Former FDA Commish Gottlieb Predicts End to Covid Masks Within Weeks: ‘Nobody is Going to be Wearing’ Them

Dr. Scott Gottlieb said Monday he expected face masks to vanish within a matter of weeks.

“By June, nobody is going to be wearing masks,” the former Food and Drug Commission chief said in an interview on CNBC. “By June, I think, the prevalence is going to be sufficiently low in this country [and] we’re just not going to be concerned about it.”

Corporations including CostCo, Publix, Starbucks, Target, and Publix announced over the last week that they were dropping or rolling back mask requirements. Those announcements came on the heels of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention modifying its guidance to similar effect.

Addressing those developments, Gottlieb, said, “The bottom line is, I don’t think these mask mandates could have survived another week or two. Prevalence is collapsing. The positivity rate is 1.9 percent. So the worst thing you could say is, maybe we could have eked out another week or two of these mask ordinances before we really had to lift them in a wholesale fashion, because people would have just disobeyed them.

“People who are going to go maskless now were going to go maskless anyway,” he added. “I think there will be people on the margin, though, who now having seen we’re lifting these mask mandates … are going to be encouraged to go out and get a vaccine. I don’t think it’s going to be 10 percent, but I think we might pick up another 2 to 5 percent of people.”

Watch above via CNBC.