“We have a vaccine we know can spur an immune response, albeit at very high doses. We're going in the right direction. The sobering news is we have a long way to go. So it's muted good news.”
“It's obviously a small step, but at least we have something that could buy us some time. It would probably go to first-responders _ especially hospital personnel _ in case of an emerging pandemic.”
“With seasonal flu, the response rate in healthy young adults ranges from 60 to 90 percent. We all hoped for 70 percent with this vaccine, but it wasn't to be. The next step is to give a booster to those who failed to respond, which we're already doing. Earlier studies have shown a third shot often increases immunity dramatically.”
“The surveillance is going to be so intense that it is very unlikely that there is going to be the type of situation we see everywhere from Nigeria to Indonesia.”
“It won't be what you see in countries in which there is no regulation, in which there is no incentive to compensate farmers, in which the people, who are so poor, when they see their chickens are getting infected they immediately sell them or they don't tell anybody because they don't want them culled. That is a critical issue that is fundamentally different than what we see in Western Europe and that we will see in the United States.”
“It is entirely conceivable that this virus is inherently programmed that it will never be able to go efficiently from human to human. Hopefully the epidemic (in birds) will burn itself out, which epidemics do, before the virus evolves the capability of being more efficient in going from human to human.”
