Peter Hotez

It looks like the global health movies you show to first-year Masters of Public Health students.

So many of these neglected tropical diseases are not acute infections like ... the flu or common cold, many are chronic, debilitating conditions that mimic non-communicable diseases ... If somebody has epilepsy, they don\'t think of cysticercosis ... If a child tests poorly in school, the pediatrician or nurse practitioner won\'t think of toxocariasis.

Poverty is seldom evenly distributed across the country. Poverty clusters in pockets. It clusters in northeastern Brazil, it clusters in northern Argentina, it clusters in southern Mexico, it clusters in southwestern China, well, it\'s the same thing in the USA. Poverty is clustered in the American South.

While we were calling them neglected tropical diseases, the \'tropical\' part is probably a misnomer, most of the world\'s neglected tropical diseases are in wealthy countries. It\'s the poor living among the wealthy.

Aedes aegypti tends to be a day biter, but once it's inside houses, it could bite anytime.

It is now fully integrated into public life of this country, it\'s an example of how pervasive the anti-vaccine movement is right now, and now to try to start dismantling it is going to be really hard work.

That is really astonishing, i don\'t know what he was thinking to specifically target a constituent like that. I would have thought there\'s probably some House ethics rules that prevent you from doing that. It\'s kind of an abuse of power, in a way.

The one we missed totally was New York epidemic.

That\'s an all-star batting average in Major League Baseball.

Measles is typically the first disease to return when there are interruptions in vaccinations because it is so highly contagious, so the fact that measles is now returning in some areas is an indication that our vaccine ecosystem is fragile and in some areas breaking down despite general gains.

The lesson we\'ve learned is coronavirus infections are serious and one of the newest and biggest global health threats.

I don\'t understand why they have to be kept on a ship, we\'re employing what I call 14th-century approaches and ethics to individuals with transmissible disease.

It is hard to try to put the genie back in the bottle once you have an epidemic. if you have measles, coronavirus, plus the flu, it\'s hard to fight that.

I think we\'ve maxed out on the benefit of travel screening, it made sense when the passengers were coming from one country, and I think in some ways it was effective. But now we\'re really going to see diminishing returns.

If there is immune enhancement in laboratory animals vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine, that\'s a showstopper.

There is a risk of immune enhancement, the way you reduce that risk is first you show it does not occur in laboratory animals.

It looked really good -- it was protective, it was safe, but the problem was we couldn\'t raise any money.

When Tony Fauci said 12 to 18 months, I thought that was ridiculously optimistic, and I\'m sure Paul Offit did, too.

That has the potential to be the most destabilizing part of this epidemic, even a single death among health care workers... could make the whole thing unravel.

The overwhelming priority right now is to ensure that all of our hospital frontline staff, clinical staff, have that level of protection.

I can\'t think of another example where things have gone that quickly.

The good news is,( the vaccine) is producing neutralizing antibodies, which scientists think is important for protective immunity against Covid-19, what is less certain is whether the levels of neutralizing antibody are high enough to confer complete protection, or whether this will be partially protective.

The results, such as they are presented, provide interesting data that are reassuring ... This needs to be replicated and it needs to be peer-reviewed.

It was just open it up and then more or less business as usual, with a little bit of window dressing, this is not an abstract number of cases. Were seeing people pile into intensive care units.

We\'ve never finished the first wave, we didn\'t complete that social distancing period that we needed to do.

Things opened up prematurely.

This might stimulate local or systemic cross protecting immunity.

This time, we have to go back to what\'s called\' containment mode,\' meaning less than one new case per million residents per day.

We are now projecting that our intensive care units will fill up over the next two weeks. And the reason that\'s significant is because we know as ICUs start to fill up, mortality goes up, it gets harder and harder to manage all of those patients, even if you have -- even if you\'re fully staffed.

That is really worrisome and as those numbers rise, we\'re seeing commensurate increases in the number of hospitalizations and ICU admissions, you get to the point where you overwhelm ICUs and that\'s when the mortality goes up.