Asking the public health community to investigate the role of vaccines in the development of autism is like asking the tobacco industry to investigate the link between lung cancer and smoking.
I think we will see better vaccines within the next 15 years, but I'm not a scientist and am focused on the short-term - what will happen in the interim.
Flu vaccine is far and away the most underutilized.
Vaccines are not traditionally big money makers. They're given once or a few times in one's life, so they're never going to be blockbusters.
Today, however, anti-vaccine activists go out of their way to claim that they are not anti-vaccine; they’re pro-vaccine. They just want vaccines to be safer. This is a much softer, less radical, more tolerable message, allowing them greater access to the media. However, because anti-vaccine activists today define safe as free from side effects such as autism, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, and blood clots—conditions that aren’t caused by vaccines—safer vaccines, using their definition, can never be made.
There are wonderfully talented actresses. It's a really rich field. There isn't as rich a field of material.
Our goal is not to completely eradicate the infection - that would be very difficult - but to produce a vaccine that will prevent not infection but disease. I think this is more possible.
The idea of the live-virus vaccine is to produce in a continuous way some viral antigens.
My proposal now is to test a vaccine first on people who have been infected, and if you show some efficacy at this level, you might be able to go further to study uninfected people in a population with a high rate of infection.
Since the 1920s, virtually all continuing medical and public health education is funded by pharmaceutical companies. In fact, today, the FDA can't even tell health scientists the truth about vaccine contaminants and their likely effects. The agency is bound and gagged by proprietary laws and non-disclosure agreements forced upon them by the pharmaceutical industry. Let us not forget that the pharmaceutical industry, as a special interest group, is the number one contributor to politicians on Capital Hill.
Without equity, pandemic battles will fail. Viruses will simply recirculate, and perhaps undergo mutations or changes that render vaccines useless, passing through the unprotected populations of the planet.
The simple truth is, the short-term solution is for the FDA to allow more importation of safe vaccines from other nations. But the long-term solution is to get more vaccine production within the U.S.
I was less successful in my attempts to effect preventive vaccination against typhus by using the virus and in trying to produce large quantities of serum using large animals
If you Google some sites about the link between vaccines and autism, you can very quickly find that Google is repeating back to you your view about whether that link exists and not what scientists know, which is that there isn't a link between vaccines and autism. It's a feedback loop that's invisible.
In 1990, one in 10 children died before the age of five. That's now down to one in 20, and vaccines were the single biggest factor in that. Had it stayed at 10 percent, 122 million more children would have died.
Vaccines are a miracle; they're fantastic. Anything that makes people hesitate to give their children these vaccines according to the recommended schedule creates risk. Risk for the children who don't get vaccinated and risk for children, some of whom don't have an immune system, so they're benefiting from the fact that the community protection means the disease doesn't get to them.
The ideal thing would be to have a 100 percent effective AIDS vaccine. And to have broad usage of that vaccine. That would literally break the epidemic.
Although it is still important to develop an HIV vaccine, we have significant tools already at our disposal that can make a major impact on the trajectory of this epidemic.
As a global community, we must ensure that legitimate concerns about liability do not hold back the possibility of developing an Ebola vaccine, an essential strategy in our global response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.
What really reinvigorated vaccines was Prevnar, the pneumococcal vaccine that prevents against meningitis and ear infections. Here was the first vaccine to cross the billion-dollar mark.
Scientific literacy is an intellectual vaccine against the claims of charlatans who would exploit ignorance.
Instead of the Government spending $400,000 on immunisation, we may get far better health outcomes if we spend $100,000 in some other way, on nutrition for example...When you have an expenditure on getting your community healthier, then the resistance to many childhood diseases is stronger.
Suffering Third World children have nutritional deficiencies not vaccine deficiencies.
Cancer vaccines are in the future. And they could be very effective. Checkpoint blockade, which is acting your immune system to recognize those cancer cells and kill them is another very promising approach and there have been some checkpoint blockade drugs out in the market now that will release the brake on T lymphocytes, the T lymphocyte is your major killer of tumor cells.
At no time in history have we succeeded in making, in a timely fashion, a specific vaccine for more than 260 million people.
