Scott Gottlieb Predicts Holiday Parties Will Be Unlikely in December 2021 as Covid Becomes ‘Seasonal’

Dr. Scott Gottlieb said Thursday he believed holiday parties were unlikely to return in large scale in 2021 as Covid-19 became a “seasonal” phenomenon.

“Coronaviruses are typically late-winter pathogens,” Gottlieb, who served as Food & Drug Administration commissioner from 2017-19, said in a morning appearance on CNBC. “They circulate in December, January. And this is going to transition this year, probably, from more of a pandemic strain to a seasonal strain. … I don’t think we’re going to be having holiday parties in, you know, the back room of a crowded restaurant on December 20.”

He said he expected Covid-19 to persist as a seasonal contagion for a “number of years,” but did not explicitly say whether he supported an indefinite kibosh on holiday gatherings.

“I think that we’re going to have to do things differently as we get into the winter, take more respiratory precautions,” Gottlieb said. “But I think that’s going to be a fact of life going forward for a number of years, anyway. We’re going to be more cognizant of the risk of respiratory diseases.”

Nearly 32 million confirmed cases of Covid-19 had been confirmed among Americans as of Thursday, according to Johns Hopkins University, while more than 87 million Americans — or about a quarter of the country — had been fully vaccinated against it, according to data Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Another 47 million had been partially vaccinated.

Gottlieb — who sits on the board of Pfizer, the first pharmaceutical company to develop a vaccine — left open the possibility that mutations of the virus could prolong the pandemic.

“If we do get a variant that is much more contagious, pierces prior immunity, pierces vaccination, that could change the equation,” Gottlieb said. “Right now, we don’t see that on the horizon. There are some things that concern us, like the Indian variant, the 167 circulating in India right now. That seems concerning. We don’t really understand it.”

Watch above via CNBC.