Osterholm Quotes

"On a really difficult high school science exam, an 86 per cent score might be considered pretty good. In the field of global health and security, 86 per cent of people protected is just not good enough."

"What this paper really calls for is a full-fledged effort in our research studies to understand when is it necessary to complete a certain course of antibiotics and when is it not — in fact, when it might even be advisable to do a short course."

"Today, as we recognize antibiotics for the very precious commodity that they are, we really need to go back and rethink what it means to be treated with antibiotics and how we can most effectively use them."

"This has been the storm coming for years. . . . We've known about it, but unfortunately, we're not ready."

“We aren’t much better prepared for Ebola today than we were during the crisis in West Africa, so you have to wonder. If we aren’t preparing for the outbreaks we know will happen in the near future, what good does it do to know about spillover events?”

"The billion dollar question is whether Aedes albopictus will play a role. Zika is going to continue. The real question is going to be not necessarily how big it will get in any location, but what is the geographic spread?"

"We can virtually guarantee there will be [Zika] activity, particularly along the Gulf region."

"Anybody who is vaccinated in a timely manner is one less person susceptible to the virus."

"If this thing [yellow fever] takes off in the urban areas of Brazil, we're in big trouble."

"Instead of wasting their time and energy debating the specifics of the Trump administration’s proposed budget, American lawmakers should determine what to prioritize... This includes increasing, not cutting, the CDC and NIH allocations, putting serious resources into a game-changing influenza vaccine, and promoting an international effort to combat profligate antibiotic use."

"Antimicrobial resistance is a slow-moving tsunami that within decades could bring us back to the infectious Dark Ages, when a simple scrape could kill and untreatable tuberculosis was rampant."

"In a move to increase the U.S. defense budget by 10%, Trump has lost sight of the greatest national security threat of them all: a disease outbreak killing millions of people."

"This may just speak to how misplaced international priorities are, that WHO is getting so little for these disease programs."

"If there are two children in a department store or a mall, one susceptible to measles and one infected, the bottom line is the virus will find that unprotected child."

“We want the initial response [to Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo] to be overwhelming so we never give an outbreak a chance to do what it did in West Africa. We want to throw everything at it in a reasonable way and a vaccine is part of that."

"The answer used to be education—the more educated you were on the issue the more likely you were to get vaccinated. The challenge is for scientists to be humble and acknowledge that in this day and age facts will not win the day."

"No one is suggesting for a second that [autism in the community] is not an important problem. It is. But it's not about the [measles-mumps-rubella] vaccine."

"We are sitting on something big with H7N9 [avian flu]. Any one of these [recent] cases could trigger something big. By then it'd be way too late."

"It is a highly concentrated number of unvaccinated people. It is a potential kind of gas-and-match situation."

"I see these people preying on a community that wants answers, I find this just abysmal. It's the worst of human behavior."