Ron Johnson Says Unvaccinated in ‘Internment Camps’ Outside U.S.
The senator railed against the COVID-19 vaccine on a Janesville-area radio program.
Ron Johnson. Photo by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America. (CC BY-SA)
Sen. Ron Johnson, in an appearance on Janesville-area radio station WCLO earlier this week, compared the treatment of unvaccinated people to internment camps.
Johnson was a guest on the program, “Your Talk Show,” with host Tim Bremel to discuss the omicron variant of COVID-19 and to continue his fight against vaccination efforts and public health officials he refers to as “COVID gods” such as Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“It’s not irrational for people that are aware of that information go, ‘you know, I think, cause I’ve seen a lot of my neighbors get COVID, and really well, it wasn’t all that bad, and I said, you know, I think maybe I’ll take my chances, and I don’t think I’m going to, I’m going to actually utilize my own freedom, my own health autonomy, and I’m going to choose not to get the vaccine,’ and now we are demonizing those people,” Johnson said. “Around the world, they’re putting them basically into internment camps. What is going on?”
Johnson’s appearance includes a number of misleading or wrong statements about how other countries have fared during the pandemic, the reporting system for vaccine side effects and public health officials’ response to omicron.
Johnson was basing his aversion to getting vaccinated on reported incidents in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a database run by the CDC and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) which tracks reactions to all sorts of vaccines. The problem with using the VAERS data to make conclusions about the COVID-19 vaccine is that anyone can make a report that is then included in the database without any further confirmation.
“We’ve had over 900,000 adverse events on the VAERs system with the COVID vaccine, 19,500 deaths, and our health agencies continued to say, ‘nothing to see here,’” Johnson said. “All I’m saying is that concerns me, we ought to look at that.”
Johnson, who has repeatedly attacked public health officials and their guidance throughout the pandemic while promoting unproven treatments such as ivermectin, said he’s being persecuted for telling the truth.
“We can’t ask that question, we can’t get a second opinion, there’s only one narrative, and it’s the narrative put forth by the COVID gods,” he said. “And anybody like me, who provides a little more truthful information, they try to destroy us. So that’s what’s happening.”
This isn’t the only time Johnson has been under fire in recent weeks for public statements about public health issues. Earlier this month, the senator appeared on a podcast in which he said AIDS was “over hyped” by Fauci in the same way he’s treated COVID.
“Fauci did the exact same thing with AIDS. He overhyped it. He created all kinds of fear, saying it could affect the entire population when it couldn’t,” Johnson said on the Brian Kilmeade Show. “And he’s … using the exact same playbook with COVID, ignoring therapy, pushing a vaccine. The solution to this I’ve always felt was early treatment. We still haven’t robustly explored that and that’s a travesty.”
In his appearance on WCLO, Johnson claimed his comments about AIDS, on World AIDS Day, were taken out of context.
Johnson isn’t the only Wisconsin right wing figure to make comparisons between measures to slow the pandemic and internment camps. In May 2020, when the Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down Gov. Tony Evers’ statewide stay-at-home order, Justice Rebecca Bradley wrote in her opinion that making people stay home to prevent the spread of a deadly disease was equivalent to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Johnson’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Sen. Johnson compares treatment of unvaccinated to internment camps was originally published by the Wisconsin Examiner.
Rebecca and Rojo both stupid ignorant conservatives.
The devil daring duo – RoJo and Rebecca – can’t understand nanoparticle transmission sequence!
I don’t see MD after their names. They are anti-science folks – I wouldn’t be surprised to see them railing against funds going to increase and deepen STEM programs in schools – goodness knows they don’t want more young folks indoctrinated with the scientific method and scientific understanding!
Wisconsin’s Johnson! If only we had a 25th Amendment applied to U.S.Senators. His irrational pronouncements qualify him for a lifetime membership in the Tinfoil Hat Fraternity.
A noted historian once said, “We should always beware that what once lay in the future now lays in the past.” When this pandemic is in the rear-view mirror, we should all remember Ron Johnson’s contribution to making it worse at every stage. Johnson is a type. The know-nothing know-it-all “businessman,” entitled, self-satisfied and willfully ignorant. To our great misfortune, he has been inserted into a powerful office and given a platform by a Fox News lobotomized electorate that believes the lies that they want to believe.
Johnson (and Rebecca Bradley) have a historic Wisconsin role model, one with the same “base” of bigots and corporate and dark money backers. That was Senator Joseph McCarthy, another reckless liar who destroyed lives as a matter of course. There is a useful historic parallel to comparing Covid measures to “internment camps.” Walter Harnischfeger, the fascist Milwaukee industrialist, and the Diane Hendricks/Menard/Uihlein, of his time, said that the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals were worse than the Dachau death camp. As Mark Twain said, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
The confusion of selfishness with “freedom” is now embedded in Republican talking points. What is strange is that, in a party that has happily “otherized” scapegoat groups, the impact of these lies will fall heavily on the lives of the party’s and Ron Johnson’s followers. In the film Ninotchka, a dour Soviet commissar (Greta Garbo) arrives from Moscow in Paris. She is asked how Stalin’s mass purge trials are going and responds, “The mass trials are a great success. We will have fewer but better Russians.” Funny line until you start thinking about the death and misery that lay behind it. You could say that, because of the efforts of Ron Johnson, Fox News and others, we will have “fewer but better Republicans.” Funny line until you start thinking about the human suffering and lost and permanently disabled family members behind the laugh.
Finally, with respect to Dr. Fauci, an old football coach in making one of his clever criticisms would tell us, “You couldn’t carry (fill in the name’s) jock.” Ron Johnson couldn’t carry Dr. Fauci’s jock.
Well stated, Frank!