Pandemic Prevention Quotes

One of my first priorities as a new member of Congress in 2019 was to visit the CDC and learn firsthand about what they needed to help protect Americans. After my visit, I learned their budget had previously been cut, and that they needed funding to modernize their data systems to help prevent pandemics and other public health crises.

If we can provide even a few months of early warning for just one pandemic, the benefits will outweigh all the time and energy we're devoting. Imagine preventing health crises, not just responding to them.

Social distancing won't end with the COVID-19 crisis but will stay with us and will become part of life.

Technologies will reach the developed world first, but the rest of the world will benefit in turn. And it will behoove the rich countries to hasten the spread of its innovations. In an era when new diseases can circle the globe in hours, it’s in everyone’s interest to stop the next pandemic before it happens.

If you withdraw the incredible focus on polio, it will spread back, and in poor countries you'll get something like 100,000 cases a year. So by being very intense and getting the cases down to zero, what you do is you avoid all the future cases.

If we can contain and monitor animal viruses at an earlier stage - when they're first entering human populations, preferably before they've had a chance to become human-adapted, certainly before they've had a chance to spread - we can head off pandemics altogether.

The Andromeda strain is a killer disease that they've got to prevent from spreading to being 100 percent contagious. It's another one where we're racing to save humanity.

Getting ready for a global pandemic is every bit as important as nuclear deterrence and avoiding a climate catastrophe.

The fact is we can't prevent people from getting the COVID-19 virus.

I work to create systems that can accurately detect pandemics early, determine their likely importance, and, with any luck, crush those that have the potential to devastate us.

Swine flu is not an anomaly. We know that swine flu - like the vast majority of new outbreaks - comes from animals. We should be monitoring those animals and the humans that come into contact with them, so we can catch these viruses early, before they infect major cities and spread throughout the world.

Take pandemics. There could easily be a severe pandemic. A lot of that comes from something we don't pay much attention to: Eating meat. The meat production industry, the industrial production of meat, uses an immense amount of antibiotics.We're now running out of antibiotics that deal with the threat of rapidly mutating bacteria. A lot of that just comes from the meat production industry. Well, do we worry about it? Well, we ought to be.

Back from 2001 to 2003, I wrote multiple editorials for The Washington Post about biological warfare and pandemic preparedness - issues that were at the top of everyone's agenda in the wake of 9/11 and the brief anthrax scare. At the time, some very big investments were made into precisely those issues, especially into scientific research.

If we do the kind of common-sense public health measures we know work, we ought to be able to stop it from being a global pandemic.