Former FDA commissioner: China may get to a vaccine first

China may have a coronavirus vaccine available on the market before the U.S., former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb said on Sunday, but he worries it may not be very good. 

“There’s a risk that China may get to vaccine first, I don’t think their [vaccine] is very good, but they may get it to the market before we do,” Gottlieb said on CBS’s “Face the nation. “I think that is a concern.”

He said that in the U.S., there may be hundreds of thousands of doses available in the fall for testing. 

{mosads}Gottlieb also said he expects the U.S. may have a few treatments ready in the fall for COVID-19. 

“We may have one or more treatments by the fall, I don’t think any one is going to be a home run but we may have something that can help,” he added. 

He said if there’s an outbreak in a large U.S. city in the fall, he thinks the vaccine would be made available under “some kind of protocol.” 

“So we would have it available in the setting of an outbreak, certainly not a national epidemic like we have right now,” he added.

NEWS: @ScottGottliebMD says he’s there is a chance China may get a vaccine for #coronavirus to the market before the United States does. WATCH —> pic.twitter.com/WMClkMZ85a

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) April 19, 2020

Across the U.S. there are more than 735,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases, the most confirmed reported cases of any single country, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. 

There have been 39,095 confirmed deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S., based on the same database.