Former FDA Chief Concerned Biden Vaccine Requirements Could ‘Discourage Some Vaccination’

Former FDA commissioner and Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb warned that President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates could wind up being counterproductive.

CBS’ Margaret Brennan spoke to Gottlieb Sunday on Face The Nation about how much longer it’ll take for the FDA to approve the Pfizer vaccine for young children. During the interview, Brennan noted that Republican Governor of Arkansas Asa Hutchinson just warned NBC’s Chuck Todd that requirements from the federal government will harden public resistance to vaccination.

Asked if the mandate made sense to him, Gottlieb replied that “the downside of this mandate in terms of hardening positions and taking something that was subtly political and making it overtly political could outweigh any of the benefits that we hope to achieve.” While he gave the Biden administration credit for how many people have been vaccinated, Gottlieb assessed it unlikely that the U.S. will get a vaccination rate above 90 percent, and putting a mandate on businesses will take time to litigate.

It takes [the Occupational Safety & Health Administration] time to implement regulations. You’ll have to put in place guidance, give businesses a grace period and then figure out what the enforcement mechanism is going to be in. In the near term, a lot of businesses that might have mandated vaccines are now going to sit on their hands and say, I’m going to wait for OSHA to tell me just how to do it and give me more political cover. So, in the near term, you could actually discourage some vaccination.

Brennan followed up by asking if America had the capacity for Biden’s alternative proposition to hold weekly testing for employees who refuse to get vaccinated. Gottlieb said the capacity exists, “but it puts a big burden on businesses to have to operationalize that and determine what they’re going to do with the result. So, I think a lot of businesses are going to opt to try to force workers to get vaccinated if in fact this ever goes into effect.”

I don’t think the federal government should be dictating this. I also don’t think governors should be preventing small businesses from making these determinations on their own. We should leave these decisions to communities, local communities and businesses to make assessments on what their risk is, what their settings are, how much precautions they can put in and whether vaccine requirements are absolute necessary to protect people in those settings.

Watch above, via CBS.