Paul A. Offit Quotes

Physicians who care for adults generally don't think about vaccines as much as pediatricians do, and adults think of vaccines as a kid thing.

Pertussis is a disease that adolescents and adults give to children.

Today, however, anti-vaccine activists go out of their way to claim that they are not anti-vaccine; they’re pro-vaccine. They just want vaccines to be safer. This is a much softer, less radical, more tolerable message, allowing them greater access to the media. However, because anti-vaccine activists today define safe as free from side effects such as autism, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, and blood clots—conditions that aren’t caused by vaccines—safer vaccines, using their definition, can never be made.

Vaccines are not traditionally big money makers. They're given once or a few times in one's life, so they're never going to be blockbusters.

I've never seen this level of anger at parents who've chosen not to vaccinate their children.

Flu vaccine is far and away the most underutilized.

What really reinvigorated vaccines was Prevnar, the pneumococcal vaccine that prevents against meningitis and ear infections. Here was the first vaccine to cross the billion-dollar mark.

For most mothers, vaccinations become a matter of faith - faith in pharmaceutical companies, faith in public health officials - and I think there's been an erosion of faith.

When you're in the womb, you're in a sterile environment. When you enter the birth canal and the world, you're not. Very quickly, you have, living on the surface of your body, trillions of bacteria, literally trillion.

One bacterium has 2,000 to 6,000 proteins.

The flu can definitely set you up for bacterial pneumonias.

Your child can die from chickenpox.

Pneumococcus is a fairly common cause of pneumonia and [raises the] risk of death in older adults.

People are reticent to give a newborn the hepatitis B vaccine and often delay it.

If you've had a cough that lasted weeks, a cough that just doesn't seem to go away, chances are it was pertussis.