Laurie Garrett Quotations

'Contagion' should serve as a wake-up call not only about the germs, but perhaps more importantly about the frailty of governance, nationally and worldwide.

What public health really is is a trust. That's why I used the term 'Betrayal of Trust' as the title of my book. It's a trust between the government and the people.

Most Americans think that public health is services for poor people, and since most Americans hate poor people and want all poor people's services destroyed, they hate public health.

At no time in history have we succeeded in making, in a timely fashion, a specific vaccine for more than 260 million people.

Without equity, pandemic battles will fail. Viruses will simply recirculate, and perhaps undergo mutations or changes that render vaccines useless, passing through the unprotected populations of the planet.

There is no governing structure for a pandemic, and little more than vague political pressure to ensure limited access to life-sparing tools and medicines for more than half the world population.

Only communist China could take away civil liberties and get away with it.

Right now in human beings, it kills 55 percent of the people it infects. That makes it the most lethal flu we know of that has ever been on planet Earth affecting human beings.

Measures we can take to handle pandemic flu if it emerges in the next six months are limited and bleak, but wise investments and strong science could well bolster the public health armamentarium considerably over the next five years.

We can see hazards approaching and we have time to actually do something.

What we're watching in real time is evolution. And it's a biological process, and it is, by definition, unpredictable.

What killed people during the outbreak in 1918 was not a weak immune system. An over-response from their own immune system known at ARDS killed them. They drowned in their own fluid.

Breeding birds pass their harmless strains to each other and the virus mutates.

People are trying to do the right thing, but nobody knows what the right thing is. Every country feels like they have to do something, and so they order a quick technological fix.

Fear's a bad way to be motivated, but a realistic sense of risk is a rational approach.

It looks to me like we're spending an awful lot of money per vaccinated American and an awful low amount on your essential surveillance.

If it happens, unions will refuse to fly, products will not be transferred, and we would see the global economy start to fall apart like a house of cards.

Let's pretend there's a pandemic. Let's everybody run around and play your role. Main result is that there is tremendous confusion. ... Nobody knows who's in charge. Nobody knows the chain of command.

In all, 86 per cent of the increased life expectancy was due to decreases in infectious diseases. And the bulk of the decline in infectious disease deaths occurred prior to the age of antibiotics. Less than 4 per cent of the total improvement in life expectancy since 1700s can be credited to twentieth-century advances in medical care.

[W]hat suffers in the atmosphere of immediacy is analysis. What suffers in this search for speed is depth. The media in the wealthy world are becoming increasingly simplistic, superficial, and celebrity-focused.

Ebola haunted Zaire because of corruption and political repression. The virus had no secret powers, nor was it unusually contagious. For centuries Ebola had lurked in the jungles of central Africa. Its emergence into human populations required the special assistance of humanity's greatest vices : greed, corruption, arrogance, tyranny, and callousness.

All across America news organizations have been devoured by massive corporations, and allegiance to stockholders, the drive for higher share prices, and push for larger dividend returns trumps everything that the grunts in the newsrooms consider their missions.

All too many journalists seem to mistake scandal mongering for tenacious investigation, and far too many aspire to make themselves the story.

It would be easy to descend into despair, not only about the state of journalism, but the future of American democracy. But giving up is not an option. There is too much at stake.