End to mask, vaccine mandates may be near, says Pfizer board member

Speaking with CNBC, Gottlieb said the US should be willing to remove some of these restrictions "...with the same speed that we put them in place."

"I think certainly on the East Coast, where you see cases declining dramatically, we need to be willing to lean in and do that very soon I think as conditions improve we have to be willing to relax some of these measures with the same speed that we put them in place and lean in a little bit, do it before things fully improved but while the conditions are looking like they're on a clear trajectory, like they're doing in the UK," Gottlieb said.

"I think a lot of the acrimony that we have here in the United States is because we haven't prescribed clear goalposts for when we're going to withdraw a lot of these measures, and the two most contentious things right now in the US are the masks among children in schools, and the vaccine mandates," he continued.

In regards to the masks in schools, Gottlieb said that while they provide "some incremental benefit," data has shown that cloth masks "aren't providing the extreme amount of benefit" for schools that have relied on them.

"And so in the setting of a epidemic right now, you don't want to withdraw the use of masks for schools that have come to rely on them. But when we do start to improve, that should be the first thing that we look at because we know that they're disruptive to children. We know that they've had a cumulative impact on the socialization of kids in schools," said Gottlieb.

In regards to the vaccine mandates, Gottlieb used Connecticut as en example, pointing to how they have removed their vaccine mandate for state workers. Well over 90 percent of the state workers have been vaccinated, and in addition, the state's population has a rising immunity to it with cases on the decline, Gottlieb said.

"And so it doesn't make as much sense to have that mandate in place anymore. And so you have to have a flexible doctrine here," said Gottlieb.

"I think the only way to get you know compliance from people and get accommodation is if we demonstrate that we have the ability to withdraw these things in the same manner in which we put them in," he continued.

Gottlieb continued on to state that what would "confound" the ability to do this "is this narrative that as soon as you withdraw these things, you're going to get a flare in the virus."

"And that's not necessarily true," said Gottlieb. "I think we're on a very clear trajectory right now. But there's this belief in the public health community, at least some quarters of it, that the reason why we had a delta wave last summer was because CDC lifted the national mask recommendation and in two things were completely unrelated."

"We lifted that national wreck mask recommendation when b117 had subsided had fully subsided. We had a period of relative quiet in July, and then delta finally emerged, but Delta was not on the horizon. At the time that we lifted that mandate," he concluded.