The former FDA commissioner doesn’t think the U.S. is going to return to normal anytime soon.
When will social distancing end? When will life return to “normal”? And what will it take to get there?
Scott Gottlieb is a physician and public health expert who served as President Donald Trump’s first FDA commissioner, where he was the rare Trump appointee to win plaudits from both the left and the right. Now he’s a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where he’s emerged as a leading voice on the coronavirus response.
Gottlieb is one of the lead authors of a comprehensive roadmap for what it would take to end social distancing and reopen the American economy. The report divides the coronavirus response into four distinct phases (the U.S. is currently in phase one, which requires the strictest social distancing measures) and documents key “triggers” that states need to meet if they want to advance to a phase with less intense social distancing and a somewhat normal economy. It’s exactly what the country needs right now: a specific proposal for what comes next that can actually be analyzed and debated.
Two themes drive this conversation. First, what are the challenges to simply getting out of lockdown? Why doesn’t the U.S. have enough tests yet? What’s stopping it from making more? And second, what does the world look like out of lockdown but before a vaccine is discovered? What’s being imagined here isn’t a return to normal, either socially or economically, but a kind of limbo that it’s not clear America has the political will to sustain and that has few answers for the most vulnerable among us…
To read the entire article from Vox, click https://www.vox.com/2020/4/14/21219021/scott-gottlieb-coronavirus-covid-19-social-distancing-economy-recession