People From Hartford

"[H]ad we had those investments early on, to carry this all the way through clinical trials years ago, we could have had a vaccine ready to go."

"[W]e took this on... with the idea of pioneering not only interest in science, but also a new business model, and the business model part, we haven't quite figured out yet, because we're trying to make... vaccines for diseases no one else will make."

"So we have a vaccine now in clinical trials, a vaccine that we hope will advance to the clinic soon, a Hookworm vaccine in clinical trials, a new vaccine that's moving into the clinic. I like to say that these are the most important diseases that you've never heard of. These are some of the most common afflictions of the world's population, but they mostly occur among people who live in extreme poverty... [S]o there is no model to figure out who's going to pay for them. So as a consequence, neither the biotechs nor the big pharmaceutical companies make those vaccines."

"So we've got to figure out what the ecosystem is going to be, to develop vaccines that are not going to make money."

"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."

"[V]accines are safe and cannot possibly cause autism..."

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

"[W]e also took on, a decade ago, the interesting problem of making Coronavirus vaccines because we recognized these as enormous public health threats, and yet we have not seen the big pharma guys and the biotech's rushing into this space. So we... partnered with a group at the and the to take on the big scientific challenge of Coronavirus vaccines..."

"Baylor's National School of Tropical Medicine... includes as its research arm a... product development partnership (PDP). There are 16 PDPs worldwide... international nonprofit organizations that develop and manufacture s—drugs, diagnostics, and vaccines—for NTDs, as well as for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis (TB), and malaria. Together, the NTDs, Tb, and malaria are sometimes broadly defined as "neglected diseases." PDPs develop and test new products for neglected diseases that the major pharmaceutical companies may not have an interest in because they are poverty-related afflictions that will therefor not generate significant sales income. The National School of Tropical Medicine's PDP is known as the PDP, and it is specifically focused on developing NTD vaccines."

"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 (NTDs). ...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 [the journal]."

"One reason... to move our scientists to Houston was to take advantage of being located within the [TMC]... comprising more than 50 biomedical institutions and 100,000 employees, occupying a building space that exceeds that of downtown Los Angeles. A second reason... generous support from Texas Children's Hospital (the world's largest...) which also housed the Sabin Vaccine Institute PDP... Our goal for moving and becoming linked to the TMC was to increase the number of new vaccines we are creating for the poorest people in less developed countries, [and] to accelerate the pace at which they are produced. ...[T]oday we have two vaccines in clinical trials—with others in various stages of development."

"The reason why we have this situation now with Omicron... is we allowed large unvaccinated populations in low- and middle-income countries to remain unvaccinated. Delta arose out of an unvaccinated population in India in early 2021, and Omicron out of a large unvaccinated population on the African continent later in the same year. So, these two variants of concern represent failures, failures by global leaders to work with sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America to vaccinate the Southern Hemisphere, vaccinate the Global South.... myself...Dr. Bottazzi... and our team of 20 scientists... make vaccines for diseases that the pharma companies won’t make... the only thing we know how to do is make low-cost, straightforward vaccines for use in resource-poor settings... it was very difficult to get funding. We got no support from Operation Warp Speed, no support really from the G7 countries... now we’ve licensed our prototype vaccine, and help in the co-development, to India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and now Botswana.... it’s really exciting to show that, you know, you don’t need to be a multinational pharmaceutical company and just make brand-new technologies that will only be suitable for the Northern Hemisphere. We can really make a vaccine for the world."

"[I]n Houston (and elsewhere in Texas) 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... [W]e found widespread NTDs... in Texas and elsewhere in the southern United States. ...NTDs are first and foremost diseases of acute poverty. ...[W]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 ."

"In 2011, together with a team of 15 scientists, I relocated to Houston, Texas, to launch a new school devoted to poverty-related diseases. The National School of Tropical Medicine at is a joint venture among three biomedical institutions—Baylor, , and the —with a mission devoted to research on and training in the treatment of neglected tropical diseases, or NTDs..."

"We invite scientists from all over the world to come into our vaccine labs to learn how to make vaccines under a quality umbrella, whereas you cannot walk into Merck or GSK or Pfizer or Moderna and say, “Show me how to make a vaccine.” With our group, we can.... the biggest frustration was never really getting that support from the G7 countries... I going on cable news networks... trying to raise meager funds just to get started... fortunately, we were able to get some funding through Texas- and New York-based philanthropies, and...we raised about...$7 million...with that, we were able to pay our scientists to actually do this, transfer the technology, no patent, no strings attached, to India, now, as I said, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Botswana... we’ve been getting calls for help all over the world from ministries of science and ministries of health, and we do what we can. We could do a lot — I mean, if we had even a fraction of the support that, say, Moderna or the other pharma companies had gotten, who knows? We might have been able to have the whole world vaccinated by now.... It’s even a vegan vaccine... So, now our partners in Indonesia... are trying to do this as a halal vaccine for Muslim-majority countries, which is pretty exciting, as well."

"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 [those] claims... that MMR (measles, mumps-rubella) and other childhood vaccines are either unsafe or cause autism."

"There's still no road map for what you do to make a vaccine in the midst of a devastating public health outbreak."

"I always liked Stephanie. She reminds me of Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka. She’s very intelligent and thank God she is there. Her mind is so into the business."

"When I became vegan I stopped training for myself and started training with a purpose greater than my own. Veganism for me is about mindfulness. I do this to liberate animals. … Before I went vegan I had tendonitis, and I would get joint aches and ligament strains, and my knees would be sore. All that went away as soon as I switched to a wholefood plant-based diet. It’s anti-inflammatory, and your digestive system gets a break. … I didn’t understand what it meant to be an athlete. I was big, muscularly, but I was swollen; it wasn’t ‘healthy big’. Now I’m leaner, sharper, quicker, and my mind’s sharper too."

"I started freerunning when I was 16. It just felt like an evolution of what I always wanted to do as a child: be creative, climb on things. It let me apply an adult mentality to that playfulness. Then I was introduced to veganism. And from there, I found out that the biggest percentage of pollution on the planet comes from animal agriculture. Once I discovered that, it became my calling. I think we all have something to contribute; we just have to look at the bigger picture and ask, “With what we’ve been given, what message can we promote that helps the greater good?”"

"No one who works 40 hours a week will beat me in a marathon."

"The long, extended play sessions of my youth were essential to the creator I am today. It helped exercise those world-building and problem solving pathways in my brain, and in turn enabled access to those deep recesses of the creative mind. Like learning a second language, it sinks in more thoroughly when you start young."

"Arranging props in a scene such as this is a joy. With gravity on my side, everything at arms length and no arduous physical conditions constricting me, I can go for hours at a clip, sculpting piles of stuff into a landscape of intersecting shape, form and color until my eye wanders endlessly among the details. In such conditions, how the image is captured has little bearing on the success of the arrangement – though the time-saving work flow enabled by digital preview, capture and post processing, certainly helps."

"I had so many other interests at the time: drawing, tinkering, building, inventing, games, sports, climbing trees. It took me through high school, and then college to settle on photography. But a half-century later, I'm still staging my shots."

"They were a lot of fun but at the time I had two children. I’m just a mother at heart, so I decided it was time to retire from the screen. I would hate to be around today. In my time you learned your craft with small roles. They always handed you a script and told you, ‘This is your role.’ Now, you have to read for a part, over and over. 2,000 people have to approve before you get anything. I liked my era, where you were groomed."

"The Mummy's Tomb was my only horror film, so I remember it vividly. We had to work all night on the kidnapping and graveyard scenes. Lon Chaney Jr. had a strap around his neck to support me. One arm was supposed to be paralyzed and he could only hold me with the other arm. I had this negligee with marabou—and one of the feathers somehow got under Lon’s rubber mummy mask. He was one unhappy actor—because he couldn’t get it out. After it was over, he thanked me for being petite. It seems some of my predecessors were a little on the heavy side! The day of the kidnapping scene—where the Mummy takes me from my bed, the director told me, "When you see him you really have to scream!" He thought since I’d never done anything like that before, I wouldn’t be able to do it. One look at Lon Chaney Jr. coming at me and it wasn’t hard to let out that scream at all!"

"Comparative anatomy, therefore, proves that man is naturally a frugivorous animal, formed to subsist upon fruits, seeds, and farinaceous vegetables."

"Mr. Trump has said very clearly for months now a policy that's been ignored, which is that he believes that we need to have a temporary suspension to stop refugees from coming in from countries where terrorist activities are rampant or in a war. That's the issue, not the Khan family loss which we all regret, not the loss of many other American families which we all regret. The issue is how to protect the homeland. And the second part of the issue which is being ignored is the cause of these losses, because it forced our American military to go back into Iraq, to go into Syria and that cause was the policies that were put together in January of 2009 by President Clinton and Secretary Obama that caused ISIS to rise."

"Frankly, what Secretary Clinton did in her speech on Thursday was totally ignoring it. She sees an America that, "Morning in America," as she said. It's not morning in America. And if it's midnight in America, like she accused Mr. Clinton of, it's the policies of Obama and Clinton that caused it to be midnight. Mr. Trump has neither position."

"A lobbyist can perform no greater favor for a lawmaker than to help get him elected. It is the ultimate political , and it can be cashed in again and again. No other firm holds more of this precious currency than the Washington shop known as Black, Manafort. Legally, there are two firms. Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly, a lobbying operation... Black, Manafort, Stone & Atwater, a political-consulting firm, has helped elect... powerful... politicians... The partners... say that the lobbying and political-consulting functions are kept separate. ...Charges , president of the public-interest lobbying group : "It's institutionalized conflict of interest." ...The partners charge six-figure fees to lobby and six-figure fees to manage election campaigns. As a result, they take home six-figure salaries. ...They unabashedly peddle their access to the Reagan Administration."

"As a political firm, Black, Manafort represents Democrats and Republicans alike--and sometimes candidates running for the same seat. ...Stone and Atwater's offices are right across the hall from each other, prompting one congressional aide to ask facetiously, "Why have primaries for the nomination? Why not have the candidates go over to Black, Manafort & Stone and argue it out?""

"For more than five years... Paul Manafort, lobbied for a Washington-based group [the Kashmiri American Council]... [charged with operating] as a front for Pakistan's intelligence service. Manafort’s work... was only one part of a wide-ranging portfolio that, over several decades, included... foreign clients ranging from Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and Zaire’s brutal dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, to an Angolan rebel leader accused by human rights groups of torture. His role as an adviser to Ukraine’s then prime minister, , an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, prompted concerns within the Bush White House that he was undermining U.S. foreign policy. It was considered so politically toxic in 2008 that presidential candidate John McCain nixed plans for Manafort to manage the ..."

"Paul Manafort went to work in Ukraine in 2005... A U.S. embassy cable... described Manafort’s job as giving an “extreme makeover” to... presidential hopeful... , who had the backing of the and most of Ukraine’s wealthiest tycoons. His , the cable said, was "a haven" for "mobsters and oligarchs." ...Yanukovych had served jail time in his youth for theft and battery. He also had a hard time speaking Ukrainian... The man paying the exorbitant bills for these efforts was... the coal and metals magnate . ...[S]ome of Yanukovych’s political patrons were implicated in the murder of ... abducted and beheaded [in 2000]."

"Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and I had worked together through the Reagan campaign. When the Reagan campaign got short of cash, [we] decided to start a political consulting firm. Paul Manafort came in one day and said, "You know we ought to start a lobbying firm, because I'm getting a lot of calls from people who all know we work for Reagan and know the people who are going to be in the Reagan administration, and they want lobbying." So we did."

"This is not a temperament issue. The Clinton campaign needs to try to make it into a temperament issue for one reason because they know that over 70 percent of the American people don't believe a thing she says. And so, therefore, her putting up policies that she's going to do have no credibility."

"Manafort arrived in Ukraine in the wake of the ... doctors determined that had been poisoned with dioxin... With guidance from Manafort and backing from Moscow, the made an astonishing comeback over the next five years, culminating in Yanukovych’s successful bid for the presidency in 2010. ...With money from the Party of Regions and its... backers, [Manafort] hired lobbyists in Washington to spin the imprisonment of [former Prime Minister] Tymoshenko as an example of Ukraine’s commitment to the rule of law. ...Such services did not come cheap... with payments worth $12.7 million designated for [Manafort] between 2007 and 2012. The indictment... claims Manafort and an associate laundered the proceeds of his work in Ukraine through offshore accounts, and failed to pay U.S. taxes on the income."

"What we were doing was sort of trying to use our relationships that we had built up, first through and then through NCPAC, and to create a business that would focus on political consulting."

"I will stipulate for the purpose of today that, you know, you could characterize this as influence peddling."

"Roger's the first one who introduced us to Donald, and Donald was one of our clients at Black, Manafort, Stone in the early 80s and was a client of ours for a long time."

"Nine months after the Ukrainian revolution, Manafort’s family life also went into crisis. ...[W]hen he called home in tears or threatened suicide in the spring of 2015, he was pleading for his marriage. ...Manafort had rented his mistress a $9,000-a-month apartment in Manhattan and a house in the Hamptons, not far from his own. He had handed her an American Express card, which she’d used to good effect. ...Because he clumsily obscured his infidelity—and because his mistress posted about their travels on Instagram—his family caught him again. ...He entered the clinic in Arizona... according to [his daughter] Andrea’s texts. “...in the middle of a massive emotional breakdown.” ...[B]y the early months of 2016, Manafort was back in greater Washington... He wrote Donald Trump a crisp memo listing all the reasons he would be an ideal campaign ..."

"Her talking about the Obama Administration has done a great job and deserves an A on the economy. I mean, please, let's talk to American families and sit around the dinner table at night figuring how to pay their bills. The American economy is not in good shape; productivity is failing."

"When people think of Washington corruption, they think of organizations like Black, Manafort & Stone, that shook down dictators, took all their money, and then tried to take America's government and make them serve the dictator's interest. You know, it is the swamp."

"Over the decades, Manafort had cut a trail of foreign money and influence into Washington, then built that trail into a superhighway. When it comes to serving the interests of the world’s autocrats, he’s been a great innovator. His indictment in October... alleges , false statements, and other acts of personal corruption. ...[H]is personal corruption is less significant, ultimately, than his lifetime role as a corrupter of the American system. That he would be accused of helping a foreign power subvert American democracy is a fitting coda to his life’s story."

"For five months, Trump's campaign manager was Paul Manafort, advisor to dictators and near dictators including a pro-Moscow regime in Ukraine that was ousted by a popular uprising."

"The hiring of Manafort and others, specifically , a Russian-born real estate mogul with mob ties whose 2015 emails indicate that he hoped to help secure both a Moscow-based real estate deal and the American presidency for Trump—showed a disturbing pattern of associations with those around Vladimir Putin, head of the in Moscow..."

"The focus of NCPAC was to use all the tools of a campaign, but instead of having a candidate, to use it through a ."

"You notice for the first time that she has freckles. You didn't know they still made them."

"... and what you are left with is a premonition of the way your life will fade behind you, like a book you have read too quickly, leaving a dwindling trail of images and emotions until all you can remember is a name."

"You are on the anti-cline of the first rush. You are also experiencing the inevitable disappointment of clubs. You enter with an anticipation that on the basis of past experience is completely unjustified. You always seem to forget that you don't really like to dance. Since you are already here, though, you owe it to yourself to make a sustained assault on the citadel of the senses."

"You are a republic of voices tonight. Unfortunately, that republic is Italy."