scott gottleib with the latest on the virus and what's happening with those quk x"ilbeig b "sawbo wltocks rally to a second term yesterday the s&p 500 was up it's now up 14% since the election making this the biggest rally ever over that time frame and according to lpl financial it's the first time that the dow has made a new high on inauguration day our next guest though says he wouldn't be bullish if -- said he wouldn't be bullish if biden won the presidency joining us is jake walthauer i remember your -- it was a nuanced viewpoint, jake. i don't remember that exactly. >> yeah, joe, you know, i was actually not necessarily a fan of a blue wave occurring because i felt that that might actually lead to higher deregulation, roll back of some of the trump era tax cuts i think now that we have one party in control in washington, d.c., it may actually be a good thing. this last round of stimulus negotiations i think forced the market to lose a lot of confidence in the ability of a two-party system to actually make good decisions. >> in trying to formulate eye questions for you, jake. we'

scott gottleib currently serves on the boards of i will lumen na and pfizer.results i'm curious what your first read on them was and how you think they do compare to the pfizer and moderna vaccine? >> yeah, they're very good results. these results were out in a pre-print server it had longer term follow-up so we got a look at more data in this publication that came out last night some of the things that looked encouraging are the antibody levels kept going up and they followed them out 71 days and the antibody levels kept going up this is fairly consistent with the mrna vaccine this looks like a good profile for the vaccine. this could be potentially a one dose vaccine that remains to be seen. they're testing it as a one dose and they're testing two doses. the open question is whether or not older individuals who are less likely to mount a robust immune response to any vaccine will require two doses to get a full immune response to the vaccine. we don't know the answer it's possible. all in all this is a good result it's an indication we'll have a third entran

scott gottleib he currently serves on the boards of illumina and pfizer. he's a cnbc contributor.g to the state's data are late for the second dosage, where do we stand? how are things going >> i don't have direct insight into how florida is managing the vaccine. there is enough vaccine in the system, they should be allocating for it. there should be enough for first doses and second doses we're on a good steady stream. 30 million doses have been distributed to states. as of this tuesday there will be another 15 million available to states 5 million doses have been ordered by the states but not shipped for a total of 50 million. a little more than 10 million have been used there is a way to increase supply much we can try to increase production. we can do more to get efficiencies in the fill finishing product. so that's what the new incoming administration should be looking at, ways to work with manufacturers to get more production into the system the final point is if j&j's vaccine comes to the market, i have a lot of confidence for them to be able to produce that in large quanti

joining us is former fda commissioner scott gottleib.ew variant of the coronavirus and how vaccines can be adapted to ensure immunity. we'll get to that in a moment. dr. gottleib, why don't we start with the idea that you've been advocating for, get the doses out and we'll catch up. >> i think it's good news. we need to worry about the second doses and make sure we have enough supply you don't need to stockpile 5% of the vaccines being produced there are two debates. some people argue we could forego the second dose or delay it, deliberately delay the second dose. i don't think we should do that. i think we should prescribe it the way it was studied the second argument is do we need to be stockpiling fully 50% of all of the doses coming off the manufacturing line to make sure everyone gets their second dose on time should we take a risk and get more doses out and expect future supply can be used to provide the second doses i'm in that camp i think we can push out more vaccine given the fact this is the most critical part of the epidemic

scott gottleib said we need to hit the reset button on vaccine rollout because the current system isn't working. so why have so few doses been administered and how can this be done better? >> well, again, i think the biggest issue now is the number of bodies to do it. i mean, it's a very big effort. my group right now, i will be heading into arizona tomorrow to help lead efforts to do vaccine rollout there and getting the people together, whether it's hiring retirees qualified to do it or bringing together people from the national guard or retired guard or other personnel that maybe right now we take six weeks and put a training program together so that when we hit the national effort where everyone becomes eligible, not just first responders, that is where we're really going to lead the effort. so there's got to be that type of guidance and that type of leadership to show how to do it instead of just saying here it is, here's some money in your accounts. >> want to turn to europe now and the coronavirus death toll in germany now stands at more than 40,000. officials show the deadliest

scott gottleib.america's covid vaccine program into high gear this is as several alternate strains of the virus are here. you're watching "squawk box" and this is cnbc alm plus saffron, to naturally boost your mood. stress comfort from nature's bounty. >>> welcome to "squawk box" right here take a look at the futures this morning after some big news out of georgia we will talk about what that big news means right now looks like the dow would open up 44 points higher the nasdaq down and down big tech stocks tumbling we'll finish those in a second s&p 500 off about 9 right now. let's show you some of those tech stocks. you're looking at the likes of facebook, looking at the likes of apple, alphabet all down. not as much as they were before. facebook off the most at about 2.5% meanwhile, we should tell you the bank stocks are rising show you some of those jpm, bank of america, citigroup all up 2%. up over 3% tesla up -- some of the big environmental plays also up. meantime, bitcoin up this morning as ma

scott gottleib he currently serves on boards.onfusing stuff. >> one of the challenges were when the vaccines were done, they had to have consent many patients don't have capacity to give consent you have to go to family members and that takes time. that can take weeks to get consents in place. pharmacies know they can't keep going to the nursing homes they can't come back for individual patients given the difficult logistics. they took literally weeks to get these consents in place in nursing homes. quite frankly this is something the government could have worked on in advance. what the government will say is that, well, we didn't have an approved fact sheet from fda, how can we consent patients until the consents were approved there were ways to get them place prior to the approval of the vaccines that you could have been using to consent the patients it took literally three, four weeks to get in place in most of the institutions they couldn't go in day one. that was a real challenge. that could have been solved for. it wasn't.

scott gottleib was tweeting about this and i think this is important because dr.ghly effective vaccines this has sustained immune protection over time, perhaps from a robust early induction of memory immune cells. the protection was strong and durable. it was highly effective. the milieu of disease is more complex. even in the u.s. trials done today are running into more mutated cases. make no mistake, this is an important and wonderful development. i think this is huge news because there are so many people who thought, okay, what are we going to do when it gets down to will you take a shot that's less effe effective. i'm not going to qualify for moderna or pfizer's shot i would get that shot even with 72% effectiveness or efficacy, even if it was lower than that, because the idea that it's preventing severe disease and keeping you from the hospital, that sounds like a good deal if it's a question between getting this one now or not knowing when i'm going to qualify for an appointment for the others, i'm going to get it. time matters this is one shot, not two shot

scott gottleib over the weekend.a much more rapid cycle time to deploy new antibody combinations which have a large library of these antibodies that are sitting pre-clinically we could think about a very expedited path to study them in a month or two and then authorize their use. that would be -- seem to be a smart thing to do as this virus mutates. so we have an armamentarium of vaccinations not everyone will get the vaccination and respond. we need medicines for the long term we're talking to the fda long term now. >> one of the issues with the anti-body drugs is people weren't getting them have you seen any improvement over the last month since this issue became more clear and people getting access to these drugs, the right -- folks at the right time. >> we really have, actually. so lilly shipped over half a mill doses of these antibodies down to the hospital system, the front line deployment. we produced over 1 million and have deployed those in the u.s. and other countries and initially you saw in the course of