Sen. Ron Johnson on COVID Response: Government Ignored Science, Embraced Vaccine Agenda

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) speaks during an interview for American Thought Leaders in Washington on May 15, 2023. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

The main reason that the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic became a “miserable failure” is that leading health officials went out of their way to advance an agenda instead of basing their decisions on science, including the science behind natural immunity, says Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).

“They didn’t follow the science. They ignored it,” the senator said Monday in an interview on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program, speaking of the nation’s top public health leaders and policy-makers.

The interview comes with the expiration of the COVID-19 public health emergency first declared by President Donald Trump in 2020 and repeatedly extended by President Joe Biden. It also comes as Dr. Rochelle Walensky ends her tenure as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a move Johnson described as “one of the rats fleeing the [sinking] ship.”

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“They don’t let any facts or science get in the way of what they want to do,” Johnson told host Jan Jekielek. “They wanted to shut down schools. They wanted to force a vaccine in every arm. They did not want to [acknowledge] natural immunity.”

“One question I keep asking every medical professional: How do you explain that 40 to 50 percent of people infected with COVID were asymptomatic, other than natural immunity?” he continued. “And we knew that right out of the box. We knew immediately that almost half of the people that contracted COVID—like me—ended up being asymptomatic. How do you explain that other than the natural immunity?”

False COVID Narrative Exposed

Johnson said he felt “encouraged” by the testimonies of Dr. Marty Makary, a professor of surgery and health policy at the Johns Hopkins University, and Dr. Margery Smelkinson, a scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Speaking on May 12 in front of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, the two experts testified that government officials were deliberately ignoring evidence of effective natural immunity in favor of massive mandatory vaccine rollouts.

Specifically, according to Makary and Smelkinson, the Biden administration not only downplayed the protective effect of natural immunity, but also continued to propagate false claims such as that vaccines prevent transmission and that there were no risks whatsoever to taking the vaccine, despite “overwhelming data” that show otherwise.

“I certainly know that the vaccine injuries have been completely denied, overlooked, so that people suffering from vaccine injuries are going without effective treatment,” Johnson told Jekielek, pointing to a recent study suggesting that the benefits Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines offer was offset by the potentially deadly cardiovascular risks associated with the jabs.

“It has examined Pfizer and Madonna’s own trial data, and come up with that conclusion,” Johnson said, adding that those data should not have been made so obscenely hard to obtain and analyze.

“Why is it taken a court battle and FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests to get what should be public information out of the federal health agencies?” he asked. “Why are they literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pages?”

“If we had federal health agencies that are being honest and transparent, they would be showing us the key documents that ... show us exactly what they looked at, what might have caused them some concern,” he added. “But they’re not doing that. Instead, they’re doing these massive data dumps.”

Problems with Vaccine Trials

The study, published in April in the journal Cell, found that COVID-19 vaccines didn’t have an overall impact on mortality, which would inevitably lead to the question of whether those trial data were actually used by the federal government in the approval process.

“Well, we don’t know,” Johnson said. “They won’t tell us. That’s our problem.”

“If they had good reasons, they should just be laying it out for us in all its detail. But the fact that they’re not, the fact that they’re resistant, that tells you something.”

“Of course, what we’ve seen so far is a long, long list of vaccine injuries that were recognized in the trials by those companies,” he added. “We know that all-cause mortality was higher for the vaccinated group versus the unvaccinated group. We know that they completely destroyed our ability to really trace the long-term effectiveness and the long-term safety of these things by unblinding the participants and vaccinating all of them.”

There also exists a problem with the interpretation of the vaccines’ effectiveness. Scientists distinguish between relative vaccine effectiveness, which is measured by comparing people who have received one vaccine to those who received a different type of vaccine; and absolute vaccine effectiveness, which is measured by comparing vaccinated people to unvaccinated people.

“They vaccinated all of them. When you understand who was in the trial, these were generally healthy people,” the senator said. “The trial was on very healthy people—not pregnant women, not the elderly. So it was a healthy group. And even there, it looks like they hid the data in terms of vaccine injuries and the true overall effectiveness.”

“People really need to be concerned more about absolute the effectiveness in terms of making their decision on whether or not to be vaccinated.”