"There have been conversations happening for months now across the public health community about, 'what will we do if US government vaccine information becomes corrupted or the system that helps to ensure their safety and efficacy is compromised?'"
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s US Department of Health and Human Services cuts have "set us back dramatically. We are nowhere near as safe now as we were even 10 weeks ago."
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."
"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."
“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."
"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."
"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."
