Quotes from Seth Berkley

Now, when you get a viral infection, what normally happens is it takes days or weeks for your body to fight back at full strength, and that might be too late. When you're pre-immunized, what happens is you have forces in your body pre-trained to recognize and defeat specific foes. So that's really how vaccines work.

I love science, and I believe in it. I have a faith that science can solve problems and make the world a better place.

We've actually eliminated Type II polio in the world, at least as far as we can tell.

When AIDS first appeared, people didn't know what it was. You'll remember that it affected mostly young gay men - it was actually called GRID for a short period of time: Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Syndrome - and people thought it actually might be recreational drugs or other types of toxins.

You'd see little shallow graves, lined up, one after the other - babies. That's what happens when measles goes through a nutritionally deficient community. It's a horrible disease, and it spreads incredibly efficiently.

When it comes to providing aid, developing innovations, and making bold steps that change the course of history, the United States is usually on the front lines.

Children who are healthy - and have adequate nutrition - are much more likely to attend school. People who finish school and do well have higher earning potential in their adult lives.

The GAVI Alliance has achieved many things in its first dozen years, but none more important than helping save more than 5.5 million lives and prevent untold illness and suffering.

As more and more people adopt an urban lifestyle and cities continue to swell, not only does the risk of urban epidemics increase - something we haven't seen much of for decades - but the need for larger emergency stockpiles can increase, too.

As megacities like Mexico City and Lagos become increasingly common, we could see a rise of the urban epidemic and a new era of infectious disease threatening global health security.

More people living in less space can put greater strain on already limited sanitation resources, and this can create a fertile breeding ground for waterborne infectious disease and the insects spreading them.

As cities get bigger, our best defence will be to prevent outbreaks in the first place by building better public health systems, improving childhood immunisation through better routine immunisation and pre-emptive vaccination campaigns.

Measles is probably the best argument for why there needs to be global health, and why we have to think about it as a global public good. Because in a sense, measles is the canary in the coal mine for immunization. It is, you know, highly transmissible. The vaccine costs 15 cents, so it's not - you know, shouldn't be an issue in terms of cost.

In global health, emergency vaccine stockpiles are like the insurance policy you never really wanted to take out: you resent the cost and have mixed feelings about never making a claim. Moreover, given that a stockpile is often a last resort, if you ever fall back on it, you have, in some way, already failed.

New vaccines are being developed all the time, which could save many more lives and dramatically improve people's health. And this goes beyond the traditional burden of childhood infectious diseases.

If you want to know the value of vaccines, just spend some time in a clinic in Africa. The faces of the mothers and fathers say it all: vaccines prevent illness and save lives.

With infectious disease, without vaccines, there's no safety in numbers.

The return on investment in global health is tremendous, and the biggest bang for the buck comes from vaccines. Vaccines are among the most successful and cost-effective health investments in history.

Finding innovative ways to deliver vaccines to children in developing countries is at the heart of our work. The very fact that we don't have people on the ground but rather work in an alliance with other organizations is itself an innovation that was the basis of GAVI's establishment in 2000.

The virus that causes AIDS is the trickiest pathogen scientists have ever confronted. It mutates furiously, it has decoys to evade the immune system, it attacks the very cells that are trying to fight it, and it quickly hides itself in your genome.

Leadership is about vision and responsibility, not power. And I try to model that in all of my interactions.