William Schaffner Quotations

When you start re-breathing air in small rooms in your home or at work, you do increase your chances for respiratory trouble, ... But the general sense that cold, wet weather predisposes us to getting colds is not true.

Only half goes directly from the manufacturers to the end users (such as pharmacies). The other half goes through a very complex distribution chain, from one company to another to another, two or three times, before it gets to the end user,

NFID has championed a national initiative involving more than 20 professional groups to improve health care worker influenza immunization rates, and is pleased with the stronger CDC recommendations issued today. A key part of the recommendations are for health care facilities to develop systems to track immunization rates among health care workers and provide feedback during the influenza vaccination campaign, which will allow institutions to better manage information and in turn, increase immunization rates and improve patient safety.

I would anticipate that within two to three years we would have a vaccine that we're satisfied with.

We're depending on the American distribution system set out by private enterprise; that accounts for its complexity,

Vaccine production in this country is not tied to public health priorities.

We should not expect perfection, or we'll be disappointed.

The reason this vaccination campaign was undertaken was spurious. It was a mirage, there was no threat of smallpox from Iraq. And that remains a powerfully sad coda to this whole episode.

This shows us once again that the world is a very small place. We have to remain on guard, even about diseases we usually rarely see anymore in this country.

the stunning fact that children 6 to 23 months old, if they get influenza, have the same high rate of hospitalization as adults 65 years and older.

Sometimes, the crystal ball is a little bit cloudy and the influenza virus fakes us out so that the virus in the vaccine isn't an exact match for the virus circulating in the community.

The vaccine supply this year is expected to be very good, with over 90 million doses coming online in the weeks ahead.

This is a blip on the radar screen, and it surely does mean that we have to keep the radar operative, ... We have to keep testing more viruses.

This looks like an exceedingly pretty piece of work.

It's a late summer phenomenon, ... It walked right out of the textbook.

It's the sort of story you could tell high-school students to get them excited about science.

It's not a light switch, that three days after you take it, you're back to doing pushups and running,

By protecting personal and public health, they are vaccines at their best.

The ultimate take-home line was that even a partially effective vaccine is an important part of the strategy.

The committee decided there was no way to drive that bus, ... There's no organized way to do it. We don't have the influenza police.

The kids were giving the hepatitis A virus to mom, dad and Uncle Tom. And so if they didn't get the disease, the parents were protected.

Even Doctors Without Borders in West Africa are moving the fatality rate from 50 percent down to 30 percent-I bet we can do substantially better than that here.

We're very prepared: Infection-control people in hospitals over the past two months have been reviewing all their infection- control procedures because we anticipated just this sort of thing happening-a person coming from West Africa, they were healthy at the time they traveled, but got sick here.

The supportive care that we're able to provide in the United States is so much better, so much more sophisticated, than what's available in West Africa. ... So we can move that needle of survival way down. Even Doctors Without Borders in West Africa are moving the fatality rate from 50 percent down to 30 percent-I bet we can do substantially better than that here.