Political Quotes

“I understand. I plead to the other side of the aisle, if we could work together, the list--I am sure your list went on much longer on important issues. But unless we get some sort of working together without slowing things down and dragging out even asbestos, where we can't debate, we can only have debate, we can't amend; we have to work together to move forward. On the drug industry, again, I am not sure exactly what it is, but right now avian flu, if you look at a map, over the last 6 months, where 10 million birds have died, 20 million, then 100 million, and then 200 million, it is moving our way. It has a 50-percent mortality rate today. If you get infected today--and probably a third of us would get infected because we have no natural immunologic response to that, unlike the regular flu--if it does continue to have a 50-percent mortality, we are in real trouble. We have no vaccines. The reason we have no vaccines today, in large part, is because the liability system has gotten out of whack. We had 26 manufacturing companies back in the 1960s. We have three today. They can't produce a vaccine. It would take them 13 months today. So the liability protections are only in the event there is an emergency, an emergency, a life-threatening emergency, in event there is a bioterrorist attack or in the event there is a pandemic. Today there are no protections given whatsoever. And also built in with those protections is a compensation program.…”