Trump’s Former FDA Chief: Personal Habits Will Change, Masks May Become ‘Fashionable’

On this week’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show: Sunday Special,” The Daily Wire editor-in-chief talked with Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner and current member of the Trump administration’s “Opening Our Country Council.”

During the conversation, Shapiro asked Gottlieb about the possibility of a second wave, and how cities can be expected to handle surges that happen beyond the initial lockdown of the country. 

“I’m really hopeful that we’re going to have a much different set of tools, and we can mitigate really large outbreaks or certainly epidemic spread again,” Gottlieb told Shapiro. “There is a possibility that you’re going to see sizable outbreaks within cities, and you’re going to have to adopt some element of social distancing within cities.”

The former FDA commissioner predicts that such drastic local measures aren’t inevitable, particularly as the capacity to detect outbreaks increases. 

“I don’t think this goes away until we get to a vaccine,” said Gottlieb. “I think there’s always going to be cases, I think you’re going to see spikes in cases and flare ups that are going to be on a regional basis. Every part of the country is vulnerable to an outbreak.”

However, Gottlieb does predict that there will be a massive shift in individual health habits that will have change how society thinks about public health, and people’s personal health habits will change as a result. 

“I think certain things that we do are going to change,” Gottlieb told Shapiro. “I think masks are going to become more fashionable, people are going to be more conscious of hand-washing. I think a lot of business are going to advertise that they test their workers, or that they clean shared spaces. You’re going to see airlines talking about what they do on hygiene related to travel — Ubers maybe are going to do that.”

“There’s going to be certain things that change around society that we never did before that we’re going to do now going forward because of our heightened awareness of the risk of spread,” said Gottlieb. 

“The good news, if there is any, is that we’re going to get some benefits for that. Not just in terms of reduced risk of coronavirus, but we’ll probably have shortened flu season,” said Gottlieb. “We’ll probably have less death and disease from flu, because all the things we’ve done to cut down the risk of coronavirus are going to cut down the risk of transmission of flu.”

“If we can cut down on the rates of flu transmission, that’s going to have some real economic benefits. It’s going to be captured in the form of significant productivity improvement that are going to be measurable,” said Gottlieb. 

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