About Senator John Cornyn

Sometime Big Bad John has the logic of a ninth grader. Question everything the Senator says because he loves to mislead Texans. He thinks we’re idiots, I’m sure.

A quote from Senator Cornyn via The Dallas Morning News :

“It is unacceptable that Texas has not received a sufficient amount of vaccine doses. We were promised 3.4 million doses by mid-October and so far weve only been allocated 1.7 million doses,” he said in his weekly conference call with reporters this afternoon. “So, all of this mismanagement makes me wonder, if the government cant run existing health programs competently, then why we should trust the government with even more responsibility, running a new government plan for health care?”

Here’s what’s wrong with Senator Cornyn’s thinking.

• First of all, the government did not manufacture the H1N1 Swine flu vaccine. It is being manufactured by pharmaceutical companies, mostly outside the United States. There were four manufacturers’ products approved for use by the US FDA and CDC: Melbourne-based CSL Ltd.; Novartis AG based in Basel, Switzerland; Sanofi Pasteur of Sanofi-Aventis SA, based in Paris; and MedImmune, LLC, the Maryland US based Subsidiary of London’s AstraZeneca. GlaxoSmithKline has not yet had approval for their vaccine in the US but it was approved in Europe as was a product made by Novartis. A third vaccine by Baxter did not pass the European committee’s approval process but it is still being considered.
• It’s an emergency program with limited lead time due to the very nature of the epidemic.  It’s remarkable that it’s available at all on such short notice.
• The Swine Flu vaccine is not an existing health program that in anyway compares to Medicare or Medicaid or what’s being proposed with health care reform. It’s merely an emergency vaccination program.

Has Senator Cornyn forgotten that he is part of the government? Perhaps he should do something to improve government; perhaps become part of the solution instead of merely writting letters and griping and complaining about the Democrats.