Mark Shields Quotes

The only known cure for the Presidential virus is embalming fluid.

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

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.

Of course when you look back from all the pandemics that have happened in the world, they were really scary.

The mystery of that damn virus has been generated by the $2 billion a year they spend on it.

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.

Infectious disease exists at this intersection between real science, medicine, public health, social policy, and human conflict. There's a tendency of people to try and make a group out of those who have the disease. It makes people who don't have the disease feel safer.

My friend told me later he got the chicken pox. I told him I caught politics and never got over it.

The largest outbreak of bird flu in American history was an H5N2 virus, which led to the deaths of 17 million domestic birds and cost the nation more than $400 million during an outbreak in Pennsylvania that started in 1983.

Contagious and infectious diseases have been largely overcome.

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

Unfortunately, infectious diseases don’t pay much attention to budget cycles.

Humankind is no stranger to calamitous outbreaks of diseases.

The border patrol gave us a list of the diseases that they're concerned about, and Ebola was one of those.

Public health officials, researchers and states rely on CDC data to track the coronavirus and make quite literally life and death decisions.

I think it would be over-exaggeration to think that there are millions of viruses ready to jump on us and bring us back to the 14th century. That would be looking over a ledge that isn't there.

Epidemics follow patterns because diseases follow patterns. Viruses spread; they reproduce; they die.

You don't have to vaccinate every man, woman and child in the country if you have a couple of cases of smallpox cropping up.

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.

Don't get me wrong: I would love to be president.

In today's world, new infections and diseases can spread across the country and even across the world in a matter of days, or even hours, making early detection critical.

You see a virus very differently when it's caught and suspended on a slab of glass than when you're observing how it's ravaged a fellow human being.

As for AIDS, it's a plague. We are human, we get plagues. They come along every so often, kill off two thirds of the population; in the next generation it's a quarter; after that it's a childhood disease.

No doubt it was better to have become president than not.

Epidemiologists study patterns in order to combat infection. Stories about epidemics follow patterns, too. Stories aren't often deadly, but they can be virulent: spreading fast, weakening resistance, wreaking havoc.