Barack Obama,
Avian Flu Preparedness
“ It turns out that, in fact, we've got the potential for the sort of pandemic that we have not seen in this country since 1918 when the Spanish Flu swept the entire world and tens of millions of people were killed. ”
Barack Obama,
Avian Flu Preparedness
“ Were going to have to rapidly ramp up our stockpiles in order to protect our population. Long term we've got to develop a vaccine and right now our system for creating vaccines is antiquated. It's not well developed. We would need 300 million vaccines for a flu of this type and right now we can produce less than one million, even if we had the appropriate vaccine and we knew how this virus was going to mutate. ”
Barack Obama,
Avian Flu Preparedness
“ It was the single biggest killer in the past century and scientists recognize that periodically what happens is these pandemics occur where flu viruses that have never been seen before by living populations suddenly develop, have mutated from existing animal flues, and that suddenly there is some mechanism for human to human transmission. Once that happens you've got a new flu strain that nobody has any immunity from and it can sweep through a population extraordinarily rapidly. ”
