Former U.S. Food and Drug Administration Director: Variants of the novel coronavirus may have spread to the United States

On December 27th local time, Scott Gottlieb, the former director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, said that the variant of the novel coronavirus “is likely to have spread to the United States, and may have had a considerable amount so far.”

Gottlieb said that the United States needs a better way to sequence and track mutant strains. Gottlieb said, “In the United States, we do not sequence enough samples, and many sequencing work is done in private laboratories and will not be aggregated into public databases.

This needs to be solved. In the UK, they are sequencing about 10% of all samples. Here, we only sequenced 1%.