"You can use any of the three [COVID booster] vaccines to help you achieve that better protection, so use what's most available, and just go with that. The most important thing is get your booster doses."
"This is what I call corrected science. You'll learn, you implement, you study it, and we're trying to make it better....And that's what we're catching up with now—the idea of how we can provide even better protection [with additional COVID vaccine doses]."
"[The status of the University of Minnesota] just speaks to the power of if you get enough people vaccinated, you really can reduce transmission substantially"
"[Delayed second doses of COVID-19 vaccine] may have had a much more superior response because we know immunologically that people’s immune systems may be much better primed for that second dose if they wait until that whole maturation process is accomplished."
"[COVID-19] cannot be attributed to human behavior no matter how much we wish it were so.... As I've said over and over, 'We're riding this tiger, we're not driving it.'"
"We have people dying needlessly that don’t have to because they could have been vaccinated and protected. Of the 700,000 people that have died in this country from COVID, 400,000 have died since vaccines have been available. Many of those people could have been protected."
"Unfortunately there’s been so much misinformation that’s come out about masking [against COVID-19] that it’s become so polarized....People are just divided into either you’re masked or you’re not. And that would be like saying everything that has wheels [like a tricycle and a jetliner] is the same."
"The fact that you have the CDC saying you can have students with cloth face coverings 3 feet apart from each other for more than 15 minutes and not call that a quarantine contact, for example is just, in a sense, not valid. And we’re seeing school outbreaks all over the country right now."
"That $65 billion [for pandemic preparedness] should have been a down payment, not the entire program. It’s a rounding error for our federal budget, and yet our entire existence going forward depends on this"
"This pandemic has exposed the political and social fissures that have undermined public confidence and the national spirit of cooperation that is so necessary for public health to be effective."
"Right now [the Midwest is] really more or less in a holding pattern until we can get more people vaccinated. This [COVID] virus is going to keep being transmitted. It may very well come down to a new baseline, which could be much higher than what it is."
"We’re going to see [COVID-19] hills and valleys, at least for the next several years as we get more vaccine out. That’s going to help....But I can just tell you, this is a coronavirus forest fire that will not stop until it finds all the human wood that it can burn."
"The [COVID-19] situation we have with school children this year is very different than we had last year...Kids are now just as likely to get infected as are adults, and they’re just as likely to transmit it."
"My strong desire is to see every kid 12 years old and older to get a vaccine because that is the best way to protect students....I would also say rooms in schools should have air exchanges five to six times every hour and they should also have portable HEPA air filter machines."
"Whether it’s a few hundred [COVID-19] cases [from the Minnesota State Fair], or more, we don’t know but look at what happened a day after the Bucks won the NBA title where you had 500 new cases and that was just one outdoor rally around the arena and not a multi-day event."
