Osterholm Quotes

"I'm convinced that taking everyone's temperature before they worked would have more impact in promoting patient safety than mandating the flu shot [for health workers]. If it's a requirement, it's on us to show the data demonstrating that it's useful. We don't have that."

"Some health care workers who get vaccinated, assuming that they are protected, they may actually in fact come to work when they shouldn't be working, with fever, and chills, and actually have a false sense of security, and transmit the virus to these patients."

​"The industry has no appetite for [a universal flu vaccine] right now, unless there are assurances of support throughout the process and that there’s a market at the end of it. There is no market at the end of the rainbow, so why even try to climb on the rainbow to begin with?"

​"Today, we see millions of people going around the world every day on airplanes, and with that, they can spread [a pandemic flu] virus very quickly, and unbeknownst to them that they might be infected, spread it very quickly.​"

​"​Seasonal flu is the one we deal with all the time, but pandemic flu frankly is the one that scares the hell out of us."

"Bird flu is our number one, two, and three priority. For both birds and humans."

"In some ways, the whole discussion now about universal or game-changing [flu] vaccine has somewhat shifted the landscape. Because now people are going to say, 'Wait a minute. Am I going to invest in an intermediate stage of vaccine production … and do this kind of fix on the current vaccine as an intermediate stage or interim stage?' "

"The influenza and antimicrobial resistance pandemic clocks are ticking; we just don't know what time it is."

"Remember the entire world will be in the soup at the same time. The United States and other developed countries will not be sending public health first responders and medical supplies to developing countries in response to the pandemic."

"It seems we've lost an understanding of the difference between a pandemic and an epidemic and what is required to prepare and respond to each."

"Who is going to pay for [a universal flu vaccine], given that the cost of research and development may mean the vaccine will be substantially more expensive than what we already have? What company will embrace that?"

"The work is very concerning in terms of the implications for what H7N9 might do in the days ahead regarding human infection. The whole world is worried about it."

"At the top of our crisis agenda are 2 frightening scenarios: the rapidly emerging consequences of a 1918-like influenza pandemic and the slow-moving tsunami of antimicrobial drug resistance."

"We cannot ensure domestic preparedness without ensuring that global infectious disease threats are contained at the source before they reach the United States."

“If anything that happens to disrupt the supply [of 30 crucial medical items produced offshore], we wouldn’t have any of it. We would suddenly see a tremendous amount of collateral damage. The [pandemic] flu will accentuate all of the other health problems that we have."

"This administration does not have a team in place to deal with [the next pandemic], in my estimation. This is going to take a big team."

"These things cycle and so Zika may have a reduced number of cases but as we see with other viruses, it's going to come back and there is still a very large part of the world that is vulnerable."

"I am absolutely certain that we are going to see [a coronavirus] making its way to the Horn of Africa and it is going to get into the camels there; all the camel traffic is basically from the Horn of Africa to the Arabian Peninsula. Once MERS or a MERS-like virus infects 7 million camels in Somalia, we're going to see an outbreak take off and it will be devastating."

"In 2012, when I published a paper on the limited effectiveness of flu vaccines and said how their availability will always be very limited during a pandemic, there were people who compared me to Andrew Wakefield and the measles vaccine and that I was somehow undermining the whole system. . . . That concept is now actually a norm because people no longer disagree with the fact that we have challenges with our current flu vaccines"

"I still worry more about pandemic influenza than anything else because it could happen tomorrow."