The Vaccine Race Quotes

“Science appears calm and triumphant when it is completed; but science in the process of being done is only contradiction and torment, hope and disappointment." － Pierre Paul Émile Roux, French bacteriologist and developer of the first effective treatment for diphtheria”
― Meredith Wadman, The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease

“The silent pressure for conformity exists whenever grants and contracts for research are under the direct control of governments; . . . then . . . no science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power. —Jacob Bronowski, Polish-British mathematician and science writer, 1971”
― Meredith Wadman, The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease

“. . . rubella does not seem to invoke the fascination of thalidomide despite the fact that in a single epidemic in the United States it caused more birth defects in one year than thalidomide did during its entire time on the world market. —William S. Webster, University of Sydney Medical School, Australia, 1998”
― Meredith Wadman, The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease

“I believe that life is chaotic, a jumble of accidents, ambitions, misconceptions, bold intentions, lazy happenstances, and unintended consequences, yet I also believe that there are connections that illuminate our world, revealing its endless mystery and wonder. —David Maraniss, American author and journalist”
― Meredith Wadman, The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease

“In 1950 Koprowski tested his vaccine on intellectually disabled children at Letchworth Village in Thiells, New York, an institution where “naked residents, unkempt and dirty, huddled in sterile dayrooms.”25 His use of people with mental disorders was not without precedent. During the war, under the sponsorship of the U.S. government, leading researchers had infected psychotic residents at an Illinois state hospital with malaria to test the effectiveness of experimental drugs.26 They had also tested trial influenza vaccines by requiring intellectually disabled people to breathe in influenza virus through aviation masks or to inhale a nebulized spray into their nostrils for four minutes; both vaccinated people and unvaccinated controls were forced to breathe in the virus.27 One of the leaders of these experiments was the young Jonas Salk.”
― Meredith Wadman, The Vaccine Race: How Scientists Used Human Cells to Combat Killer Viruses

“Public health officials told newly pregnant women—often mothers with several children already at home—to stay away from children, who were the most likely carriers of the disease.30 How exactly a mother of young children might manage to do this was unclear.”
― Meredith Wadman, The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease