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'Concerned' Pfizer coronavirus vaccine has been slow in FDA: Dr. Marc Siegel

2020-12-07 | 🔗
Fox News medical contributor tells 'Fox & Friends' he thinks US could have vaccine 'approved by now' as HHS Secretary Azar says distribution could come in days.
This is an unofficial transcript meant for reference. Accuracy is not guaranteed.
Election disputes Steve Steve, thank you. Hhs Secretary Alex Azar, offering a positive outlook on the rollout of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine. Listen if the panel approves on December tenth. How soon might the vaccine be out for people really within days Chris, within twenty four hours of FDA, green lighting with authorization we will ship to all of the states and territories that we work with and within hours they can be vaccinating Steve that sounds good here to discuss is Fox NEWS, medical contributor and author of that book, Covid, police, cars of fear and the power of science, Dr Marc Siegel, Hi Steve. How are you today Steve im, good we heard from Pfizer. This was ninety percent effective over a month ago, whats taking the government so long warp speed, not so warp speedy. Well, its been slowed down at the FDA level. Im concerned about that Steve.
The data safety monitoring Board on the Pfizer vaccine, for example, has been looking at the data all along the FDA is saying: okay. Now they have to sit down and go over this one sitting, and then it will be approved. Obviously, by the end of this week there is no question about it, but in the United Kingdom they approved it faster because they paid attention to that drips and drabs of data come in. I think we could have had this approved by now Steve. Let me ask you this as well: one hundred million votes probably going to be fifty million. I read this morning. It might be forty million. They say there are bottlenecks with production and supply chain things, but you know what, in the average person who needs it, doesnt care about that hurry. Yeah Steve! I agree with you on that. I want to point out something: I look glass, half full, because when you talk about the cold chain with the Pfizer vaccine, it has got to be kept below zero and got to be on dry ice Steve. Absolutely
so you have the military involved and Mckesson involved with syringes and needles and then have you Pfizer itself involved. Then you have a computer program, so I think if Pfizer manages to distribute twenty million, if twenty million people end up getting the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine by the end of the year and live in nursing homes and healthcare workers, we have done good for the month of December, Steve gotten it to the market this quickly. We need to widely distributed its tough to inknock. Could you late a whole population, something that happened at midnight last night Mark California issued their stay at home orders taking effect where, essentially, the governor has divided the state into five parts? If you are hospital, Icu capacity drops below fifteen percent. You are on that lockdown thing right now. They have locked down
l, DOT, a county and huge portions of southern California. When you look at these lockdowns weigh the cost of business interruption versus the impact in slowing the spread. Well. Im very concerned about that. You just leader, Charles Payne, on that very eloquent, little and passionately lets not forget the California attorney general is about to become the head of the health and human services. Im very concerned about the math here and about the way politicians make these decisions we found out recently outdoor restaurants in l, DOT A have almost no cases linked to them, and yet they get shut down the tremendous cost here, a study that came out of Japan by the way where they actually have not locked down Japan get this just because of all the businesses closing Steve. In the month of October, there were more suicides in Japan than the people died from the pandemic from March all the way to October the amount of damage in terms of depression, anxiety. All of the other medical problems is huge.
Transcript generated on 2020-12-07.