Mikhail Varshavski Quotes

When most members of a community are vaccinated, they protect those who are not by eliminating the viral reservoirs in the population. The effect is known as 'herd immunity.'

From a population point of view, it's actually very important that as few people as possible get the flu. People getting the flu is not a private matter. The risk for healthy people is really about your friends and neighbors and fellow travelers.

With infectious disease, without vaccines, there's no safety in numbers.

I just want people to know the facts and science and the information... measles is preventable.

I think that protecting children at the age where they're most vulnerable against diseases that are highly contagious is prudent.

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

In the 19th century, smallpox was widely considered a disease of filth, which meant that it was largely understood to be a disease of the poor. According to filth theory, any number of contagious diseases were caused by bad air that had been made foul by excrement or rot.

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.

If we vaccinate well, if we increase those vaccination rates, we can stop measles just as we stopped it before.

Cholera is even more severe among populations who are immunologically naive.

Why do our kids need to be protected from flu? Isn't that something only for the cold western countries who have long, cold, below-zero winters? That's what I thought until I learnt that India's tropical weather facilitates circulation of viruses around the year, unlike the West, which sees a peak only during winter.

It's important to protect the old and the vulnerable, who are at the highest risk of severe illness and bad outcomes. But like most issues of medicine, it isn't a binary choice. Given the uncertainties of how this virus spreads and its high risk of infirmities, it would be unwise to abandon efforts to limit Covid spread wherever possible.

Those people who get the flu shot not only protect themselves from getting the flu or reducing their likelihood of developing the flu, but those around them.

When you're in a pocket with low vaccination rates, that's when you find yourself at greater risk of getting measles.

Vaccination is a public health issue because influenza is a highly contagious disease. If you don't vaccinate your child, his or her schoolmates are much more likely to become ill. That is why some places (New York, for example) are making the vaccine mandatory for school children.

The risk of getting Hep B from a blood transfusion is a tiny number, but it's a bigger number than the risk of side effects from the vaccine.

Of all the problems which were open to me for study, typhus was the most urgent and the most unexplored. We knew nothing of the way in which contagion spread.

We're all in denial from time to time. We all see things that are too painful to really deal with. But this has consequences, and the consequences of not vaccinating your children are not only just that those children are exposed to illnesses; it's that everyone else they go to school with and they hang around with are, too.

Pneumonia is a disease that often flies under the radar of not just the public but even the global health community. It kills more children under 5 years old every year than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined.

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.

Ebola is a nasty disease to get. It's scary. But as a weapon, it is probably not likely. Ebola is a difficult malady to weaponize and deliver efficiently.

Herd immunity is, it turns out, not incredibly easy to understand. It took me quite a bit of reading before I fully grasped it. But understanding herd immunity is essential to understanding why we vaccinate the way we do.

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.

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.