Uncontrolled Spread Quotes

“There’s a reason why much of this manufacturing left the US in the first place. It was cheaper to produce overseas. But we can no longer afford the luxury of valuing low price for these goods above all else.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“For those who still cling to the gauzy hope that nations will join hands to better identify and coordinate around global risks, the gloomy truth was revealed by the collective international response to COVID—the application of trade and travel barriers as a way to isolate the virus and the nations that hosted it; the nationalization of production facilities that made critical medical products; the deliberate withholding of drugs and equipment needed for the global response.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“even as the US developed a surplus of COVID vaccine—stockpiling as many as 100 million vaccine doses by the beginning of the month—the Biden administration wouldn’t allow those doses to be shipped to Brazil, which was experiencing an uncontrolled epidemic. We were vaccinating healthy and low-risk sixteen-year-olds in the US while hospitals in India and Brazil were running out of oxygen for patients hospitalized with the disease.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“It took more than a month after the authorization of the first vaccine to begin vaccinating the 1.34 million residents of US nursing homes, where the most COVID deaths were occurring.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“The new speed turned largely on our ability to deploy novel approaches for developing vaccines, where the initial constructs were derived entirely from the virus’s genome. This enabled us to use pieces of synthetic genetic material that could be made quickly available as the vaccine starting point. The application of these tools transformed the way we develop vaccines against a novel viral target. After COVID, these approaches will be routine.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“It was a leaky protocol. The tests were not fit to the purpose for which they were being used. Without masks and other mitigation inside the compound, the White House needed an airtight testing system. They didn’t have one.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“It was once thought that a terrorist or nation-state would be unlikely to weaponize a pathogen that could easily blow back on them. COVID may have changed some of that calculus. Western democracies proved uniquely incapable of implementing respiratory precautions and defending from this threat. The US was one of the worst hit among nations. Terrorists along with more traditional nation-state adversaries may now see that respiratory pathogens are a poor man’s nuclear weapon.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“RNA viruses mutate relatively quickly, and many, like influenza, are able to undergo a process known as antigenic drift, by which the virus is able to alter the surface antigens that are the targets of our antibodies—thus evading our existing immunity. Some viruses, like measles, cannot change their genomic sequence in ways that substantially alter enough of their surface proteins, so measles remains susceptible to our vaccines or the immunity that we get from prior infection. However, for viruses like influenza, as their surface proteins undergo change, the virus is able to dodge the protective antibodies that we’ve developed from past infection or vaccination”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“As the Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins observed, the lab leak theory might appear, at first blush, less plausible than a natural origin, unless you were to assemble the world’s largest repository of dangerous coronaviruses in a lab that’s located in a densely populated city, experiment with them in a lower-security facility with weak biological controls, and start infecting transgenic mammals as a way to evaluate the pathogenicity of the viral collection in the human immune system, all of which the Chinese did.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“Most of the notable features on the virus could be found in coronaviruses already identified in nature, including the furin cleavage site. So, in theory, all of its genetic diversity could have evolved through natural selection. The features didn’t necessarily need to arise from a lab, or from any special circumstance.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“In all, SARS-1 had been the subject of six outbreaks since its last-known natural occurrence, each one the consequence of its escape from a laboratory: one time each in Singapore and Taiwan, and then four separate escapes from the same lab in Beijing.69 Another instance where an experiment in China had gone awry, and triggered the global spread of a novel virus, had occurred in 1977 and involved a strain of H1N1 influenza.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“A highly respected pair of researchers put the odds that such an effort (in this case involving a hypothetical strain of a novel influenza) could create a dangerous pathogen that would accidentally escape from a lab and trigger a pandemic at 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100,000 per lab year.64 This was a meaningful risk. The US government imposed a moratorium on gain-of-function studies in 2014. No such restrictions were imposed in China. The US moratorium was later lifted by the NIH in 2017 and gain of function experiments continued including one widely cited study that was done by US researchers in collaboration with the WIV.65”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“but the concerns that a lab leak could have been the origin of COVID persist largely because the Chinese government has withheld information that could help put such theorizing to rest.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“Given the intense isolation that nations are now likely to experience when they disclose that they’re host to a menacing outbreak of a novel disease, and the economic repercussions they’ll incur, we can expect countries to adjust their behaviors. They’ll be even more reluctant to reveal the existence of a new pathogen or to share strains and sequence information”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“America’s dismal experience with COVID leaves us little choice but to expand the tools we use to inform us of new risks. In bolstering our pandemic preparedness, our purpose shouldn’t be merely to blunt the impact of the next pathogen that emerges, but to make sure that a calamity on the scale of COVID can never happen again, and the US can never be threatened in this way again.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“And yet the CDC wasn’t the right agency to take ownership of anticipating and developing strategies to counter national security threats, because it possesses a retrospective mind-set. The CDC doesn’t generally focus on actionable assessments of future risks; it produces academically oriented after-action reports in an effort to define new scientific principles.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“And yet the CDC wasn’t the right agency to take ownership of anticipating and developing strategies to counter national security threats, because it possesses a retrospective mind-set.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“Later, in 2006, Congress appropriated funds to improve the CDC’s system for detecting and reporting on novel threats, directing the agency to “establish a near real-time electronic nationwide public health situational awareness capability” to “share data and information to enhance early detection of rapid response to, and management of, potentially catastrophic infectious disease outbreaks”; but the CDC never implemented the called-for changes.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“As part of our national preparedness, it will be important to stockpile countermeasures to some of the known risks, but it’s equally important to support the development of novel technology platforms that have broad applicability over a range of potential threats. We can’t always see the future. We can’t focus solely on the dangers that we can see today. And we can’t guess which approaches to developing drugs and vaccines will yield the most effective solutions.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“A decade earlier, we might have struggled for a year to get SARS-CoV-2 to grow in cell cultures. Messenger RNA proved to be an agile approach, allowing us to develop highly effective vaccines directly from the virus’s genetic composition.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“The US government would pay Pfizer only if the vaccine worked, and only for the doses they were buying.37 Bourla wanted it that way. He was concerned that the strings attached with federal grant money could slow the process. He wanted his scientists unencumbered. He knew that speed to market would save lives.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“Pfizer filed with the FDA on Friday, November 20, seeking authorization for emergency use of the vaccine.35 It was the first company to seek permission to offer a COVID vaccine to US patients. It was just 248 days since the company had first set out with BioNTech to develop the vaccine. No vaccine had ever been developed that fast. The process involved 150 different clinical trial sites, 43,661 patient volunteers, the work of thousands of Pfizer colleagues, and the hopes of a weary nation: it was one of the largest, fastest, and most important scientific endeavors of its kind in modern history.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“The mRNA approach could also provide a more reliable way to manufacture the vaccine in large quantities without relying on millions of chicken eggs.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“In fact, Moderna never had the actual coronavirus on its premises. It never needed a sample, just the computational sequence of the virus’s RNA. Once Moderna got the sequence, the entire process to construct a candidate vaccine took just two days.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“The vaccine by Sinovac, called Coronavac, followed this strategy and was eventually shown to be about 50 percent effective, or less.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“This is also the approach used by the two leading COVID vaccines that were made in China and marketed by the Chinese drug makers Sinovac and Sinopharm.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“In the traditional approach to making a vaccine, the antigens are cleaved off the virus that you’re targeting, a tactic that requires scientists to isolate proteins on the surface of the virus.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“However, there’s always a risk that a vaccine can be too potent, or too indiscriminate, and activate too many parts of our immune system.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“But a good vaccine maximizes its ability to kindle all of our immune system’s machinery, not only stimulating the production of antibodies but also spurring the activity of T cells and B cells that have memory, and are able to churn out new antibodies and other mediators of our immune response after they come into contact with a virus months or years later.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

“Antibodies can continue to circulate in our blood for many months, but not all antibodies are equally effective in neutralizing a virus.”
― Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic