The current measles outbreak is "a harbinger of things to come. We have created an environment where routine immunization of children is no longer something that we can count on happening. This is not a prediction to scare people. It’s a prediction to say, ‘Look, this is going to happen if we don't do something different to better understand the importance of these vaccines.'"

“Typically, if you had a really bad flu year one year, you may have reduced occurrence the following year just because of some immunity. But I want to be very cautious about that. If you've seen one flu season, you've seen one flu season.”

"We have a real battle on our hands right now in terms of helping the public understand what will happen if they’re not vaccinating their kids. What this means is this is not without a consequence. So you may think you’re making a moral choice. You're also making a choice that can end up killing your child."

Indiscriminately firing government scientists "is using a machete instead of a surgical knife."

"Right now in this country, there is a major challenge occurring with children developing influenza and then developing a condition called acute necrotizing encephalitis. Have you seen a word come out of the CDC about this? They've been prohibited from even putting this kind of information out. This is critical information for parents to know."

"We are in a period of more uncertainty regarding public health and vaccines than at any time in my 50-year career."

“Global health safety is effective only if we have global representation. WHO [World Health Organization] will do what it can. But at some point, we’re going to have a real challenge."

"We’ve never seen a global spread of avian influenza virus like this. We’ve seen an explosion in the number of outbreaks in poultry and duck operations over the course of recent weeks."

"If you look at what's happened the last 8 weeks, the number of poultry operations that have gone down [due to avian flu]—and more recently, the duck operations—is absolutely stunning."

"There is no one who's probably less qualified to be Secretary of Health and Human Services than Robert F. Kennedy Jr."

"We know that people are being exposed through consumption with [chronic wasting disease] prions. What we don't yet understand is what would it take for that prion to actually infect that human with ingestion." 

"Trying to restrict infectious disease research right now would be like saying we’re only going to invest in safety for highways that run north and south, but forgetting all the ones that run east and west."

"I’ve been sleeping with one eye open about this virus [H5N1 avian influenza] for many years."

"The pandemic clock is ticking. We just don’t know what time it is."

"I think we have to be careful about interpreting these [influenza-like symptoms in people who drank raw milk] as we go forward."

"He [Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.] is a voice machine that continues to put out dis- and mis-information in such a way that it sounds believable to the public."

"What Mr. [Robert F.] Kennedy adds to this mix is really only more confusion and disinformation about what vaccines can do, what they don't do, how safe they are, how well they work."

"From a respiratory virus standpoint, this is probably the lowest we've been in terms of risk in the community for any serious illnesses since the beginning of the pandemic. It's quiet start, but a quiet start does not predict for you it'll be a quiet ending."

"These are good [COVID-19] vaccines, not great vaccines. If you listened to us in the first days after approval, it came across that these are great vaccines—we can take our masks off now and everything will be fine. And we just lost a lot of credibility there."

“It’s really important to understand that no one—and I mean no one—knows what H5N1 influenza virus is going to do to the human population."

Our underwriters