“We’re spending tens of billions of dollars on research. Are we spending any money on vaccine injuries at all?”
Today, I sit down with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), a member of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs as well as the Budget and Finance Committees.
In this deep-dive interview, we discuss what he sees as a global push for mass vaccination and a concerted effort to suppress early treatment. Johnson has been at the forefront of efforts to change America’s COVID-19 policies and has hosted a number of hearings and roundtables on early outpatient treatment for COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccine injuries.
He also shares his thoughts on the banking crisis, the Russia-Ukraine War, and what he sees as the path forward for America.
Interview trailer:
Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/its-all-being-covered-up-sen-ron-johnson-on-missing-batch-of-fauci-emails-covid-origins-and-silencing-of-the-vaccine-injured_5148765.html
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Senator Ron Johnson, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Senator Ron Johnson: Thanks for having me on.
Mr. Jekielek: I have to say that I’m going to dub you a COVID response skeptic. All the way from the beginning, you were already asking pretty big questions publicly about this whole idea of shutdowns. I want to focus in on a particular time and see if you remember in mid-March of 2020, there was this moment where the whole narrative was, “It’s just another virus. Nothing to worry about.” Then, it suddenly shifts to, “We have to lock down our borders,” and then, pretty quickly to, “We have to lock down the country.”
Senator Johnson: Oh, I remember it. First of all, I’ll take that moniker. Skeptic to me is a synonym for science. Science is about being skeptical. One of the greatest tragedies of the entire pandemic episode is we haven’t even been allowed to ask the questions.
I remember very early on in the pandemic watching the video coming out of China with everybody in their moonsuits, it was alarming, there’s no doubt about it. We didn’t know what we were dealing with. We had certainly heard of Ebola and MERS [Middle East Respiratory Syndrome]. Ebola had about a 40 percent death rate or infection fatality rate. MERS had something like a 30 percent rate. SARS was eight to 10 percent.
Were we dealing with something like that? We just didn’t know, until we had the Princess Cruise. You had John Ioannidis analyzing that, and his analysis of what happened on the Princess Cruise has pretty well stood the test of time.
This was a deadly disease if you were elderly, and if you had certain comorbidities. But if you were young and healthy, it was going to be a flu-like type of disease. I glommed onto that analysis. I knew that there was no way you could shut down the American economy, the way people like Anthony Fauci were talking about it, a 50-day shutdown to flatten the curve.
What exactly are you going to shut down? We’re still going to need hospitals operating. We’re still going to need pharmacies operating. We’re still going to need grocery stores operating. We’re still going to need gas stations. The economy had to continue to operate.
Somewhere in that timeframe, in a comment to a reporter somewhere, it was said, “Listen, we tragically lose 36,000 people a year on the highway, but we don’t shut down our highway system. We need a transportation system. We’re going to have to gut our way through this thing and follow science as best we can.”
“Protect the vulnerable, but we’re going to have to carry on with life.” Of course, Fauci heard that, which was brought up in one of those famous press conferences. He said that analogy was beyond the pale or some such comment.
Now, I remember on one of our senate calls with Anthony Fauci about this timeframe, and you get your opportunity to ask one question. My question was directed to Anthony Fauci. I said, “Dr. Fauci, you’re proposing these shutdowns.”
“Are you taking into account the human devastation, the human toll, the economic devastation that you’re contemplating here?” He just cavalierly said, “Senator, that is somebody else’s department. I don’t worry about that.”
If you’re a doctor, you may be specialized, but you have to treat the whole patient. You have to understand what your cure is going to do to the patient. He couldn’t have cared less. Very early on, nothing about our response made sense. I was an early advocate for early treatment.
I heard about the possibility of the drug hydroxychloroquine. If you remember, there was a state senator in Michigan that was treated with hydroxychloroquine. I heard about Dr. Zelenko, and Didier Raoult in France. I’m reading about these things. My concern was that we wouldn’t have enough of it.
I’m calling up the head of Novartis and texting him. They donated 30 million doses to the national stockpile, but it wasn’t being distributed. My main concern was, again, would we have enough manufacturing capacity for a cheap generic drug like hydroxychloroquine?
I had never heard of ivermectin at that point, and at that time I hadn’t heard of budesonide. I hadn’t heard of all these other molecules. I had heard of vitamin D, which by the way, Anthony Fauci took and told no one. Isn’t that curious? He upped his intake of vitamin D. Why wasn’t he talking about that early on?
I’ve been vilified, and I’ve been ridiculed throughout this process. During Omicron was when the pandemic had really become politicized. Democrats were freaked out by it. The Republicans were walking around saying, “There’s no way I am going to wear a mask.”
I was on a telephone town hall with a few thousand constituents, and I was telling my constituents, and a lot of them were probably Republicans, I said, “Take Omicron seriously. It’s probably more contagious, probably less lethal, but it can still be a deadly disease. Take it seriously. There are things you can do. You can take vitamin D, vitamin C, and gargle. There are things you can do.”
I mentioned gargling, because there was a study on the CDC’s own website saying that gargling can reduce the viral load. Why not? What’s the worst thing that can happen? Fresher breath. But I’ve got Democrat operatives in those town halls.
Within 10 minutes after that town hall, we had national media calling my office, “What’s this thing about Senator Johnson saying, Listerine will replace the vaccine?” Of course, I didn’t say that, but that was the narrative for two weeks.
For whatever reason, there was a concerted effort to not promote or research or push any kind of early treatment, anything that might mitigate and lessen the severity of the disease. It was just, “Get tested. We’ll spend tens of billions of dollars on tests.” But then if you test positive, do nothing, go home afraid, isolate yourself, and hope you don’t get so sick that you have to go to the hospital.
But if you do go to the hospital, then we’ll slap Remdesivir in your arm, costing over 3000 bucks. You’ve had doctors on here, I’m sure, talking about how that can be pretty harmful to your kidneys. We’ll put you on a vent, knowing that 80 to 90 percent of people that went on ventilation never got off it.
Nothing made sense to me. I’ll be 68-years-old soon, and as long as I’ve been alive, it has been early detection that allows for early treatment, which produces better results and better healing. That’s how we treat every other illness and cancer. You’re trying to go for early detection.
But for COVID it was early detection, and then do nothing. It was insane. With our response to COVID I would say that’s probably the best word to sum it up—insane, a miserable failure.
Mr. Jekielek: But the response went in the face of all established, suggested responses, including the CDC’s own guidelines. There was a very small number of people, especially at the beginning, who were asking these sorts of questions. What was it that you knew? You said you were reading these different things, but what was it that you knew to look at, that a whole lot of people didn’t?
Senator Johnson: It was because I didn’t have the level of fear others had. I certainly had a concern up front. Again, you saw the Chinese in the moonsuits. You heard from these doctors that were treating, and then young doctors just dying. I had that concern. But then, with John Ioannidis’ study on the Princess Cruise ship, he said, “Okay, we’ll get through this.” I didn’t have the level of fear that they imposed on the rest of society.
That was their main tool. The technocrats and the Faucis of the world made sure that the world was deathly afraid of this. As a result, when you’re deathly afraid, you’re looking for some relief from that fear. Then, you have a guy like Fauci saying, “I’ve got the cure here. I’ve got a vaccine.”
What was insane about it is that we didn’t pursue early treatment. We didn’t look at all the different molecules, all the different generic drugs that were on the shelf. They have been used for decades, safely. They had the kind of properties that you’d be expecting in terms of being antiviral or anticoagulant or working with respiratory illnesses. We just threw all that aside.
There was nothing in the pandemic plan that called for shutdowns. Fauci said up front, “Masks aren’t going to work.” They didn’t. All you needed to know was, “Here is the particle size of the virus and here is the opening pores of the mask. This isn’t going to work.” It might be marginally effective, but it wasn’t something that you would impose on everybody in your society.
The way we shut the economy down, we shut down all the little mom and pop shops, but we let the big box stores open. Bobby Kennedy writes in his, “A Letter to Liberals,” that a 2021 study showed there was almost a $4 trillion transfer of wealth from the middle class to the Big Tech social media giants. Those are the people that were in charge of the narrative.
That is what has opened my eyes up. I’ve been referring to them as the “Covid Cartel.” I’m talking about the Biden administration, the federal health agencies, big pharma that has captured the federal health agencies, and legacy media. The Big Tech social media giants and big pharma captured the media as well.
They controlled the narrative, and they controlled the narrative in a way that was highly beneficial to them. Amazon did great during the pandemic. The social media companies did great during the pandemic. Why? Because society was shut down. You had to use social media. You had to use Big Tech.
Mr. Jekielek: There was also a societal hysteria around this fueled by some of these different players. This is another debate that’s out there. On one end of the debate there are these puppeteer overlords that are pushing their message onto the society, and society just responds. On the other side, we’ve simply turned into a safetyist kind of society, where the smallest threat can create a mass hysteria like this. Where do you land on this spectrum?
Senator Johnson: Unfortunately, it’s very easy to manipulate a population. We’ve seen this for decades. Go back to the beginning of newspapers and mass media. You tell the big lie, and as people have said, “The truth hasn’t even put on its shoes, and the lie travels around the world many times.” Unfortunately, it’s very easy to manipulate a population, and the best way to manipulate them is with fear.
I look at the pandemic as just an extension of climate change. Again, I don’t deny climate change. I’m just not an alarmist. Climate has always changed. You look at the Vostok ice core sample, we’re in our fifth cycle of temperature variations of 22.7 degrees in over four hundred and some thousand years.
I know this is a diversion, but do you know how much the sea level has risen in the Bay of San Francisco since the last glaciation period 10 to 20,000 years ago? 390 feet. Again, the climate has always changed. We have to adapt. We can’t hold back the tides.
And yet, there’s a political movement that has seized on climate change. It used to be global cooling. I’m old enough to remember that, either a nuclear winter or a climate-induced winter, and we wouldn’t be able to grow crops. Then, that changed into global warming, and then, they couldn’t quite decide.
They just said, “Let’s use the catchall phrase, climate change,” and they used that to scare people. You have this little Scandinavian girl that says the world’s going to end in 12 years. AOC has done the same thing. The world’s not going to end in 12 years. We will adapt.
Unfortunately, for the climate change alarmists, they weren’t able to seize control to the extent they wanted to. They looked at the pandemic and said, “This is even better. We can really scare the you-know-what out of the global population, and we can gain control. We can start doing things like vaccine passports, and we can restrict travel.”
People ought to be very concerned, because now what are we going through? A potential bank crisis. Be very concerned about a central bank digital currency, where they can just turn on and turn off your ability to purchase certain goods based on your social credit score. That’s what happens in China.
Do we want that in the U.S.? There certainly are people like the technocrats in the U.S. that would like to see that. With this banking crisis, all of a sudden we’re ensuring every deposit, no matter how large. Start asking some questions and be skeptical.
Mr. Jekielek: I want to go back to this question of why you knew to look in all sorts of places? Like you said, you were reading John Ioannidis very early, but it seems like most people weren’t, even people that should be, and even people whose job it is to do so.
Senator Johnson: First of all, I’m not a fan of the federal government. I think our founders were geniuses. They knew we were imperfect men and women. If we don’t want to live in anarchy and chaos, we need some government, but it better be limited.
Because they came from tyrannical regimes, they understood that as the government grows, your freedom recedes. The one essential ingredient in America is freedom. And unfortunately, I’ve been witnessing it over my lifetime, slowly but surely, that our fellow citizens are willingly giving their freedom away for a false sense of security.
I try to remind people, Venezuela is an oil rich nation, a successful South American nation. Those people, the Venezuelans, voted themselves into poverty. They did it to themselves. Okay, we could do the same thing here.
I ran in 2010 on a platform of freedom. I’ve never abandoned that platform and I’m watching the potential of shutdowns to limit people’s freedom. You shut down churches, but you keep liquor stores open. What is that about?
Again, every action the Faucis of the world prescribed didn’t make sense to me. I remained skeptical. I was fortunate enough, because I was chairman of a committee, to hold hearings. Early in February, we had Scott Gottlieb and others talking about how we don’t produce drugs in this country, not the precursor chemicals, and not the active pharmaceutical ingredients.
That’s a vulnerability. We ought to address that. We still haven’t. A trillion dollar-plus infrastructure bill, and we didn’t address that problem. But then, I held my May hearing with John Ioannidis, because I was trying to put this into perspective. I was trying to calm things down.
I remember even talking about the differences between Ebola, MERS, SARS and Covid. That’s where I got introduced to Dr. Pierre Kory, who testified very late. I heard about him a couple of days before the hearing, and I tacked him on. He was one of these doctors practicing in New York, a courageous doctor with the compassion to actually treat COVID patients.
He had an affiliation with the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He came on and talked about his use of corticosteroids. Of course, he was vilified for it. That wasn’t the standard of care, and Fauci hadn’t blessed it. But about eight weeks later, they had the study come out of the UK on dexamethasone, a corticosteroid, and all of a sudden people were using it.
I got connected to a group of doctors, a global network of eminently qualified doctors and medical researchers who had a completely different take on Covid; the writers of the Great Barrington Declaration, and Michael Yeadon, a 30-year employee of Pfizer, who retired as a senior vice president of research with a background in toxicology.
I’m talking to him. He was beside himself when he heard what his colleagues were going to do with this gene therapy. He couldn’t believe it. He said, “I’m not understanding this. There’s no way we’re going to produce something that is going to have the body produce its own toxin,” which is what the spike protein does, “and then it is encapsulated in something that is designed to permeate barriers.”
Remember we were told the vaccine was going to stay in the arm. They knew it wouldn’t. They had the biodistribution studies on the lipid nanoparticles from the Japanese regulators that had to FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] it. They knew it was going to biodistribute all over the body.
Now, you’ve got this gene therapy potentially biodistributing to the ovaries, heart, brain, and permeating the blood-brain barrier. We’ve got mad cow disease cases now being written about.
Let’s say this thing attaches to heart muscle. It does two things. It juices the mitochondria, which is the engine of the cell, so that it has the energy to produce a spike protein that’s toxic to the body. Now, the body’s going to attack the heart muscle. That’s how you get myocarditis. Again, I’m not a doctor or a medical researcher, but this stuff can be explained in layman’s terms.
What happens if that gene therapy attaches to a cancer cell? It’s juicing the cancer cells mitochondria. I’m certainly hearing and reading about cancers coming out of remission and roaring back to stage four. We’re hearing about all the gynecological issues that are occurring, but it’s all being covered up.
I got connected to a group of doctors who were educating me, telling me of their concerns. Geert Vanden Bossche wrote his four-page letter to the WHO saying, “The last thing you want to do in the midst of a pandemic is do mass vaccination. You will drive variants.” Don’t we have a lot of variants? What is that caused by?
You’re going to always have variants anyway; the Muller’s ratchet, the natural evolution of a virus would be to become more contagious but less lethal, because the virus variant wants to survive. It doesn’t survive very well if it kills its host. It wants to keep the host alive, but it wants to get a lot more hosts.
These are just basic scientific principles of virology and immunology that were completely ignored. They could be very easily explained to a layman like me that could understand, along with things like natural immunity.
I had an asymptomatic case of COVID in late September, early October 2020. I was around people, and because I’m going to the White House and that type of thing, I’m always being tested. I was around people that had COVID. I got tested, tested positive, and never had a symptom. From that experience, I suppose I had less fear, plus I had natural immunity.
When I was asked, after the vaccine came out, probably around February, “Senator, are you going to get vaccinated?” My response was not to denigrate the vaccine, but first of all to be as honest as I could and say, “Listen, there aren’t enough vaccines right now for the elderly who want them, so I’ll hold off.”
What I could have said was, which would have been completely honest, “There’s no way I’m going to get that vaccine.” I didn’t say that. I didn’t discourage the use. I just didn’t promote it. Because again, I’m not a doctor and I’m not a medical researcher, but I was skeptical. During that interview, I said, “Besides I’ve already had COVID and I’ve got natural immunity. It’s probably going to be better than the vaccine.”
I was savaged for that. I was called an anti-vaxxer, which is probably just underneath murder, rapist, racist, and pedophile—the last thing you want to be called is anti-vaxxer. That is part of our problem now in terms of getting to the truth, in terms of the pandemic and other things as well. But no, again, I was exposed. I was talking to people.
I had the good fortune of being connected to these doctors and medical researchers that just had a completely different take, which is why in January of 2022, I held the event COVID-19: A Second Opinion. I thought it was about time that the public heard a different opinion on how we should be handling this pandemic, a different opinion on vaccines and vaccine injuries.
Mr. Jekielek: Some of this information came out in your January 2022 hearing. You had another hearing in December of 2022, and it was very slow to come out. Natural immunity is finally something that’s understood to be superior to vaccination, which is what you would expect, as we’ve already known about it. But there are still many areas, including early treatment, that are unknown or vilified in the way that you just described; as being horse dewormer or anti-vax. There are a whole bunch of slurs out there.
Senator Johnson: It’s a Nobel Prize-winning drug, and the FDA is denigrating it. Here is my history of hearings; in February with Scott Gottlieb, in May with Pierre Kory and John Ioannidis, then in November with Peter McCulloch and Harvey Risch and George Fareed on early treatment. They were really focusing on hydroxychloroquine. We were all vilified as the snake-oil salesmen of the Senate by Dr. Jha, who never treated a COVID patient.
Then, in December of 2020, there was a hearing with Pierre Kory, focusing on ivermectin. By the way, Dr. Kory thought the pandemic was over. He had the studies on the use of ivermectin. He was using it, and others were using it. He said, “You don’t even need the vaccine. We’ve got this covered.” He was way too optimistic in terms of the World Health Organization and NIH actually looking at the science.
I started looking at the VAERS system. Francis Collins was very cavalier in his comment to me around March or April, when there are already thousands of deaths reported on the VAERS system. He said, “Well, Senator, people die.”
I got connected to the vaccine injured groups through Bri Dressen and Ken Ruettgers and his wife. I held an event in June of 2021, letting these people tell their stories. Let the vaccine injured tell their stories. We were all vilified for that.
I had another one in DC in November 2021 with not only vaccine injured, but also medical experts. Then I followed up with the Second Opinion event in January 2022. The final one was in December of 2022 about vaccines; what they are, how they operate, and how they can cause injury. I’ve been pretty consistent on this.
I have written over 50 oversight letters, and things on lot-to-lot variations. What are they doing granting full approval for Comirnaty, but still extending the emergency use for what’s available here in the U.S.? Why are you pulling the wool over the eyes of the American public? What are you trying to do here? I’ve asked so many relevant questions, and gotten so very few answers on this. Again, it just increases my skepticism.
Mr. Jekielek: The information in many cases is actually out there. The studies have been done to show mechanisms of harm with the vaccines in a whole bunch of areas. With Pfizer itself we did the FOIA, and we saw they knew about 500 different types of harm. You’ve written 50 oversight letters. My question is about impact. Do you feel like this is having an impact? You’re a very lonely voice, not alone in Congress, but a lonely voice.
Senator Johnson: I try to tell other people on this journey with me that, “Those of us who have our eyes open and have been fighting this battle, take some comfort in the low uptake of the Covid vaccines in the very young. We are having some impact. Parents aren’t subjecting their children to this.
That’s a good thing. I would also say the excuse for suppressing all this information, the excuse for censoring it, and the excuse for vilifying people like me and others is that, “We can’t do anything that will increase vaccine hesitancy.”
If you really want to get to the core issue here, that’s it. They have failed miserably. By lying to the American public, by labeling truth as disinformation, and by not being transparent and honest, they’ve increased vaccine hesitancy. A guy like me who was never an anti-vaxxer, I’ve gotten them all. My kids got them all.
But now, I’m skeptical. I started reading books like Dissolving Illusions, and Turtles All the Way Down. You can see the documentary, “Vaxxed.” You read a host of other books and you wonder, “Why isn’t this being talked about? Why aren’t questions even allowed?”
With the laws they passed in 1986 when it seemed like we were going to just completely bankrupt or eliminate all vaccine manufacturing, because of our litigious society, you probably needed some protection so that we could produce some vaccines. That was certainly the narrative back then, “You have to pass these laws to protect the vaccine manufacturers.” I don’t think it was contemplated that would lead to an explosion of childhood vaccines, because there’s no liability on the part of the manufacturers.
When I first talked to Bobby Kennedy about this, he said, “Ron, let me give you a five-minute primer on vaccines,” and then it was about 45 minutes later. But he starts out, ‘We’re about the same age. When we were growing up, we got three vaccines. Now it’s 60 or 70, and they’re doing them in multiples.”
We’re finding out with the COVID vaccine and things like antibody-dependent enhancements that things can go wrong. Now, after so many doses, your body is producing the antibodies that actually suppress your immune system. It’s the same stuff that they try and juice to suppress reaction to allergies, and to alleviate allergic symptoms.
Again, I’m not a doctor and I’m not a researcher, but there’s so much of this information out there that certainly concerns a guy like me. Why isn’t it concerning the Anthony Faucis and the Collinses and Walenskys and the people who have replaced these folks? Why isn’t it concerning our federal health agencies? The answer is pretty obvious—they are thoroughly and completely captured by big pharma.
The video, which was pretty interesting, about the serial passing for mutations, that Project Veritas undercover video, more important than the statement, was really the way he was just talking, just as a given, about the revolving door between the federal health agencies and big pharma. As a regulator, you’re not going to really seriously regulate or question your future employer or your previous employer, who will be your future employer once again. It’s a thoroughly corrupt process right now.
Mr. Jekielek: I want to touch on something you mentioned earlier in the hearing back in February of 2020 with Scott Gottlieb about the precursors being manufactured outside the country. Since pre-pandemic, big pharma has been fighting tooth and nail to prevent the reshoring of the creation of those precursors, which I found fascinating. This is not a new thing. As you said, this hasn’t changed.
Senator Johnson: No.
Mr. Jekielek: It’s kind of unbelievable. Somehow, we seem to be unable to fix this. It’s not simple, and I understand that, but at least you could put the wheels in motion.
Senator Ron Johnson: First of all, I realize that refining and producing precursor chemicals is an environmentally dirty process, but you can clean it up. It costs money to clean it up, I wouldn’t think it’s a highly labor-intensive operation. There’s not that big an economic advantage of doing this in low labor countries.
It’s more the environmental concerns, and it’s the cost concerns. If big pharma is opposed to it, the only explanation is that it would cost them more money to produce it here. There’s always going to be pressure on the cost of drugs.
They wanted to produce them in as cheap an area as possible and not worry about the national security concerns. But it’s precursor chemicals, it’s that refining process, and then taking those precursor chemicals and turning them into active pharmaceutical ingredients, which occurs primarily in India, the main supplier.
The compounding and production of pills occurs as well. We do some of that in the U.S., but a lot of that is occurring overseas. I don’t have a real good feeling that the FDA is really tracing that process or bird dogging that or regulating the manufacturer of those things before they’re all of a sudden put in a little pill bottles here in the U.S.
The FDA is vilifying a Nobel Award-winning drug like ivermectin. At the same time, they’re not doing what they’re really supposed to do, which is ensuring drug safety and making sure that all the studies were completed and continue to be run on the vaccine, for example. They’re just turning a blind eye towards it, and it’s willful ignorance. They’re not doing their job. We passed a trillion dollar infrastructure package. I was raising the issue internally, “We ought to set some money aside for that.” They said, “Nah.”
Mr. Jekielek: We’ve been talking a lot about the capture of agencies by the pharmaceutical industry. The vast majority of these precursors come from communist China, which by the way has an unrestricted warfare doctrine, where it uses precisely these sorts of methods as a form of warfare or perhaps even capture. I would worry that if big pharma has captured our agencies, what if the Chinese Communist Party has captured big pharma? This would be a potent way to do it, wouldn’t it?
Senator Johnson: They certainly have influence on medical journals. They certainly have influence in terms of universities, access to all the research that we’re funding. It’s a pipeline right to the Chinese government. That was so absurd about what Anthony Fauci did in funding all these studies, subcontracting them out to people that then subcontracted them out to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If you are cooperating in any way, shape, or form with a Chinese entity and Chinese citizens in science, you’re basically cooperating with the People’s Liberation Army. It’s pretty much one and the same.
You’re conducting all this dangerous research. You are certainly skirting the moratorium on gain-of-function, and you cover it up in late January, early February of 2020. We’ve known about this quite some time. We still can’t get the unredacted documents to make the full case. What’s that all about?
Mr. Jekielek: Senator, what do you make of the fact that now President Biden has signed the bill to declassify all of the origin material?
Senator Johnson: We will see what he actually declassifies. The deep state knows what it did. The deep state does not give up its secrets very easily. I was actually shocked when 4,000 pages came out from HHS of Fauci’s emails. Even in a heavily redacted state, they were very incriminating.
We know a lot about what was happening there the last couple days of January, early February, where they were assembling a group of people that are experts in this field. The initial reaction was, “This is man-made.” By the way, my group of experts, including computational biologists, just thought, “Absolutely, this is a chimeric. This is a man-made virus.”
But anyways, that was the initial reaction from the group, until they found out that wasn’t favored by Anthony Fauci. Then, they did a 180 and all of a sudden it was, “No, that’s a conspiracy theory.”
It’s amazing what we already have in the redacted form. But for two years now we’ve been trying to obtain the unredacted emails that were provided under FOIA. They won’t give them to us. They allow us to read 50 pages at a time, unredacted, and take notes.
We took the 4,000 emails, narrowed our search down to 400, and they’ve been releasing 50 at a time. We’re down to the last 50 pages, and it’s probably been as many months, and they’re still not giving us the final 50 pages. That’s where all the incriminating evidence is.
Again, it’s just obvious that Anthony Fauci was covering up his funding that went through various U.S. actors into Wuhan. It’s also very obvious that they suspected very early on that this absolutely could have been a lab leak. Why is it a couple days later they’re saying, “That’s a conspiracy theory.” Why are they changing the narrative? Why are they providing misinformation?
I’ve got an email, and I’m going to be talking to Secretary Beccera about it later today in a finance committee hearing, showing that the people here were saying that it was about a 50/50 split between natural versus lab. That’s not what they said a few weeks later when they said that was a conspiracy theory to even consider a lab leak.
What was going on there? Again, it’s just another reason I’m suspicious. I’m skeptical, because what you see there doesn’t make any sense. There’s no innocent explanation for what we see there.
Mr. Jekielek: Now, we have a few different sources of evidence that tell us that at some point, very early on, the governance of the pandemic response shifted from HHS to becoming a national security priority, so then something like the NSC or DHS are now involved or perhaps driving it. We’ve also had these pandemic simulations war games, a couple of which look remarkably similar to what was actually done.
Senator Johnson: Identical.
Mr. Jekielek: Right, so nearly identical. That suggests that whoever was really running things was saying that they believed these war games were somehow successful. Which again, flies in the face of basic epidemiology. I still have trouble grasping that. How important do you think this was to the pandemic response?
Senator Johnson: When you have CRISPR [Clustered Regularly Interspaced Palindromic Repeats] technology, you have people with pretty unsophisticated labs being able to splice genes. You would be negligent as a government not to be concerned about that and not to ask, “How can we respond if somebody uses this in biological warfare?” It seems to me that you would be negligent if you weren’t doing that.
Then, you realize they’re doing some of these simulations. Listen, I had hearings with the blue-ribbon panel on biothreats. Even the fact that they ran the vaccine through the Department of Defense appropriation process, another transactional authority, there can be an innocent explanation on why they would do that, just even the distribution of it. Probably nobody else had the distribution capability other than the U.S. military. You needed something like FEMA, and you needed things like DHS. This is, again, a national health emergency and you’ve got to take extraordinary measures.
What concerns me, and the legitimate concern is that if we are taking that route, what safety studies were just completely bypassed? What safety studies continue to be completely bypassed? I’ve listened to the teleconference they had in October of 2020 with the CDC and FDA talking about the safety surveillance systems, and should they get the emergency use authorization for the vaccine?
They were talking about VAERS, and they were going to be looking at that closely. If there was somebody that had an adverse event that resulted in a couple days lost time, they’re going to have a CDC representative on the phone talking to the individual and getting to the bottom of that.
That was total BS. They never intended to do that. They certainly didn’t do that. The numbers started mounting on VAERS, and by the way, we’re up to 35,000 deaths reported worldwide. That may not be proof of causation, but it sure gives me cause for concern.
Mr. Jekielek: As you said, VAERS was the system for basically getting a safety signal, and suddenly it became this.
Senator Johnson: Then, you had the V-safe system, set up specifically to track this, but set up not to track real serious things. You couldn’t put in myocarditis. All you could respond to is, “Did you have some days where you had to miss work or school? Did you seek medical care? Those are the two basic parameters. Of the 10 million people that signed up for V-safe, 25 percent missed work and were obviously affected, and 8 percent sought medical care?
It was Aaron Siri that had to sue the federal health agencies to release that data. Again, the CDC’s job is to gather health information and disseminate it to the public and to the medical profession in an open and transparent way. It’s not to decide not to collect information, because they don’t want to know the results.
It’s not to hide the information they do gather. It’s not to doctor it and cherry-pick what they use to present misinformation. But that is what the CDC is doing. They’re not being honest. They’re not being transparent. It makes me skeptical.
Mr. Jekielek: Senator, in this recent Twitter Files dump that Matt Taibbi published, there’s a lot of very interesting Covid-related communications and censorship of some specific accounts. Taibbi basically says that it’s as if these public health people are acting to elicit a particular behavioral response as opposed to presenting truthful information. It turns on its head the expectation of the public that when you hear information it’s true. But to learn that a lot of the information that you’ve been given is designed not to be truthful, but designed to elicit a particular response in the population, I find this deeply troubling.
Senator Johnson: There’s a very interesting panel that’s on videotape from the Milken Institute in 2019. On there is Rick Bright, who by the way was the guy who sabotaged hydroxychloroquine. He’s on a panel with Anthony Fauci at the Milken Institute, and they are bemoaning the fact that we don’t have a mass vaccination program. One of them says, “It’s probably going to take a pandemic to really accomplish that goal.” This is in 2019. Well, they got their pandemic.
I was concerned about the production capability of hydroxychloroquine, and Novartis produces that. I got the CEO of Novartis on the line and we were texting each other. He was saying, “Yes, we’ve got 12 different trials. The results of those would be coming in May or June.” But all of a sudden in about mid-April, he went radio silent. I’ve never talked or texted to him since.
It just seems like at some moment, pretty early on in the pandemic, the decision was made throughout the pharmaceutical industry, and throughout federal health agencies globally, that the solution was going to be a vaccine. They already had the patents on it. They already had the mRNA. It wasn’t really being developed, they already had it.
They kind of went through the motions over the course of about 9 to 10 months to finally be able to say, “We’ve done all the studies.” They didn’t do all the studies. More and more of this will be revealed, but the studies they were doing were probably pretty alarming, like for example, on the biodistribution of the lipid nanoparticle, when you have concentration in things like the ovaries.
I don’t know what charade was being played in terms of development of the vaccine. They had been working on mRNA. They were just waiting for an opportunity to unleash it globally as part of a mass vaccination program. That’s what this has all been about. Yes, it meant profits for the pharmaceutical companies.
But it was also about the hubris of people like Anthony Fauci. Regarding AIDS he said, “Don’t worry about therapies.” He denied Bactrim to AIDS patients; a few tens of thousands of people died, because he was not approving Bactrim to address their pneumonia. He said, “We’re going to get a vaccine, a vaccine.” He never got one for AIDS, but he got one for the pandemic.
Mr. Jekielek: So here we are, it’s early 2023, and these vaccines are still being authorized by the FDA. These bivalent vaccines that are quite a bit less tested, are being approved for infants, from what I recall.
Senator Johnson: Infants, by the way, have almost zero risk from Covid because they’ve got a very strong natural immune system, and we’re pushing this on children. By the way, globally, that’s not universally happening. There are plenty of countries globally that recognize the risk and are responding to it, but here in the U.S. we are not.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s touch on this before we go back to that question. You mentioned everyone saying that with hydroxy they were going to let it go by the wayside. It wasn’t 100 percent, but it was close. That’s an astounding level of coordination. Some people have called it collusion. How did that happen, not just on this issue, but on many others, along with the idea that vaccination was the solution?
Senator Johnson: I wish I had the full answer. You’re Anthony Fauci, and you’ve got a government agency that is granting hundreds of billions of dollars of research grants to hospital systems and research universities. You’ve got grants from the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and they’re all about vaccines. When you have that money flowing, people don’t buck the system.
You had 80 percent of doctors that were once independent taking the Hippocratic Oath, and taking that very seriously. Their primary responsibility was to their patients, not to a hospital or a federal health agency. Now, all of a sudden, 80 percent of doctors are their hired hands. They risk their license and they risk their employment if they buck the narrative. You’ve got so much control coming from that grant-making process, from the trusts, and from the federal government. It doesn’t take very many people. By the way, in that same group of people, you can see Jamie Farrar of the Wellcome Trust, Bill and Melinda Gates, and you see Anthony Fauci.
These guys, they’re all in the same circle. They’re all going to the World Economic Forum. Three years ago, if you talked about Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, I probably would have said, “Why don’t you go over there in the corner and talk to those folks.”
Not anymore. They’ve been brazen about how they’ve allowed their discussions to be videotaped, and how open they are in terms of their plans. It’s astounding. You almost can’t believe what they’re saying. In many respects the world is run by a very elite group of individuals globally.
Certainly, that’s what we’ve witnessed during the pandemic. That’s one of the reasons I have this bill to deem any agreement or treaty the Biden administration does with the World Health Organization has to come before the Senate for ratification. I don’t want Biden to be able to completely negotiate our sovereignty away when it comes to our health.
Mr. Jekielek: Just to clarify, are you saying you think the World Economic Forum runs the world, or is it the billionaires? What are you saying?
Senator Johnson: There is an excess of influence by very powerful people. The World Economic Forum is one group. Bill and Melinda Gates, their trust, is supposed to be beneficial, and in many cases it probably is. The Wellcome trust is probably very beneficial. But when you’re in charge of making those types of donations to different important causes, causes that are certainly publicized in the press, you have an inordinate amount of influence over what the process is.
I’m a U.S. senator. I have watched the profound dysfunction of this place, where our main function should be, and I hate to say this because I don’t like spending money, but it should be to fund the government. We should do it in a thoughtful way and make sure that we’re not wasting taxpayer dollars. We don’t do that. We don’t even bring up 12 individual appropriation bills. There ought to be a lot more done in a more thoughtful, functioning process.
But we’ve been waiting until the fiscal year begins, and then we start passing continuing resolutions for a few months up until Christmas. Then, everybody’s worn down and somebody writes a multi-thousand page appropriation bill with all kinds of policy prescriptions added into it. Nobody knows what they’re voting on, but so many people still vote yes.
It’s completely dysfunctional. Who’s directing what’s in those appropriation bills? Where is the money being spent? What little phrase in a particular piece of legislation is being changed, so that over the years, we end up with a framework where these people could shut down our economy, the way they have been able to shut it down?
I’ve seen the analysis by individuals that have gone back and traced the different laws that were tweaked or changed or enacted that build up to our government’s capability of shutting down small businesses—allowing liquor stores to stay open, but churches being shut down.
This didn’t happen in a void. This happened over many years. Who directed all that? Did they know what they were doing? I don’t know. It’s completely out of control and it’s not being controlled by the representatives of the American public.
The American public, as we talked about earlier, is easily propagandized. It’s easy to pull the wool over their eyes and it’s done repeatedly. It’s done by the Left. I’ll bring partisanship into this. It is the radical Left that has infiltrated virtually every institution, not only in America, but globally. It’s a Leftist agenda.
It is an agenda that wants to control the population. They think they’re so smart. They think they’re such great angels that they need the power to direct your life, and that you’re not smart enough to direct your own life. You need them to be telling you when you can walk outside during a pandemic, and whether or not you need to wear a mask.
You need the technocrats. You need these better angels, okay? It’s grotesquely arrogant and full of hubris. But, again, that’s a group of elite people. They swim in the same circles. They attend the same conferences. They talk about these things and they videotape it. It’s not my conjecture. Just watch the videotapes, read Bobby Kennedy’s book, and read about those exercises. In hindsight, they look very sinister.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about the corporatization of medicine. Over the past few decades, we’ve seen that in many spheres like Big Tech, but also in medicine as well, there has been huge consolidation. There are corporate employers of doctors now and there are a lot less individual practices. There are a whole bunch of reasons for this, and this has been the societal direction.
You talked about how doctors’ ability to enact the Hippocratic Oath is being threatened. There’s a lot of incentive for them to follow the guidelines and not focus on the individual person and try to figure out what’s best for them in their particular situation. Instead, they follow these broad guidelines, which we are told are not rules, but given the incentive structures, they almost amount to rules. A lot of doctors are paid this way and maybe even believe to some extent that this is the way to do things.
Senator Johnson: First of all, evidence-based medicine makes an awful lot of sense; follow the science. But what happens if the science is corrupted? That is what has happened. We have corrupted medical research because of all these grants. It’s a very complex problem.
But I would argue that it’s actually pretty simple, because there’s a root cause of the corporatization of medicine. It’s because the government stepped in and imposed itself on medicine with Medicare and Medicaid.
Many decades ago, the patient paid something like 90 cents of every health dollar directly out of their pocket to medical providers. Now, it’s been exactly reversed. Only about 10 cents of what you pay for medical care and for pharmaceuticals comes out of your pocket, and 90 percent is picked up by a third party payer, either an insurance company or the biggest dog on the block—the government.
When the government becomes the 600 pound gorilla in the room, they set the reimbursement schedules, and they determine what they reimburse, and what they don’t. A classic example of this, during the pandemic when nobody wanted to see anybody, you had to do telehealth, which makes all kinds of sense.
It’s so efficient. It can’t be used universally, but you can do an awful lot with telehealth. But we needed to get waivers from Medicare for doctors to practice telehealth. Again, it worked beautifully. But now, the pandemic is over and all of a sudden they’ve got to re-up those waivers.
Why wouldn’t you? I’m not sure that Medicare will do it. Again, evidence-based medicines make sense. Medical protocols make sense until they don’t, or until the evidence is corrupted. From my standpoint, the only way you’re going to bust through the corruption is to have greater independence across the board, whether it’s independent review panels looking at drug approvals, or whether it’s independent review panels watching the grant-making process, and certainly, independent doctors using their independent judgment.
Every human being is different. Protocols may work 90 plus percent of the time, but on some people they don’t. That’s when you need the doctor to use their medical judgment, but to also recognize they are human. They make mistakes. We can’t sue them out of existence. It’s a big old mess. Our litigious society is a big mess. I put the main blame on the government seizing so much control over our medical establishment, and not overall for the good.
Mr. Jekielek: One of the things that the Twitter Files and other disclosures in Missouri v. Biden have explained to me is how society is susceptible to being propagandized. There’s a powerful structure which has formed, and I call it the megaphone. It’s basically the structure that allows for the creation of a perceived consensus around an issue in society.
For example, with the Russia/Ukraine War, there is a perceived consensus about what should be done about that, or around COVID, that all the vaccines are safe and effective. Some portion of our population is quite susceptible to this, even switching 180 degrees on their viewpoint within 24 hours. I would not have really believed this until we saw it in action.
This actually keeps me awake at night, because this is an incredible power to wield. It’s not just the media and it’s not just social media, it’s a kind of structure, perhaps emergent because of a shared viewpoint. How do we deal with that when truth or even pursuit of truth becomes a rare commodity?
Senator Johnson: As you’re talking here, I’m thinking about fellow travelers. There’s not one person in charge, there’s not two or three people in charge, but there’s a group of individuals that have pretty much the same Leftist viewpoint, that again, think they’re so smart, and they’re the better angels. If you give them all the power, they can create a utopia. It just doesn’t work, and they won’t admit that this hasn’t worked.
They’ll commission a study that says the vaccine saved two to three million lives. Okay, where’s the data on that? Prove that to me. They don’t have the data. That’s what we’re battling. We’re up against powerful forces. They have had different goals and different aims throughout our history.
I loved that in Bobby Kennedy’s documentary on his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, he starts out with Eisenhower’s speech about the military industrial complex. That’s been replicated because of big government. The essential ingredient to a military industrial complex isn’t big companies, it’s big government.
Because of big government, companies are pretty much forced to come to Washington DC to get some kind of relief. But once they come here, they realize, “Oh, this is actually pretty easy to bend to our will.” What was once regulated, and with those businesses once fearing government, all of a sudden they become a willing participant and they’ve captured the agency. And so, you have the military industrial complex, you have the pharmaceutical industrial complex, and you probably have a bunch of them.
Look at what is happening with Silicon Valley Bank. You have all these green companies, all these startups. Let’s face it, most startups probably fail. It’s not the best portfolio to have. If you’re a bank, you probably want a few of those, but you also want some stable companies like manufacturers that just manufacture basic goods that are going to stay. They do it like I did, make money the old-fashioned way, a couple cents a pound, solid businesses. But Silicon Valley Bank attracted all these IPOs, and it has all of these deposits.
It engages in holding assets that, according to Dodd-Frank, don’t even require a capital reserve, because they’re so safe. They’re safe until inflation takes hold, and then they start increasing interest rates and these things lose a great deal of their value. All of a sudden the bank becomes insolvent. But what does the federal government do? They don’t do what they should have done, which is wipe out the shareholders and have the depositors take a haircut, because they were stupid.
They were negligent in making sure that they only had $250,000 of cash and everything else was invested in some sweep account or another asset. They bail them all out. But they’re bailing out companies that are all into environmental, social, governance, [ESG], and diversity, equity, inclusion [DEI]. All these companies are focusing on that as opposed to making a profit and having a financially stable company and a financially stable bank.
So now, we’re underwriting the Leftist agenda of the Silicon Valley Bank. We’re doing it in a way that’s just going to make the next financial crisis probably come sooner and it’ll be worse. It just builds on itself. But again, this is all the Leftist cause, and it makes no sense.
It’s what Governor Sanders talked about in her response to the State of the Union. It’s normal versus crazy. What’s happening in this country and what’s happening in this world is crazy. How are they getting away with it? I don’t have a good explanation.
Mr. Jekielek: You had a pretty strong exchange with Secretary Yellen on this topic. You don’t think things are being dealt with properly here?
Senator Johnson: I laid out for her what I thought are probably the three main reasons for inflation. By the way, it’s inflation that sparked this bank crisis. Without inflation, they wouldn’t have had to increase the interest rates. If interest rates weren’t up, those bond values wouldn’t have declined and put these banks into bankruptcy. I’m saying, “Are we willing to acknowledge what caused inflation?” I’ve laid out what I think are the three biggest causes of the current inflation.
One; trillions of dollars of deficit spending. Inflation is pretty easy to define, it is too many dollars chasing too few goods. Two; their war on fossil fuels. I never thought I’d see the day where gasoline was five bucks a gallon, but it was. They drove up gasoline and other energy prices to record levels, and that obviously fuels inflation. Three; the supply dislocations caused by the pandemic, and by our insane response to the pandemic where we shut everything down.
Those are the three main causes. But by far the number one cause is the printing of dollars, the classic definition of inflation. She came back to me and said, “Senator, I don’t agree that deficit spending was a major cause of inflation.” Even I was shocked by that answer. If she’s in charge, she’s denying reality, and she’s deluding herself, as I think this administration is. It doesn’t give me a great deal of confidence that they’re going to actually fix the problem.
Which is, of course, what they didn’t do. They passed more deficit spending, and they call it the Inflation Reduction Act. Of course, the media goes along with it. They don’t take a critical eye and say, “How is the printing of more dollars going to reduce inflation?” The answer is it’s not.
Mr. Jekielek: One of the areas where spending has been criticized lately is on the Russia/Ukraine War. I believe this is something that you voted in support of.
Senator Johnson: One time. One time.
Mr. Jekielek: Okay. I’m just curious about your thinking.
Senator Johnson: I was on Senate Foreign Relations. I was the European chair and the ranking member on the European subcommittee. I’ve been to Ukraine a number of times. I was at Poroshenko’s inauguration. I was at Zelensky’s nomination or inauguration. I was the only member of Congress there. I personally thought Zelensky was the real deal.
Now, coming out of the private sector, I know the Ukrainian people want what we want. They want to shed the legacy of corruption, the endemic corruption in Ukraine. You’ve got 20-some thousand prosecutors. They don’t pay them well, but they live like kings, because you sense the corruption the Ukrainian people have put up with. They wanted to rid themselves of it. That’s really what Zelensky’s platform was—to defeat corruption in Ukraine. So, I’m sympathetic with it.
Let’s face it, Putin is just evil. Ukraine doesn’t threaten Putin. He just wants the territory. He’s bombing population centers. He’s committing atrocities and war crimes. How can you do anything to provide aid and comfort to Putin? But you have to recognize reality. It’s not a fair fight, and it’s not a level playing field.
Putin can bomb population centers. He can step-by-step utterly destroy Ukraine. And Ukraine really can’t effectively respond. The only way you stop Putin is if you respond in kind, and threaten Russian populations. Nobody’s going to do that because they’ve got nuclear weapons.
I don’t see an acceptable result for this war. You can just keep grinding it out. You can just see more and more death, and more and more destruction. At some point in time, you have to recognize that reality. I voted for the first appropriation very early on. Then, there was a hope that showing support for the Ukrainians and providing them with the lethal defensive weapons they needed would spank Putin hard enough to, like Russia did in Afghanistan, finally say, “No more,” and leave. That didn’t happen, and I don’t see that happening.
Another reason I voted for that initial package was because we were depleting our own weapon stockpile and it had to be replenished. A big chunk of that money actually went to replenish our own military supplies. So, I voted for it one time. I haven’t been very outspoken about this, because I don’t want to give aid and comfort to Putin. But again, it’s hard to know what to believe coming out of Ukraine. I was hearing reports earlier today about the Ukrainian people are not being all that supportive of this anymore.
I don’t know what the truth is. I know the Russian people are, because propaganda is very effective. To me, this has got to stop in some way, shape, or form. We’re not going to like the result, and I realize that. But we will like the result less the longer this drags on and more Ukrainians are murdered and slaughtered and more of Ukraine is destroyed. I don’t see how this gets any better. It just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. At some point in time, this has to be ended.
Mr. Jekielek: And now, we have Russia and China continuing to get closer and closer, which isn’t a very good outcome.
Senator Johnson: No. I don’t want to encourage President Xi to take over Taiwan. To a certain extent, we need to stop poking the tiger and the bear here, but also recognize they are a real threat. I wish they were nothing more than friendly competitors, but they are malignant adversaries. We do need to resist them, and we need to resist them in the right way. We need to resist them smartly.
There was a way to prevent Putin from invading Ukraine. I don’t think he ever would have invaded if Trump would’ve been reelected. We could have very visibly ramped up the defensive weaponry earlier on. There are things we might have done to prevent it. But since it has started, I just don’t see any kind of result that we’re going to find acceptable.
Mr. Jekielek: I’ll briefly share something that I’ve shared with a number of people, which is, when the price of oil is high, Russia has a lot more flexibility to do what it wants.
Senator Johnson: We deluded ourselves. I didn’t, but others did, thinking that we’re going to slap on all these sanctions and bring Russia to its knees. No, the war has increased the price of oil and more money has flown into Russia as a result of this. Again, upfront, you have to recognize the reality of the situation. One thing about Washington DC that I’ve noticed—they’re not big into reality.
Mr. Jekielek: Senator, let’s go back to thinking about what to do here now, because we’ve painted a very dire picture.
Senator Johnson: I’m not the most uplifting character, sorry.
Mr. Jekielek: I know that you haven’t stopped your activities. You’re continuing to pursue the truth and pursue some solutions. You have some, and we’ve spoken about them before. Challenging these industrial complexes that we’ve been talking about may seem daunting to the common man and the common woman.
Senator Johnson: First of all, you start with the basic problem solving process. Coming from manufacturing, I’m solving problems all the time. It’s just a basic process. First, you have to admit you have a problem, then you have to properly define it. Once you’ve defined it, then you take a look at what the root cause is. Then, you can start designing solutions. In Washington DC, it almost always starts with a solution that’s beneficial to somebody, and it’s generally about spending money. The solution is always about spending money.
The overall solution is that we need to reduce the size of the federal government and its influence over our lives. As it relates to federal health agencies, we need to define the mission of what those government agencies do. We need those government agencies. We need an agency that actually does protect the American public in terms of food and health safety. We really do need that. We need a CDC that gathers health information on chronic illnesses and reports it, and then makes their grants responsive to what we’re seeing.
Bobby Kennedy talks about the chronic illnesses in children, what they were, what they are today. Autism went from one in 10,000, to as low as one in 26 in some areas. What has caused that? The asthmas and the allergies, why aren’t we talking about that in the news media? If you want to whip people into a state of frenzy, at least do it on issues that are real. You’ve seen these parents who had a perfectly normal child, two, three, four years old, get a vaccine, go into seizures, become autistic, and never speak another word.
Why can’t we even ask that question? Why are those parents silenced? Why are they censored? Why aren’t we looking at that? The solution is pretty simple; define the mission of these government agencies, and then write the law so that they stay bound within that mission and don’t corrupt it. They should not allow big pharma and outside interests to corrupt what their mission is. It shouldn’t be that hard to do. We could do it for a whole lot less money and a lot fewer people.
Because the more people you have, the more people that are corruptible, can be corrupted, and are corrupted. Again, you shrink the size, and you focus the mission. For the FDA, I would start really focusing on safety in food production operations. I would focus on drugs.
How much are we monitoring the safety of drugs coming in from other countries? That’s always their argument against drug re-importation from Canada. But they have no problem reimporting their own branded drugs from other countries without the FDA really being in their plants, as far as I’m aware of, and really paying attention to it.
Get an agency focused on food and drug safety. Get an agency that’s really focused on gathering information on public health, publishing it, and then an NIH that makes the grant dollars responsive to those health needs and the chronic illnesses. There seems to have been a real corruption process.
A whistleblower, Bill Thompson, provided data that has been suppressed, that just went away. It was raised, and then effectively, it just got deep-sixed again. People’s eyes are starting to open up. People are asking questions. And then, you got a guy like me who has got six years of pursuing, uncovering, and then exposing the truth. That’s what I’m dedicated to doing.
Mr. Jekielek: You’ve told me that you actually didn’t want to run. Why didn’t you?
Senator Johnson: Because the dysfunction here is profound. At some point in time you say, “I’m sick of it.” But the primary reason I did run again is because during the pandemic, nobody was doing what I was doing in Congress. The hearings I held should have been held in the health committees in both the House and the Senate, and they weren’t. I was doing it in Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. I was using my position to highlight these things.
Even when I lost my chairmanship, I was holding these hearings, but nobody else was. Then, I got connected to the vaccine injured community. Nobody was advocating for them. You’ve met with them. You can’t turn your back on people like that. All they wanted was to be seen, heard, and believed, because they wanted to be cured.
We’re spending tens of billions of dollars on research. Are we spending any money on vaccine injuries at all, whether it’s childhood vaccinations or whether it’s the Covid vaccination? Are we even doing the research?
I doubt we are, because they don’t want to know. They got a good thing going. They have pharmaceutical companies being able to crank out new vaccines. If we’re up to 70 over how many years, it’s more than one a year, with no liability issue. They just make a lot of money off of it. It’s just self-perpetuating. They don’t want to ask questions. They don’t want to do the research. They don’t want to know. It’s called willful ignorance.
It seems as if nobody else is really stepping up the plate to do this. In the end, I couldn’t turn my back on this country. This country is something rare and precious. It’s not perfect. We’re a long way from perfect, but the people of America are good, as I think most people are around the world. The problem is really bad governance around the world, but the people are good.
In 2010, I ran on the platform of freedom, because it’s the one essential ingredient. The way we were able to build this country was because people had the freedom to dream and aspire and build and create. If you crush that freedom, people won’t be able to dream and aspire. We won’t build and create. We’ll become Venezuela, and we can’t let that happen.
I saw your interview with Bobby Kennedy, and I like his approach to this. He doesn’t create expectations for himself so he can ever be defeated. He just gets up every day and he fights. That resonated with me, because that’s my approach too. I’m not going to let them defeat me. They’ll try and silence me. They’ve gone a long way towards silencing me, and gone a long way toward marginalizing me and ridiculing me and vilifying me, but it hasn’t stopped me.
Mr. Jekielek: People say that fear is contagious, but one of the things that I’ve learned from the pandemic is that courage can also be contagious. Senator Ron Johnson, it’s such a pleasure to have you on.
Senator Johnson: Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate what you’re doing, and what Epoch Times is doing. You’re doing real journalism, and that’s what this country needs. That’s what the world needs.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you. Thank you all for joining Senator Ron Johnson and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jana Jekielek.
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