Laurie Garrett
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"Laurie Garrett" is a Pulitzer prize-winning science journalist and writer of two bestselling books. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1996 for a series of works published in Newsday, chronicling the Ebola/Ebola virus outbreak in Zaire.

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We're building a whole public health strategy based on these drugs, extrapolating a huge amount from a few small studies. How could you say they are efficacious? We don't know. Given that governments are spending millions, it's unconscionable that companies aren't giving more answers.

[Right now] it is not highly contagious. This one has not made that mutational step. That is the shoe we hope never falls. As of right now it is very difficult for this type of transmission to happen. There are only a handful of examples.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.