Gottlieb: ‘A pretty good degree of confidence’ people with three doses are protected from omicron

Former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb on Sunday said vaccine developers have “a pretty good degree of confidence” that fully vaccinated individuals who have received a COVID-19 booster are protected against the omicron variant.

Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Gottlieb said that there is no indication that the omicron variant first detected in South Africa makes individuals more ill than other previously detected variants, and that there have been anecdotal accounts of people experiencing mild cases of COVID-19, though he pointed out that initial cases appear to have been clustered among young people.

“The question here is going to be whether or not a fully boosted individual someone who’s had three doses of vaccine has good protection against this variant right now,” said Gottlieb, who now sits on Pfizer’s board of directors.

“If you talk to people in vaccine circles, people who are working on a vaccine, they have a pretty good degree of confidence that a boosted vaccine, so three full doses of vaccine, is going to be fairly protective against this new variant,” said Gottlieb.

.@ScottGottliebMD on key questions about #Omicron:

Does prior infection with the #Delta variant provide durable immunity?

Does a three shot regimen — including a booster — provide the same immunity?

WATCH –> pic.twitter.com/9Q36LePkAG

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) November 28, 2021

However, Gottlieb stressed that data on the omicron data is sparse, with no clinical studies or test tube studies having been completed. He estimated that studies testing the blood of vaccinated people against the omicron variant could be out by the end of this week or some time next week.

“Now, I would expect that those studies are going to show that the neutralization against this virus declined substantially. But that doesn’t mean that the vaccines won’t be effective,” he said.