"In 2006, I became founding editor in chief of PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, a then new journal for a growing community of scientists and public health officials committed to studying the . ...I became deeply impressed with the number of papers reporting on disease findings in middle-income countries, and even in some high-income countries. This... combined with my personal experiences after moving to Texas and seeing first-hand the endemic tropical diseases, inspired me to look more deeply into the health disparities of the poor who live in the midst of wealth. ...Many of the findings in this book are based on data and information published in ."

“There is an urgency to create vaccines for diseases which don't make money.”

“n Houston is an area known as the Fifth Ward... Driving... deep into this neighborhood reminded me of the terrible poverty I had seen... in destitute areas of Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, and China. I saw... images... just like the standard global disease movie typically shown to first-year public health or medical students. ...It was even more astonishing when we turned our global health lens inward to study diseases that were infecting impoverished areas... e found widespread NTDs... in Texas and elsewhere in the southern United States. ...NTDs are first and foremost diseases of acute poverty. ...e determined that 12 million Americans who live at such poverty levels suffer from at least one NTD. The diseases include neglected parasitic infections such as,,, and.”

“Today, measles ranks among the most deadly of childhood infections, yet parents and guardians are walking away from protecting their children against this and other deadly diseases in unprecedented numbers. They are abandoning the option of protecting their children because of phony propaganda released by an anti-vaccine movement that began in 1968. Since then, the movement has become scary, powerful, and well organized. One aspiration of this book is to counter claims... that MMR and other childhood vaccines are either unsafe or cause autism.”

“But we collaborated with a unique group that figured out how to solve the problem. That if you narrow it down to the smallest subunit, the piece that... called the receptor binding domain, that docs with the receptor, you get protection, and you don't get that immune enhancement phenomenon. ...We proposed this to the. They funded it and we wound up actually making and manufacturing, in collaboration with, a first generation SARS vaccine. So SARS was the one that emerged in 2003... and then this new one... we call the SARS 2 Coronavirus. We had it manufactured, but then we could never get the investment to take it beyond that. ...We had the vaccine ready to go, but we couldn't move it into the clinic, because of lack of funding, because by then nobody was interested in Coronavirus vaccines.”

“I perceive... a dearth of voices speaking out against the modern anti-vaccination movement. Their false claims and public statements more often than not go unchallenged. I hope that this book might serve as a clarion call for other scientists and physicians to speak out on behalf of science.”

“When the Chinese started putting up the data on Bioarchive in January-February, we saw a very close homology between the two, and realized that we may be sitting on a very attractive Coronavirus vaccine. Now, we're working... again with NIH, and we're working with BARDA and others to get the funding, but now we'll have that lag. ...hese clinical trials are not going to go that quickly because of that immune enhancement. It's going to take time. ...nfortunsately, some of my colleagues in the biotech industry are making these inflated claims. ...ou've seen this... in the newspapers, "We're going to have this vaccine in weeks..." What they're really seeing is that they can move a vaccine into clinical trials, but this will not go quickly because as we start vaccinating human volunteers, especially in areas where we have community transmission, we're going to have to proceed very slowly, very cautiously. The FDA is on top of that. They have a great team in place at the. They're aware of the problem, but it's not going to go quickly. We are going to have to follow this very slowly, cautiously, to make certain that we're not seeing that immune enhancement. So now we're hearing projections, a year, 18 months, who knows...”