Scott Gottlieb Quotes

Smallpox was the worst disease in history. It killed more people than all the wars in history.

Left to their own devices, epidemic diseases tend to follow the same basic process: A virus or bacteria infects a host, who typically becomes sick and in many cases dies. Along the way, the host infects others.

Historical records show that smallpox was a human scourge for thousands of years. The virus produces high fever, severe back pain and scarring eruptions of flat red spots on the skin that turn into pustules and then into scabs - a two-week process during which the disease is highly contagious.

A pandemic influenza would mean widespread infection essentially throughout every region of the world.

It's the advantage of the virus to spread, and you can only spread when you infect people and they infect other people without necessarily killing them. So if you had 100 percent mortality, the potential pandemic would almost self-eliminate itself.

In 'Pox: An American History,' Michael Willrich meticulously traces the story of how the smallpox vaccine was pressed into service during a major outbreak.

You'd see little shallow graves, lined up, one after the other - babies. That's what happens when measles goes through a nutritionally deficient community. It's a horrible disease, and it spreads incredibly efficiently.

Even the pandemic flu of 1918 only killed one to two percent of the people who were infected.

Experiments suggest that if one particle of Ebola enters a person's bloodstream, it can cause a fatal infection. This may explain why many of the medical workers who came down with Ebola couldn't remember making any mistakes that might have exposed them.

Even if it had not been possible to reproduce the disease in animals and consequently to verify the hypothesis, this simple observation would have been sufficient to demonstrate the way in which the disease was propagated.

Influenza pandemics must be taken seriously, precisely because of their capacity to spread rapidly to every country in the world.

The fact that I was fortunate enough to escape contagion, in spite of frequent, sometimes daily contacts with the disease, was because I soon guessed how it spread.

Now, when you get a viral infection, what normally happens is it takes days or weeks for your body to fight back at full strength, and that might be too late. When you're pre-immunized, what happens is you have forces in your body pre-trained to recognize and defeat specific foes. So that's really how vaccines work.

Now, you might think of flu as just a really bad cold, but it can be a death sentence. Every year, 36,000 people in the United States die of seasonal flu. In the developing world, the data is much sketchier, but the death toll is almost certainly higher.

We saw in 2003 the beginnings of an outbreak of an illness called SARS. SARS ended up killing 800 people which is a significant number of deaths, but nowhere near as high as it could have been.

Influenza is a serious disease. Kids die of influenza, both in Japan and the United States, and if you give a drug to people who are at risk of dying, there will be people who die who got the drug,... There is no signal the drug is doing it as opposed to the disease.

If smallpox were a threat just to individuals, then it could be left up to individuals to decide whether or not they want to protect themselves.

The plague is upon us. One cannot well study plagues until after they have run their course.

Smallpox is the only human infectious disease ever eradicated by science.

The difference is that with Ebola, it is such a devastating disease, and there is still no cure. They're still working on vaccines. The fact of the matter with polio, there is a cure; there is a vaccine.

Nobody spends any money on smallpox unless they worry about a bio-terrorist recreating it.

Covid spreads too easily to think it can be confined to the young.

When we think of the major threats to our national security, the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat lurks beyond our shores, one from nature, not humans - an avian flu pandemic.

This is an industry that doesn't have the common cold... It has cholera.

The flu is very unpredictable when it begins and in how it takes off.