Spencer Finley

News Editor

sjf5814@psu.edu

On Thursday, November 11, former Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration Scott Gottlieb travelled to Penn State Behrend and delivered remarks on the current pandemic and what can be done to prepare for future pandemics. 

When asked generally what we need to do to prepare for the next pandemic, Gottlieb said “Just, sort of thinking broadly how we plan for the next pandemic, we always have this notion that we need to keep sort of a warm-base preparedness and we can build facilities that would have the capacities to manufacture vaccines and we could keep them mothballed.” He continued that, “We stockpiled certain things, we warehoused certain things, and we found in the study of this crisis that you can’t just keep a warm-base preparedness; you have to keep a hot-based preparedness, you have to be ready to start manufacturing at scale on day one.”

Gottlieb, a member of former president Donald Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force, was not entirely uncritical of the Trump Administration’s response to COVID-19. He said one of the problems was a lack of a diagnostic test that was readily available early on because it forced us to implement lockdowns too early on in places they may not have been needed.

“We used up our political capital to implement those measures. We reached for our most harsh and stringent measures. We implemented them broadly because we didn’t know where to target them,” Gottlieb said. 

“By the time the virus finally arrived in the South, it arrived in the Southwest, it arrived in the Mountain states and it arrived in other parts of the country, people there said ‘we’re not shutting down anymore, we did that before, we probably didn’t have to and we’re not going to do it again.’”

 Gottlieb said that we were not able to gather information or make recommendations quickly enough. “We also lacked the capacity to gather the kind of information that we needed to scale our response, so we couldn’t figure out for example that a lot of the transmission was through asymptomatic spread.” He continued that “It took us a long time to recognize that a lot of the transmission was through aerosols and not respiratory droplets. That was a key finding that took us a long time to find out.”

Gottlieb addressed the response to the Coronavirus and its relation to our responses in future crises. Gottlieb said that it was a mistake to shut down international travel because it would disincentivize countries to be transparent with disease outbreaks.

JUMP STARTS

He also said that we need to begin strengthening our supply chain, saying that the reason we had difficulties in accomplishing testing was caused by difficulties in producing small components, not because of difficulties in producing or distributing advanced machinery.

“We can’t just stockpile things, we have to have the domestic capacity to produce certain things. Like, what did we run out of when it came to testing? It was the cotton swabs that we used to collect the sample,” Gottlieb said. “We didn’t have the domestic capacity to actually produce them.” 

When asked what, if any upsides there were to the current pandemic, Gottlieb said that “I think that we’ve recognized what our weaknesses are.” He continued that “I don’t know that we’re necessarily better prepared today for the next pandemic than we were when it struck but for the fact that we now know what we didn’t know and we know where our vulnerabilities are.”