Osterholm Quotes

"This is not business as usual anymore, but it doesn't mean that we have to sit back and take it."

"The pandemic clock is ticking. I would still say the most likely source is going to be a coronavirus. Is it five years? Ten years? I don’t know, but I can say with certainty: I believe it’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of time."

"Given what is happening in the current Administration with vaccines, I think we are in free fall. We are in worse shape now than we were literally before the COVID pandemic. No one in the White House is in charge of leading the country through the potential next hit from an infectious agent, which could be more deadly than if somebody launched a physical war against us on our own shores."

The Vaccine Integrity Project's ultimate goal is "to exist for the least amount of time possible. We can't wait for CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] to be restored to its previous level of excellence."

"Sadly, the ACIP [Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] we knew has been hijacked and is today an ideological body and no longer a scientific one.”

"We have basically destroyed what capacity we had to respond to a pandemic. The office that normally did this work in the White House has been totally disbanded."

"As a parent or a grandparent, I wouldn’t want my kids to go into Florida in the years ahead, to go to Walt Disney World, or any place like that, because Florida’s going to become a hotbed of [infectious disease] transmission by eliminating this particular [school vaccine] mandate."

"Where there was consistent use of N95 masks [against COVID-19], protection was remarkable. But a lot of the studies never really measured effective use. Look at the plastic shields at grocery stores. They were useless. We spent millions and millions of dollars doing that, and the 6 feet thing was the same. Useless."

"The government agencies that we have previously counted on to provide us with the factual-based information to support recommendations [on vaccines] are going to be at odds with us. We have to do whatever we can to eliminate the politics of this. It shouldn’t be partisan. Stick with the facts."
 

"When that next pandemic happens, the world will be lining up right away to get vaccinated, and as opposed to what happened with COVID, when we were at the front of the line, next time, we'll be at the end of the line," because the US Department of Health and Human Services defunded mRNA vaccine research contracts.

"Vaccines are important, but they're not as important as vaccination, the actual use of the vaccine. And so even if you have an effective vaccine but somebody has dissuaded you from using it, that's a real challenge."

"One study does not make for a safe vaccine supply or not. It's the accumulative data that comes from many studies that have been done, that together demonstrate the safety of vaccines."

"If we don't invest [in the US healthcare system] right now, the bottom line is we're going to just do a repeat all over again in the next pandemic."

"There's nothing to me that is harder than trying to comfort parents after their child has died from measles and they had refused to get them vaccinated. That is the most difficult, horrible, horrible place to be, and I don’t want anyone to ever have to experience that."

"We are watching basically what I would consider to be over 60 years of good public health practice [Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] literally thrown out the window."

"What we're watching is the wholesale destruction of public health as we know it in this country, specifically around the vaccine issue."

"If they [Food and Drug Administration] do not make it [COVID-19 vaccination] permissive—meaning that individuals who are not in a risk group or who are under 65 years of age want to be vaccinated—it's likely now that payers will not pay for that vaccine. Therefore, in a sense, it's the equivalent of taking away a vaccine from someone."

"Once again, I want to make it clear that single-antigen vaccines have been and will continue to be effective against respiratory viruses, and the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine is no exception."

"We need to understand what it is that is creating this [government] challenge to vaccines and why."

"We all recognize that the vaccine enterprise is at some risk right now."