Robert Belshe Quotations

People who were vaccinated many decades ago are probably partially protected, but not completely protected against smallpox.

If that's true, we still have time to monitor the key genetic changes that would enable (the H5N1 virus) to spread in humans.

It gives us some reassurance that by continuing to monitor the current virus in birds, we can get a sense as to when it'll be an efficient virus. We may have some time to develop new vaccines and better therapies.

Recently, some strains of bird flu viruses have infected people in Asia. There is concern these new strains could cause a pandemic, but they are not infecting people in the United States at this time. Rather than wait for that possibility to occur, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is testing avian influenza vaccines.

Preventing influenza in children, we think, will reduce influenza in our society.

This level of resistance is quite alarming. This is saying that these resistant viruses are spreading, and that's something we have to be concerned about.

There's a lot of people who should not be vaccinated with smallpox vaccine.

The number of humans infected by other people is, if not zero, very close to zero.

It takes a fair amount of restraint using two people to hold down a 3-year-old and give 'em an injection. It's such an easier vaccine to deliver in children. The babies aren't crying. The moms leave our office happy.

The logistics of conducting a large scale vaccination program, if we're talking on the order of millions, would be enormously complex and difficult to conceive how we would successfully do that,