Ron Johnson Continues His War On Vaccines

Ron Johnson. Photo by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America / Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

For years, Wisconsin’s Republican U.S. Senator Ron Johnson has been one of the leading opponents of vaccines. On Sunday, he blew his anti-medicine horn again, charging that federal officials failed to warn the public about COVID-19 vaccine safety concerns. “They let people die and become permanently disabled because they didn’t want to cause ‘vaccine hesitancy,'” he posted on the social media platform X.

While there is no doubt health officials were battling to overcome vaccine hesitancy, given the opposition of anti-vaxxers like Johnson, there is no evidence of the widespread side effects Johnson has claimed.

In his rational moments, Johnson sort of concedes this. At a roundtable he held in Milwaukee in 2021, Johnson said that he is pro-vaccine, acknowledging that more than 300 million doses have been given to people and “for the vast majority of people, the vaccine has been given with few or no side effects.” But he offered testimony from six people, none from Wisconsin, who suffered side effects.

In a statement, the Milwaukee Health Department said Johnson’s motives should be questioned when people were dying from COVID-19. “The scientific facts about the COVID-19 vaccine remain: It is safe, it is effective, and complications are extremely rare,” a statement by the department stressed. “More importantly, it saves lives.”

Johnson has never disproven this, yet he has continued to bang his anti-vaccine drum, exaggerating the threat from vaccines while minimizing the benefits for those 300 million people.

In June, he held a high-stakes hearing on Capitol Hill titled “Plausible Mechanisms of COVID-19 Injections Causing Cancer and Attacks on Scientific Publications and Research,” as ABC News reported. As with his past hearings, Johnson featured a small number of conspiracy theorists to make outlandish claims, in this case that the vaccine was causing cancer. Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal contested this, offering this statement at the hearing: “The National Cancer Institute has concluded, quote, there is no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines cause cancer.”

In an interview with ABC News, Johnson offered more grandiose claims, calling the government’s handling of the COVID-19 vaccine the “biggest government scandal of my lifetime,” and claiming without evidence that “millions of people had adverse events” from taking the vaccine.

Just two weeks later, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported on a new study of 1 million veterans who used the Department of Veterans Affairs health system, finding that the coronavirus vaccine reduced the risk of major cardiovascular events, particularly in older adults. The study found the vaccine decreased the risk of cardiovascular death associated with the virus by nearly 60%, the risk of heart attack by around 40% and the risk of stroke by just more than 30%. Additionally, it decreased the risk of hospitalization for heart failure by around 40%.

Johnson ignores such research while claiming thousands of people have been killed by the COVID-19 vaccine, despite the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s finding that only three deaths might have been caused by the vaccine out of 245 million doses.

Johnson has used his position as chair of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to hold five hearings in the past year on the COVID-19 vaccines and what he describes as the “corruption of science.”

In July, Johnson joined Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky in demonizing former U.S. health official Anthony Fauci at hearings of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Fauci led the efforts to contain the COVID pandemic, which killed more than 1.1 million Americans, including nearly 15,000 Wisconsinites. The numbers might have been much higher if not for the vaccine. Yet Johnson pressed Fauci on whether he was involved in the Food and Drug Administration’s “attack” on hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

Johnson was a major proponent of ivermectin, best known as a horse tranquilizer, and hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, though the FDA found the drugs did not meaningfully reduce mortality or affect recovery in patients.

The late conservative Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson once called Johnson “America’s most reliable source of unreliable information about COVID-19.” Wisconsin’s senator is one of the most prominent vaccine skeptics in the U.S., if not the world, perhaps second only to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose opposition to the measles vaccine contributed to the deaths of 80 people in Samoa, critics have charged.

When President Donald Trump picked Kennedy to run the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Johnson was thrilled, as he told NPR. “When he called me up asking, for example, his chances of confirmation, first words out of my mouth: ‘Bobby, this is the answer to my prayers,'” Johnson said.

Yes, Johnson now has a key supporter for his seemingly endless run of demagogic anti-vaccine hearings.