Former FDA Chief Says Flu Season Could Be A Whopper in Kalamazoo

"It's going to be messy".

The former head of the FDA under Donald Trump says we could be in store for "a whopper" of a flu season this year.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb is the former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner and he's on the Pfizer Board of Directors. This morning on CNBC he said that “we’re in for a whopper” of a flu season because of a lack of immunity in the US population.

Striking a positive tone initially, Gottlieb said "I do believe this is the last major surge of the infection. Even if we see new variants, they're likely to have emerged within the delta lineages and hopefully will be able to vaccinate against them in the future."

But then the conversation turned to influenza-the flu. Dr. Gottlieb said we didn't see a flu season last year. "We're in for a whopper because we haven't put immunity into the population in at least one and maybe now two years. When flu does come back and it will come back, it's going to come back very aggressively because you're just going to have a population that hasn't had much flu immunity in a number of years."

Gottlieb also warns "we could see a situation either this year or next year where you have a really bad flu season if there's a mismatch between the flu vaccine in the circulating strain. It could be very bad."

He went on to say that many of the changes in the work place implemented in the past 18 months will probably be in place for a long time.