages 5 to 11 have been vaccinated three months after it became available to them.
Parents clearly still have concerns that public health officials could help allay, he said.
“We now have safety data on millions of kids in that age range on the use of vaccination,” he said. “We have growing data showing that it does really help prevent especially these serious complications from COVID and also long-term complications from COVID.”
McClellan said he also thinks the United States and other wealthy countries need to help make COVID-19 vaccines more widely available in other parts of the world, if only for their own self interest. The more the virus spreads among unvaccinated people, whether here or abroad, the more likely that new strains will emerge.
“With so many opportunities for continuing infection around the world, it increases the likelihood that some combination of variants is going to come along that actually does make the virus easier to transmit or cause more serious harms,” he said. “I hope that’s not the case, but I think the likelihood of additional variants is extremely high.”
This story was originally published February 2, 2022, 6:02 AM.
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