Pfizer’s Scott Gottlieb Predicts: ‘True Delta Wave’ Coming After Labor Day

Pfizer board member Dr. Scott Gottlieb predicted on Friday the strongest wave of Covid-19’s Delta variant would arrive weeks into September, contrary to a prediction he made months earlier.

“I think there’s perception that we’re sort of through this Delta wave in the Northeast, because we’ve seen Delta cases go up and we’ve seen them come down in places like the New York Metropolitan region,” Gottlieb said in a morning interview on CNBC. However, he said, “I don’t think that that was the true Delta wave. I think that that was a Delta warning.”

“I think our true Delta wave’s going to start to build after Labor Day here in the Northeast and northern part of the country,” he added. “This is going to be a highly regionalized epidemic. And so I do think that Labor Day and [the] return to school are going to be incubators for spread that’s going to lead to that Delta wave.”

The assessment stood in stark contrast with comments Gottlieb made in July, when he predicted Covid 19’s Delta variant could subside in as little as “two or three weeks.”

On the bright side, Gottlieb said on Friday, the epidemic “peaked weeks ago” in the South, with children representing the bulk of new cases. “Even hospitalizations are declining in states like Florida,” Gottlieb said.

“Hopefully, this is the last real wave of infection that we’re going to experience,” he added. “But it’s going to be a new normal, because this is going to be an endemic virus. It’s going to circulate every year. It’s probably going to be a winter pathogen, as coronaviruses are.”

Watch above via CNBC.