Azar: No national shutdowns
Secretary, Baker bullish on virus vaccine prospects
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, on a visit to a Boston hospital Friday, said he did not believe the fight against COVID-19 would require future economic shutdowns at the national level.
Azar joined Gov. Charlie Baker to tour operations at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where he discussed vaccine development efforts and the federal government’s overall approach to the pandemic.
Baker said Beth Israel’s work toward a vaccine with Johnson & Johnson “provides a significant amount of optimism to all of us who are looking for both treatments and vaccines as a big part of how we — not only here in Massachusetts but around the country and across the globe — deal with COVID19 as we go forward.”
Azar said the federal government has set an “ambitious goal” of having 300 million doses of a vaccine ready by early next year. The effort will involve harnessing both the federal government’s resources and the private sector, and “pulling the inefficiency out” of drug development timelines, he said.
“We’re going to have many shots on goal, but there’s of course no guarantee with science,” Azar said.
There are about 60 counties in the country considered COVID-19 hotspots right now, Azar said, most of which “involve fairly discernible causes” like living or working environments including nursing homes, prisons or meat-packing facilities.
Like many other states, Massachusetts is in the midst of a gradual attempt to reopen the economy after shutting down most aspects of public life earlier this spring in hopes of mitigating the spread of the coronavirus. Each state is crafting its own approach to reopening, and Baker said he’s heard criticism “that ours so far is too slow and too fast.”
Baker said the idea behind a phased-in reopening “was so that we would have the ability to continue to check” public health data and to “make sure that if something did happen we would be in a place to address it.”
“There’s no question in my mind that a cautious and careful reopening based on data is ultimately our best way to ensure that we don’t end up creating a second outbreak,” the governor said.
Azar said it’s too early to tell what impacts that state reopening measures, the Memorial Day holiday weekend, and the recent string of large protests against racism and police brutality have had on the spread of the virus. He encouraged demonstrators to cover their faces and practice social distancing and said he wanted “to emphasize that peaceful protesting is a vital part of our American democracy and we’ve got to support that and defend that.”
If there is a future significant outbreak, Azar said the federal government believes “that we have the tools now to avoid these types of shutdowns again in the future, certainly on a national level.”
“There could be isolated communities that will face outbreaks that need to take some forms of community mitigation steps in the future,” he said. “That’ll be locally led, state-supervised, we’ll provide support at the federal level.”
The federal government is envisioning a “six-part approach” to addressing COVID-19, Azar said — looking for early indicators of people experiencing symptoms; testing those people as well as populations that face higher risk; executing the “traditional blocking and tackling of public health” to contain, isolate and treat identified cases; making sure health system capacity and supplies remain adequate; developing therapeutics for treatment; and developing vaccines.
Baker has discussed challenges Massachusetts officials have faced in trying to secure personal protective equipment, including instances where they have been outbid by the federal government, and has touted efforts to build up a local supply chain.
Azar said President Donald Trump wants to build up a “next generation strategic national stockpile focused on having 100% of the products needed for a pandemic.”
He reiterated Trump’s intention to leave the World Health Organization “absent change,” saying the WHO “can take steps to demonstrate its independence from China, its commitment to reform, its commitment to ensuring accountability in terms of transparency [and] investigation of the original causes and origins of the outbreak.”
The novel coronavirus that causes the respiratory disease was first detected in the city of Wuhan in China late last year.
Azar said the U.S. did not have a system for “standing up testing of a novel pathogen” and suggested that China had been “concealing” information about the virus.
“This was a truly unprecedented circumstance, a novel coronavirus like this, a highly transmissible but very severe disorder that spread, now we know — no thanks to the Chinese for concealing it — asymptomatic transmission that makes this a particularly perplexing and dangerous virus to be dealing with,” he said. “We had to build a completely new testing system in this country.”