NEW YORK (1010 WINS) – The former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration expressed concern Sunday that New York City's homegrown coronavirus variant may be infecting people who already had COVID-19 or have been vaccinated, contributing to higher positivity rates seen in pockets of the city.
On CBS News' "Face the Nation," Dr. Scott Gottlieb told anchor Margaret Brennan that it's possible the city's B.1.526 variant could reinfect people or infect the vaccinated but that more information about cases is needed.
Gottlieb said that even as cases and hospitalizations go down statewide, in "certain parts of New York, Brooklyn, parts of Queens, parts of Staten Island, the positivity rate is approaching 15%."
"So you're seeing a lot of infection surging in pockets of New York City," he said. "What we don't understand with 1.526 is whether or not people are being reinfected with it and whether or not people who might have been vaccinated are now getting infected with it."
Gottlieb said one of the concerns about the B.1.526 variant is that it has a mutation seen in the South African variant "that we know in certain cases is causing people who have already had coronavirus to get reinfected with it."
"And so the question is whether 1.526 is responsible for some of the increases that we're seeing in New York right now and whether this is the beginning of a new outbreak inside the city," Gottlieb said. "We're just not very good right now at collecting the cases and linking it back to the clinical experience. So we need to step in much more aggressively and start sequencing cases, especially people who report that they either were previously vaccinated or already had COVID."
Gottlieb said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should work with the city Health Department to look for cases in which people were reinfected or infected after getting vaccinated.
Officials said earlier this month that the B.1.526 variant and the U.K. variant, called B.1.1.7, account for over half of new COVID-19 cases in the city.
On Saturday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that the first case of the Brazilian P.1 variant had been found in New York state. The patient is a Brooklyn resident in their 90s with no travel history, Cuomo said.
