Fmr. FDA Commissioner Gottlieb: Health Officials Reluctant to Discuss Non-COVID Deaths over Fear People Won’t Be Safe with COVID

On Friday’s broadcast of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb called for immediate action to deal with increased morbidity after the coronavirus pandemic due to things like weight gain, increased alcohol consumption, mental health problems, and people missing health screenings during the pandemic and stated that there is a “reluctance” to talk about the world post-COVID, “including by public health officials who feared that if we talked too much about the post-COVID state and what the future looks like, it’s going to take away the incentives of people to try to engage in behavior now to try to control the spread of the virus.”

Gottlieb said, “We should deal with it right away. I think that there’s been a reluctance to look into the future, and there’s been a reluctance to talk about the sort of post-COVID state, I think, in part — including by public health officials who feared that if we talked too much about the post-COVID state and what the future looks like, it’s going to take away the incentives of people to try to engage in behavior now to try to control the spread of the virus. We need to start having this conversation now. Because there [are] going to be things that policymakers, if they work quickly, can do to try to get resources, especially to hard-to-reach communities to try to work off some of this excessive morbidity and this risk that we’ve accrued — this healthcare risk that we’ve accrued.”

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