"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."
"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."
"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."
"There have been conversations happening for months now across the public health community about, 'what will we do if US government vaccine information becomes corrupted or the system that helps to ensure their safety and efficacy is compromised?'"
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s US Department of Health and Human Services cuts have "set us back dramatically. We are nowhere near as safe now as we were even 10 weeks ago."
The current measles outbreak is "a harbinger of things to come. We have created an environment where routine immunization of children is no longer something that we can count on happening. This is not a prediction to scare people. It’s a prediction to say, ‘Look, this is going to happen if we don't do something different to better understand the importance of these vaccines.'"
“Typically, if you had a really bad flu year one year, you may have reduced occurrence the following year just because of some immunity. But I want to be very cautious about that. If you've seen one flu season, you've seen one flu season.”
"We have a real battle on our hands right now in terms of helping the public understand what will happen if they’re not vaccinating their kids. What this means is this is not without a consequence. So you may think you’re making a moral choice. You're also making a choice that can end up killing your child."
"Right now in this country, there is a major challenge occurring with children developing influenza and then developing a condition called acute necrotizing encephalitis. Have you seen a word come out of the CDC about this? They've been prohibited from even putting this kind of information out. This is critical information for parents to know."
