Appearing Friday on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Pfizer board member and former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said the rise in monkeypox cases suggests the virus has spread “pretty wide,” but he predicted that it will not spark an epidemic akin to the coronavirus.
A transcript is as follows:
REBECCA QUICK: What the heck is Monkeypox and do we actually need to worry about this?
DR. SCOTT GOTTLIEB: Now that there’s been community spread, it may be hard to snuff this out. I don’t think it will become a major epidemic because this is a virus that’s difficult to spread. You need sustained close contact or sustain contact with the open source, but there’s so many cases now that are disconnected. This is spreading in the community and there may be a lot more inflection than what we’re picking up. It has a long incubation period, upwards of 21 days. So there may be a lot of people incubating the virus and there’s probably a lot of people who went undiagnosed or misdiagnosed because doctors aren’t looking for it. And given the fact we found so many disconnected cases, it does suggest the spread is pretty wide.