Acting FDA head says most people are going to get infected with COVID-19

• The acting head of the FDA said most people are going to get infected with COVID-19.
• Janet Woodcock made the remarks on Tuesday during a testimony to Congress about the Omicron variant.

The acting head of the US Food and Drug Administration said on Tuesday that most people in the United States are eventually going to get infected with COVID-19.

"It's hard to process what's actually happening with now, which is most people are going to get COVID," Janet Woodcock, acting commissioner of the FDA, said to a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing.

The highly transmissible Omicron variant is currently sweeping through the country, and Woodcock said that past approaches to mitigating the spread of the virus don't reflect the current situation in the US.

"What we need to do is make sure that hospitals can still function, transportation, you know, other essential services are not disrupted while this happens," she said.

Woodcock's remarks come as other agency heads like Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Rochelle Walensky and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases' Dr. Anthony Fauci testified to Congress about the variant.

The US is averaging over 680,000 daily new COVID-19 cases, according to the latest CDC data, and hospitalizations are hitting record levels.