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April 18, 2021 - RFK Jr. The Defender
30:12
Senator Ron Johnson on Hearings and Treatment

Ronald Johnson serves as the senior United States Senator from Wisconsin. Johnson is known as a staunch fiscal hawk who urged federal spending cuts during the debt-ceiling crisis of 2011. He discusses his Senate Hearings on treatment and therapeutics and the public reaction.  The Senator also a special request that all of us keep an open mind and listen to each other. 🇺🇸

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Hello, everybody.
Today, my guest is Senator Ronald Harold Johnson of Wisconsin, who was, until the Democrats took control of the Senate, he was the chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
And a lot of the people who watch this podcast are familiar with Senator Johnson for a series of hearings that he conducted, particularly on therapies for the COVID-19.
And Pierre Corey, I think, was one of your witnesses, but many, many other witnesses and revelations that came out of your hearing.
And I think for many of us who are concerned about government policies and about the reasonability and the scientific basis for the countermeasures and this weird totalitarian kind of shenanigans and monkey business that we see, I think should concern every American, Democratic, and Republican.
You were kind of a voice of reason and hope for people who are looking at this with great concern.
So I want to thank you, and I want to thank you for joining me today.
Well, I appreciate it.
I appreciate the kind words.
You know, what was amazing about that, Bobby, is I thought I was doing a public service, holding hearings, asking just Highly qualified doctors that had the compassion, but also courage to actually treat COVID patients and then provide information.
You know, what happened as a result of that after my first hearing on early treatment.
And again, it was a hearing on early treatment.
Myself and the group of doctors, Dr.
Peter McCulloch, Dr.
Harvey Risch, Dr.
George Fareed, were labeled by the New York Times and Dr.
Jha, the snake oil salesman of the Senate.
So what has surprised me is just the close-minded approach to this.
You know, Dr.
McCulloch talked about the four pillars of a pandemic, which is first, you know, try and control the contagion.
Secondly, early home treatment.
The third pillar would be late hospital treatment, and then the fourth pillar, vaccine.
What's controversial about that?
I just don't get it.
I've been amazed at the closed-minded approach to dealing with a pandemic that caught basically the world by surprise.
We never witnessed this virus before, and so we actually had to have doctors practice medicine, but those that had the courage and compassion to practice medicine were vilified and worse.
I mean, I think one of the great revelations for people when they heard Peter Corey and Peter McCulloch speak and how they crystallized the issue, which is, you know, we were constantly being told we've got to flatten the curve by being locked inside.
And they came to you and they said the way to flatten the curve It's through early treatment.
We start treating people when they get sick so they don't ever have to go to the hospital.
And the standard of care under Tony Fauci's regimen was that you get the COVID test, you find out that you've got COVID, you wait three weeks until you're so sick that you can't breathe, and then you descend on the hospital.
And what these doctors were saying was, you know, let's not let it get that far.
There's a lot of treatments that we are seeing.
Not just a little, but mountains of peer review science that says if you intervene early with these treatments, You never have to go to the hospital.
And I think it was just stunning that Dr.
Fauci and Bill Gates and the people who seemed to be running the countermeasures in the COVID response were absolutely militant about not treating people early.
It made no sense to me.
Early on, when I first heard of that Michigan State legislator that was treated and she said she was cured by hydroxychloroquine, I'm going, man, would that be fabulous.
I mean, that would be the silver bullet to this pandemic if we really had a...
Existing drug, even better yet, a cheap generic drug that could be repurposed for this.
You know, something that is available in the billions of doses.
Something that's been around for, in the case of hydroxychloroquine, 65 years has been proven very, very safe.
Of course, no drug is 100% safe.
I mean, that is the silver bullet that we could put this pandemic behind us.
And immediately, anybody that talked about hydroxychloroquine was vilified.
And then the same thing happened with ivermectin.
And it made no sense because a tenet of medicine is early detection and early treatment.
I mean, isn't that what we're trying to do with every other disease?
And even something like COVID, you know, flu is like COVID to a certain extent.
It's a virus.
But we all know that if you have, you know, we have something called Tamiflu.
But we also know that if you don't take Tamiflu almost immediately, It's no good.
If it's used late, you might as well not even have taken it.
So you had to identify drugs and you had to research that.
You had to have robust trials on those types of drugs, you know, the full gamut.
I never pushed one over the other.
I was just saying, let's utilize our health agencies.
Let doctors practice medicine.
Let them utilize their full off-label prescription rights.
Use the internet.
Let doctors communicate with each other.
Because we're in the midst of a pandemic, we don't have time to wait for the double-blind, gold standard, randomized trial studies.
We need to have doctors practice medicine.
We need to attack this.
And people like Dr.
Corey, by the way, very early on with his critical care group, they came up with the use of corticosteroids.
And I actually had him in another hearing early, I think this was in May, where he presented those findings.
And as a result, I had doctors contacting me and telling me I helped save people's lives because I put Dr.
Corey on as a witness in May.
He came back later in December in my second early treatment hearing.
This is after the New York Times has already accused me of being a snake oil salesman.
He came in and talked about ivermectin.
And it was the day before that he got a study in from Argentina.
Where they had prophylaxed 800 healthcare workers with a multi-drug approach, including ivermectin.
Of the 800 that were prophylaxed using that multi-drug cocktail, not one of them got COVID. The 400 that weren't prophylaxed with it, 58% got COVID. Now, again, I know that's not a random controlled study, but it's pretty powerful evidence that would require further investigation, and yet Our health care agencies to it, and again, did worse than turn a blind's eye toward it, vilified, terminated people that were coming up with this.
They censored 8 million Americans.
Watch Pierre Corey's opening statement.
It was a passion plea.
He presented that evidence.
All he's asking NIH to do is look at his manuscript, look at his evidence.
And in the end, YouTube censored.
They pulled that video off after 8 million Americans had viewed it, which kind of indicates that Americans weren't particularly happy with the NIH guideline, as you were describing, which basically says, get tested.
If you have COVID, go home, isolate yourself in fear.
And if you get sick enough, if your oxygen levels drop too low, check yourself in the hospital and just hope we don't have to put you on a ventilator because that's not a real good successful treatment.
I mean, it seemed almost like a deliberate attempt to flood the hospitals and to increase this feeling that there was a crisis rather than feeling, you know, we didn't hear the things that you would want, you know, they called Fauci America the doctor, but What do you want to hear from your doctor when you get sick?
You want to hear that there's no reason for panic, that you are going to get the best treatment, that he's going to consult with other doctors, specialists in the field, and that he's going to give you a course and explain the science behind it clearly and explain the risk clearly.
And we got nothing like that from this doctor.
We got a doctor who has never treated COVID himself, who is Not consulting with anybody, as, you know, Peter McCulloch, Dr.
Peter McCulloch pointed out, and Dr.
Corey.
There was nobody on that COVID White House committee who has ever treated a COVID patient.
They were all people who were involved in HIV, which, you know, is a long history of corruption on that issue.
And they were, and they didn't do what you would want them to do, which is to say, which is to summons The best doctors from all over the world and put them in a committee and have an open discussion with all the American people can watch.
Televised discussion where they're collecting studies.
I think there's been something like 50,000 studies on COVID that have been published.
And you want them going through those studies and saying, look, this drug looks like it works.
We got 19 studies that say this drug works.
You got to give it a certain time and you got to give it in combination with Sythermax and with zinc and with vitamin D. Why was Dr.
Fauci not telling us, you know, 85% of the people who are hospitalized are vitamin D deficient.
95% of the people who died from COVID are vitamin D deficient.
He was taking vitamin D himself.
Why didn't he tell us, you need to be taking vitamin D. You need to stop drinking sugar drinks.
You need to lose some weight.
You need to get outside and recreate.
And you need to not live in fear.
Because that is part of the stress.
Make your situation worse.
None of those things happen.
America's doctor did not act like the doctor that you want at home.
Let's face it, Bobby.
That's the $64 question, and I don't have any kind of reasonable answer for it.
Again, I was pushing early treatment.
And again, I was pushing early treatment, not a specific drug.
I was just pushing the agencies, look at these things.
Take a look at the anecdotal evidence.
Take a look at the observational studies.
Look at this.
Show some compassion.
Why didn't that happen?
I just have no explanation for it because, again, it made so much sense.
If we could have had a repurposed drug, we could have put this pandemic behind us literally months ago.
And, you know, listen, early on when they started talking about hydroxychloroquine, I was concerned about, you know, if we started providing that as a prophylaxis for everybody, we may not have had enough.
You know, so I understand initially say, well, hold on here.
We need to make sure that the people that are using this safely for rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, you know, they need to be able to get their doses as well.
So my first concern about hydroxychloroquine is if it works, if it works.
Can we produce enough?
And so I was kind of going down that avenue.
I was talking to the producers of it.
They were telling me about all the studies that were going to be coming out in May.
And then when I started following up with them in May, I said, well, where are your studies?
Where are your studies?
Radio silence.
And I can't explain what was happening.
To this day, I do not know.
I suspect things.
It's one of the things I'm going to continue to investigate.
But until I actually have some hard information, I'm not going to speculate, but it just made no sense whatsoever that we'd have just almost a total blackout that we'd vilify doctors, as you said, that had the courage to go and actually treat COVID patients, expose themselves to it.
Dr.
McCulloch got COVID. He enrolled himself in a trial.
And so he took the cocktails himself.
He took hydroxychloroquine.
He took ivermectin.
And he got well.
A lot of people have.
And it's gotten so bad though now, Bobby.
I'm reading reports because I get all this information.
I'm reading reports where families are begging their doctors.
They poisoned the well so much on this early treatment.
They're begging their doctors to give their loved ones ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
And the doctors are refusing.
And courts are overruling doctors.
I just had a report.
Where a hospital finally, an 81-year-old father, husband, was on a ventilator.
They gave him one dose of ivermectin, which allowed him to get off the ventilator.
And then they wouldn't give him any more.
more than family had to take the hospital to court to prescribe a generic drug that every doctor has the right to prescribe off label.
They had to take him to court.
Four days later, they finally got him on dosage.
And apparently the patient is doing quite well now.
He's stable.
His family still can't see him at hospital, but it took a court order to make doctors utilize their off label prescription rights.
This does not need FDA approval.
These drugs are generic.
Doctors have off-label prescription rights.
That's how they practice medicine.
That's how we practice medicine.
That's how we've advanced medicine.
Hydroxychloroquine, that's approved as an anti-malarial drug.
I don't believe it's FDA approved for either rheumatoid arthritis or lupus.
It's been Use that as an off-label drug.
That's how we advance medicine, by doctors practicing medicine.
But our healthcare agencies have not allowed doctors, they discourage doctors, they punish doctors for practicing medicine during this pandemic.
It makes no sense whatsoever.
Another thing that makes no sense is why Joe Biden hired Tony Fauci to continue to manage this pandemic.
When his record on the pandemic is just absolutely cataclysmic, we had in our country one of the worst body counts of any country in the world.
We have 1,600 per million people dying.
Norway has one one-hundredth.
We have a hundred times the death rate of Norway.
We have 79% greater than Germany.
I think we have 10 times the death rate of Japan.
Japan has a much older population than we do, but they use early intervention.
We have 1,000 times the death rate of most African countries, and what do the African countries have?
They have a much younger population, true.
They spend a lot of time in the sunlight, but we have more than 1,600 times the death rate in countries like Tanzania, like Vietnam, et cetera.
Those countries all use ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine for malaria control.
Pakistan, India have a tiny fraction of the COVID fatalities per population that we have.
Tony Fauci has failed on board consistently throughout his career.
In 1984, when he came to work for the National Institute for Infectious and Allergic Disease, Chronic disease rate, which he's in charge of keeping down, was 12%.
Today, it's 54%.
We have the sickest children in the world.
We have the sickest population in American history.
Of all the industrial nations, we have the worst health outcomes.
We have the highest drug consumption rate in the world.
We pay the highest prices for drugs.
And now drugs are the third biggest Killer.
And he has taken his agency, which is meant to prevent chronic disease, allergic disease, and he has turned it into an incubator for the pharmaceutical industry.
So he is measuring successes, how many vaccines he gives, how many drugs he develops.
You will never hear him say how much healthier Americans are because of his work.
And his track record on this pandemic has been worse than you can imagine.
It's just incredible to me that people don't see that.
It's certainly not a record of success, not by a long shot.
And what concerns me, in addition, is the censorship.
Just how closed-minded the media, the social media, people in the healthcare agencies have been.
Why?
I cannot explain that.
One possible explanation would be, and these are facts, is the treatment with either hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin in a multi-drug approach where you use vitamin D and vitamin C and zinc and that type of thing, it costs definitely under $50 per treatment.
Remdesivir, which, you know, they actually altered the outcome of the study because it wasn't reducing death, but it was reducing hospitalization, say, by a couple days.
It doesn't reduce death.
There's no proof on that, but that costs over $3,000 a dose, and remdesivir does result in liver toxicity, so a lot of people that are treated with it can't go through the full course.
But that's the drug.
That people are pushing as opposed to generic drugs that are less than $50 for treatment.
Again, it just makes no sense why there has been this vilification and just completely put your head in the sand about these generic drugs.
Yeah, on Remdesivir, that is Tony Fauci's pet drug that he incubated for Gilead.
And then he was the one who ran the study and had to alter the protocol twice.
During the study in order to make it look like it was successful.
But then the WHO came with a much bigger study and said that remdesivir does not even reduce hospital stage.
What he said in his study is just a lie.
It has no benefits.
And yet that is the standard of care.
That is what they're giving people in this country.
And it's the only thing that doctors have the green light to give you.
As you say, you know, the doctors have to kind of go off-label and against recommendations to get us to give you ivermectin and to give you hydroxychloroquine.
The thing that we should have done in this pandemic from the outset is, tell us what the infection fatality rate is for a seasonal flu, and let's try to get below that.
And then we don't have to have any lockdowns.
We don't have to crash the economy.
And they crashed our economy.
They've destroyed the middle class.
They've obliterated the New Deal.
They've just destroyed all these American values, our Constitution, etc.
And there was no accounting.
Nobody ever said, you know, we're going to save more lives from COVID than we are from the lockdown.
Or maybe the lockdown is actually going to kill more people than COVID over the long term.
And let's face it, nobody's going to study the human toll of the shutdowns.
I've been saying this since day one.
Fauci challenged me when I made the true statement is that we tragically lose 36,000 people per year on the highway, but we don't shut the highways down because we need a transportation system.
We also need the economy.
And I don't care what business organization you work for, every business, every organization is essential to someone.
And I think you have to take a look.
I mean, did we succeed?
I mean, was this a success?
It doesn't look that way.
The average infection fatality rate of seasonal flu is probably about 0.13%.
A really bad flu season is about 0.18.
A good flu season is about 0.1.
And we lose tens of thousands of people per year with the flu.
We just don't keep a running tally on the TV set and, you know, scare the you-know-what out of people.
The Oxford Center for Evidence-Based Medicine has been predicting through their analysis really for months now that the final infection fatality rate, which is different from the case fatality rate, The eventual infection rate of COVID is going to be somewhere between 0.1 and 0.35.
And again, I'm not downplaying COVID. I think we all recognize it is a serious virus, and it turns deadly on a certain percentage of the population.
It's not a disease I wanted to get, but I got it.
I tested positive for it twice, but I had no symptoms.
And I think, again, I'm not a doctor, but my own theory from what I've read and what people have told me is, you know, I was probably exposed to some other type of coronavirus, so I had T-cell immunity.
Forty-five percent of the population, I've heard some experts say, enter this pandemic with T-cell immunity, which is why you probably had about 40 to 50 percent of people being asymptomatic.
Again, I'm not a doctor.
I'm not pretending to be one, but I obviously have read an awful lot.
I've talked to an awful lot of medical experts, and all I was trying to do in my hearings was just provide that type of information to people.
people.
And I don't understand why information is now viewed as dangerous.
There's Louis Brandeis in a 1927 court decision talking about falsehoods and other things that could be harmful to society said that, well, the remedy here is not to limit speech, not to enforce silences.
It's more speech.
The remedy is more speech, not enforced silence.
To me, that's what I've been trying to do here.
I've been trying to provide more speech, expert testimony in a committee where we actually have people sworn in, and they have to testify under, you know, penalties of perjury.
And yet again, the New York Times labeled those doctors who risked their lives, one of them caught COVID, called them snake oil salesmen.
I mean, it's shameful.
Yeah, I love A.J. Rowling's quote where he said that government does not tear out a man's tongue to stop him from telling a lie.
They tear it out to stop him from telling the truth.
And as you say, the remedy for if there is really misinformation, you know, let's not shut it down.
Let's give good information and let's have a public debate, a free flow of information and Let's let ideas triumph in the marketplace of ideas and debate.
Particularly in the midst of a pandemic, which is an emergency situation where So much is unknown.
Again, you know, initially it was all about ventilators.
Well, we found out that the success rate of ventilators was quite low.
So that didn't look like very good treatment.
But yet we, you know, did the War Powers Act and we produced a bunch of ventilators.
I'm not criticizing that.
It's what we tried.
You know, we're going to throw the kitchen sink at this thing.
We should have allowed doctors to practice medicine, to try all kinds of things using their best judgment.
And that's where, you know, Pierre Corey and his critical care group, they came up with corticosteroids.
And that saved people's lives.
It allowed us to do late treatment in hospital without putting people on ventilators, you know, saving lines.
Turning people over on their stomachs allowed them to breathe.
There's all kinds of things that doctors practicing medicine came up with quite early on.
But what was forbidden by the health agencies, by the experts, was early treatment.
And it never made any sense.
It does not make sense to this day.
Did you see the study that compared Minnesota to Wisconsin?
I know that you have ties to both of those states.
One of them had, I think, Minnesota had a very, very strong lockdown, whereas Wisconsin was much more lenient.
It's a Canadian study, and it compares Wisconsin and Minnesota to very similar states and have very, very different policies.
And then it compares Florida to California.
Which again, are similar states that had completely antithetical policies.
And in both of those studies, the states with the least restrictive lockdowns and masking mandates had much better records of protecting human life.
And in fact, California, which had much more stringent lockdowns, had 33% greater deaths by age population And Florida, which has a much larger elderly population.
And Wisconsin had a much better record by almost all metrics than Minnesota.
And this is a peer-reviewed study that came out last week.
Very, very interesting.
I've been getting data the entire time, and all the state data, I've been comparing it, looking at overall fatality rates based on population, that type of thing.
It's hard to draw absolute conclusions to all these things, but I remember early in the pandemic, the epidemiologists, I think even Fauci was saying, we're not going to prevent people from getting this disease until we have a vaccine developed, but it's about flattening the curve.
So we don't overwhelm our healthcare systems.
Now, we came close to overwhelming the healthcare systems in New York.
I think maybe down in New Orleans.
But generally, we stressed our hospitals.
I know in Wisconsin, the biggest problem in our hospitals wasn't overpopulating them.
We couldn't get staff because of all the shutdowns and the fact that people weren't coming into work because they had to take care of their kids because schools were shut down.
So it was mainly a staffing issue in Wisconsin.
But for a while there, for a number of weeks, We were leading the nation in new cases.
We really had a peak in probably November, December.
It was pretty frightening.
Close to 8,000 new cases per year and deaths were up.
Again, I do not downplay this disease, but I think we have to have the modesty and humility to realize that there's a lot we didn't know.
And I think we also had to really, and again, I was asked to write a counterpoint in the USA Today because they're going to write an op-ed about shutting the economy down without even being able to read their op-ed.
I have to write a 300-word counter op-ed.
I made the argument that we had to keep the economy open because we had to take into account the human toll of the economic devastation.
I know Fauci did.
I asked him one time in a conference call, you know, are you taking into account the human toll, the economic devastation?
His answer is basically, that's not my department.
Again, I view that as a pretty callous response.
I think, you know, when you are in charge of public policy, you have to take a look at the entire What it is you are recommending.
And I know Fauci didn't do that.
I don't think these healthcare agencies did.
I think the way we've handled COVID has been basically insane.
But I've also been pretty reluctant to criticize elected officials who had to make really tough decisions, particularly early on, with very limited information.
I really do sympathize with them.
I wouldn't want to be President Trump.
I wouldn't want to be a governor back then.
People had to make really tough decisions.
So I really don't want to be critical of it.
But now, many months later, I think those same elected officials have to have the modesty and humility to take a look at the science, take a look at the evidence, and go, well, maybe we were wrong here.
We probably should have shifted our policies.
We shouldn't dig our heels in into decisions that we made that maybe didn't turn out too well.
They have to look at the evidence, as you were just talking about, state by state.
What worked, what didn't.
What do you think about Governor DeSantis and what he's done in Florida?
Well, again, I think you took a pretty common sense approach.
The comparison there is, I think, to New York.
Again, New York was hit hard.
And it seems like there are different variants that are more aggressive, more lethal.
Again, I'm not a doctor, but it just seems that way.
New York was hit hard.
But what their governor did was force nursing homes to take COVID patients.
I mean, I'm sorry, that made no sense whatsoever.
DeSantis didn't allow that.
Again, the approach we should have taken generally was isolate the sick, okay, quarantine then.
Yes, that made sense.
Protect the vulnerable.
And then have the rest of us carry on with our lives as safely and responsibly as possible.
Let's face it, we've all become germaphobes.
I think that was certainly appropriate.
I think we'll continue to be germaphobes.
I hope at some point in time we get back to normal life and realize, you know, life is a risk.
You are going to get, there are infections you're going to get.
You can't put yourself in a bubble.
But that's the approach we should have taken.
But what Cuomo did versus what DeSantis did, I think the results are pretty obvious.
DeSantis did the right thing.
And again, these are tough decisions.
There was nothing perfect.
People caught COVID. People died.
But I think DeSantis did a far better job of protecting the vulnerable.
Thank you very much.
Anything else that we should touch on?
No, I think we've really covered the subject here.
Again, I just want to emphasize, we have to be open-minded.
We can't be censoring information.
We have to be seeking the truth.
And if there's falsehoods and fallacies out there, again, as Brandeis said, the remedy is more speech, not enforced silence.
I am highly concerned about what's happening in medicine.
I'm highly concerned about what's happening in our media, social media.
I'm highly concerned about our culture.
We do need to heal.
We do need to unify.
But that's respecting one another and listening to differing opinions, not being afraid of information.
Universities should be places where there's a diversity of thought.
You know, there shouldn't be censorship in universities.
There should be open discussion.
Our young people should be exposed to the full spectrum of ideas, the full spectrum of political ideology.
That's not happening today.
This is very dangerous.
This is a very dark road we're going down in this country.
I hope we open up.
I hope we become more respectful of each other, more respectful of each other's ideas, and stop censoring.
This is not good for America.
This is very dangerous.
I'm highly concerned.
Senator Johnson, thank you so much for joining me, and thank you for fighting for American health and for our democracy, and I hope you will continue to make that battle.
Well, thank you for having me on.
Take care.
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