Wood­cock de­fends FDA's re­sponse to Omi­cron be­fore Sen­ate health com­mit­tee

In what may be Janet Wood­cock’s fi­nal con­gres­sion­al hear­ing as the head of the FDA, she once again of­fered a can­did de­scrip­tion of the dif­fi­cul­ties of bat­tling the cur­rent Omi­cron out­break.

Speak­ing through two masks along­side oth­er CDC, NIH and HHS lead­ers, Wood­cock com­pared the cur­rent pan­dem­ic to a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter, adding, “I don’t think it will last a re­al­ly long time.”

“I think we need to fo­cus on con­ti­nu­ity of op­er­a­tions for hos­pi­tals,” she said in re­sponse to ques­tions from Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) at the Sen­ate Health, Ed­u­ca­tion, La­bor and Pen­sions Com­mit­tee meet­ing on Tues­day. “I think it’s hard to process what’s ac­tu­al­ly hap­pen­ing right now, which is that most peo­ple are go­ing to get Covid.”

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