NIH Director Francis Collins Speaks on Sequestration. (September 7, 2013)

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins spoke to The Huffington Post last month about the impacts of sequestration on NIH, citing the universal flu vaccine as an example of potential promise lost. "If you want to convert this into real meaningful numbers, that means people are going to die of influenza five years from now because we don't yet have the universal vaccine," he said. "And God help us if we get a worldwide pandemic that emerges in the next five years, which takes a long time to prepare a vaccine for. If we had the universal vaccine, it would work for that too." HuffPost also ran a lengthy piece last month on the impacts of sequestration on science.