Osterholm Quotes

"I don't believe that this infection really is being transmitted in waves. It's more like a coronavirus forest fire where in fact, it just burns, burns and burns. But then as soon as you let up the break, then it all comes back again."

"Public officials who know they have been exposed to the virus and should be in quarantine are either displaying blatant arrogance or numbing ignorance....The laws of virus transmission aren't different for public officials than they are for everyone else."

"This group [young adults] is going to continue to transmit a lot of virus....They are mobile, they have contact with those who are older, and we're going to see that spillover occur more and more as we get into the fall."

"Everyone had a fear there would be explosive outbreaks of [coronavirus] transmission in the schools. In colleges, there have been. We have to say that, to date, we have not seen those in the younger kids, and that is a really important observation."

"If a vaccine was developed that is 50 percent effective in preventing Covid, it would still be licensed. Of course, we'd like a higher degree of effectiveness, but as with the flu vaccine, 50 percent protection is better than zero. A Covid vaccine probably won't be nearly as effective as the childhood vaccines we're familiar with."

"We really have another 12 to 14 months of a really hard road ahead of us [with COVID-19]. That's what I'm concerned about today. I don't go back and replay February and March. I play right now."

"We have to make sure the [COVID-19] vaccine is proven to work and ready for the public....If it is not ready and we cannot guarantee it works, the entire medical profession needs to stand up and say 'No, we are not going to do this right now.'"

"The public health community wants a safe and effective [COVID-19] vaccine as much as anybody could want it. But the data have to be clear and compelling."

"There is a pattern here that has occurred over a number of topics for both agencies [FDA and CDC] over the period of recent weeks that is making a lot of people in the public health community at state and local and federal levels doubt the scientific integrity of these agencies — which is the worst thing that we can have happen to us in terms of public health credibility."

"Everybody right now in the United States, whether you're talking about K through 12 or you're talking about Higher Ed, are all struggling with what to do with the numbers [of COVID-19 cases] that are occurring in the adolescents and young adults."

"We weren't sure what this coronavirus would do because we’ve never witnessed a pandemic of a coronavirus before. Now we know it's kind of a super forest fire. It just keeps burning and burning and burning wherever there is human wood."

"It's a propaganda stunt. There is no way that vaccine should be allowed to be used in the public. It's an experimental vaccine. It could backfire...it could be dangerous."

"We can continue to allow the coronavirus to spread rapidly throughout the country or we can commit to a more restrictive lockdown, state by state, for up to six weeks to crush the spread of the virus to less than one new case per 100,000 people per day."

"Will we have a [COVID-19] vaccine or vaccines by the end of the year? Likely. But the question is, what does that mean? Will it be rushed in terms of its evaluation such that people lack confidence in it? How long will it protect for, even if it is adequately evaluated and the safety issues around it elucidated? We just don't know that yet."

"This thing [COVID-19] is going to keep running. And it’s going to come and go and come and go and only with really active mitigation efforts will we ever slow it down. Our whole goal is to slow it down enough until we can get to a vaccine, where we can achieve protection that way as opposed to the disease itself."

"Right now we are experiencing a national forest fire of COVID that is readily consuming any human wood that's available to burn. When you have something like this happening, there's no way that traditional testing and tracing is going to have any meaningful impact....I liken it to trying to plant your petunias in the middle of a Category 5 hurricane."

"This is a disease [COVID-19] that we will be studying for decades and decades to come, just by the very nature of its unique presentations, all the different organs it affected, how it impacted on our immune systems and what then happened because of the dysfunction of our immune systems brought on by this virus.

"I fear that there has been this sense that kids just won't get infected or don't get infected [with SARS-CoV-2] in the same way as adults and that, therefore, they're almost like a bubbled population....There will be transmission. What we have to do is accept that now and include that in our plans."

"We don't understand what is happening in terms of why some people shed more of the [SARS-CoV-2] virus than others....Some people are in the term, 'super spreaders,' and it is never just the individual but the environment as well."

"I still believe distancing is by far the most important aspect of protecting oneself from this [SARS-CoV-2] virus. Aerosols ... surely have even more implications in terms of distance, just because of how far they can travel, but then how infectious are they — how much virus is there?"