“Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan asked Gottlieb on CBS if the Biden administration needed to look at getting vaccine manufacturers to “reboot” existing COVID-19 vaccines in order to tackle the new omicron variant.

Noting that companies, including Pfizer, were doing so, Gottlieb said that “this is going to be a really critical decision because what we’ve seen in the past, for example, when we engineered a vaccine to specifically target 1351, the old South African variant, was that vaccine worked well or appeared to work well against 1351. But [it] didn’t appear to provide as good coverage against all the other variants.”

“And there’s reason to believe that as you develop vaccines that are very specific to some of these new variants, they may not work as well against the full complement of different variants that we’ve seen. So you wanted to try to stick with the ancestral strain, the Wuhan strain, in the vaccine I think as long as possible,” Gottlieb continued.