[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 212 (Wednesday, December 8, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9019-S9022]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                            Vaccine Mandate

  Mr. JOHNSON. Mr. President, I come to the floor of the Senate today 
to make a few points and ask a few questions.
  First of all, can we all acknowledge that there is so much that we do 
not know about the coronavirus, about COVID, the disease, or about the 
COVID vaccines? Our response to COVID, as a result, has been a reaction 
to very imperfect information.
  So, very early in the pandemic, I gave those individuals in a 
position to have to make very tough decisions with imperfect 
information a great deal of latitude in making those tough calls, but 
over the course of the months, we have learned a lot.
  We have always been told to follow the science, but it sure seems our 
healthcare Agencies--as I refer to them, the COVID gods; the Dr. Faucis 
of the world, the Agency heads, the Biden administration, the 
mainstream media, and social media--have never allowed second opinions. 
There has been one narrative, and they simply have not been willing to 
consider alternative measures.
  So a question I think we should all be asking ourselves is, Does that 
response work? Over 780,000 Americans have lost their lives. The human 
toll of the economic devastation of the shutdowns, the year of lost 
learning for our children, the psychological harm to our children, the 
record overdose deaths, the increase in suicides--I don't know how you 
can take a look at America's death rate--the last time I looked, it was 
a couple weeks old; about 220 per 100,000 population. By the way, 
Sweden was at 145 per 100,000 a couple of weeks ago. I don't see how 
anybody can take a look at the response imposed in our country by the 
COVID gods and say it was a success.
  So acknowledging the fact that there is still so much we don't know, 
I would

[[Page S9020]]

appreciate a little modesty on the part of the COVID gods. I would 
appreciate that we actually follow the advice that I have always heard 
when dealing with a serious medical condition: Get a second opinion. 
Get a third opinion. As I said, that is not allowed.
  I think it also calls for a little respect for our fellow citizens. 
These are some tough decisions. They are tough decisions whether or not 
you want to get vaccinated.
  Even more gut-wrenching than tough decisions based on these idiotic 
and pointless vaccine mandates is, do I subject to the coercion, to the 
pressure, to the fear of reprisal and take the jab or lose my job? 
These are tough decisions.
  I am a big supporter of Operation Warp Speed. I have had every 
vaccination until this one because I had COVID. The COVID gods aren't 
acknowledging natural immunity. They are not acknowledging vaccine 
injuries. They are not acknowledging the fact that even if you are 
fully vaccinated, you can still get COVID and you can still transmit 
COVID. So what is the point of a mandate? But, of course, that is not 
what we are getting from the COVID gods.
  This weekend, something happened that is not unusual. My words were 
taken completely out of context, twisted, distorted, and I was 
relentlessly attacked.
  I would like to respond to those attacks that were headlined:
  ``Fauci calls Ron Johnson's AIDS comment `preposterous.'''
  Fauci said:

       I don't have any clue of what he's talking about.

  ``Fauci Blasts Ron Johnson for Saying He `Overhyped' AIDS: 
`Preposterous!'''
  ``Anthony Fauci Rips GOP Sen. Ron Johnson's `Preposterous' Accusation 
He's `Overhyped' COVID.''
  So what did I say? That sounds terrible. Well, what I said was in 
response to radio talk show host Brian Kilmeade's question asking about 
the Omicron variant.
  He said: It looks benign. I mean, mild symptoms; mostly people under 
40.
  So I answered his question about Omicron, talking about Muller's 
ratchet. It is a phenomenon. It makes sense--how viruses generally 
mutate, how they become more contagious because they want to replicate, 
so they become more contagious but generally less lethal because it 
doesn't have replication if you kill your host. Now, nothing is 
guaranteed, but that would be the general direction of the variants of 
the coronavirus. Why would we assume anything worse? But that is what 
the COVID gods are doing. They are assuming the worse. They are using 
every new variant to keep us in the state of fear that they have 
created to maintain control over our lives and rob us of our freedom, 
to impose freedom-robbing vaccine mandates, again, that are 
preposterous--there is a good use of that word--that are pointless, 
that are idiotic.

  But after talking about that state of fear, I went on to say:

       By the way, Fauci did the exact same thing with AIDS. He 
     overhyped it.

  Now, full stop, that is where the news media stopped and then accused 
me, falsely, of downplaying AIDS. I have never, nor would I ever 
downplay the tragedy that is AIDS, that is COVID. These are serious, 
deadly diseases. They have killed hundreds of thousands. I would never 
downplay them.
  When I said ``overhyped,'' I explained exactly what I was talking 
about in the next six words. I said:

       He created all kinds of fear, saying it could affect the 
     entire population when it couldn't. . . . [H]e's using the 
     exact same playbook [for] COVID.

  Here is the key point that I want to talk about a little bit later: 
ignoring therapy, pushing a vaccine. The solution to this pandemic, I 
have always thought, was early treatment. We still haven't robustly 
explored early treatment, and that is a travesty.
  Now, Dr. Fauci wanted to show us that this criticism of him, creating 
a state of fear, is preposterous, but let's go to what he actually said 
back in May of 1983.
  Now, I was alive in May of 1983. I understand how unsettling this new 
disease was. I understand the state of fear, the legitimate state of 
fear. But responsible health officials should not have stoked it, and 
Dr. Fauci did. He authored an article in the Journal of the American 
Medical Association stating ``the possibility that routine close 
contact, as within [any] family household, can spread the disease.'' He 
added:

       If indeed the latter is true, then AIDS takes on an 
     entirely new dimension.

  And then:

       If we add to this the possibility that nonsexual, non-
     blood-borne transmission is possible, the scope of the 
     syndrome may be enormous.

  Now, it is important to note that these aren't off-the-cuff comments; 
this is in a column he wrote with forethought. Dr. Fauci knew what a 
delicate time we were in as the public awareness of this disease was 
emerging, when people were already frightened by what they were 
hearing. He was in a position of authority. He knew what he said 
carried weight and would be disseminated, and it was.
  The following day's headlines--the United Press International 
published a story headlined ``Household contact may transmit AIDS.'' 
The next day, the Associated Press ran a story asking ``Does AIDS 
spread by routine contact?'' The same day, the New York Times article 
read ``Family Contact Studied in Transmitting AIDS,'' and it invoked 
Fauci's article in discussing the possibility of transmission between 
family members.
  He stoked the fear, and it, quite honestly, continues to this day. He 
stigmatized AIDS patients for years with his fearmongering.
  Now, less than 2 months later, in June of 1983, Dr. Fauci flip-
flopped and he publicly contradicted his own fearmongering by stating:

       It is absolutely preposterous--

  He likes that word, by the way--

       It is absolutely preposterous to suggest that AIDS can be 
     contracted through normal social contact [by] being in the 
     same room with someone or sitting on a bus with them.

  I mean, you heard what he said 2 months earlier, right? If he felt it 
was so preposterous on June 26, why had he raised the fear, stoked the 
fear, just 2 months earlier?
  It is interesting. I just found out last night that not only did he 
write that article stoking the fear, he started giving interviews. I 
have seen an interview where he basically used the exact same words. 
But now he denies it. He wants to deny the reality of what he said and 
what he did. He wants to rewrite history.
  By the way, when it comes to the AIDS crisis, rewriting history, I am 
not the only one who is accusing him of that. In an article published--
or updated last on December 6 in 2017, in the Huffington Post, in their 
comment platform, which I guess has since been taken down, an author of 
a book--his name is Sean Strub--wrote an article--wrote a blog for 
HuffPost.
  The book Mr. Strub wrote was ``Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, 
Sex, AIDS, and Survival.'' And he describes it, as he recounts how slow 
the Federal Government was in publicizing the use of Bactrim and other 
sulfa drugs to prevent PCP, which is the pneumonia that was then the 
leading killer of people with AIDS, in addition to its longtime and 
well-known use to treat that type of pneumonia.
  So let me quote from Mr. Strub's article. He said:

       Dr. Anthony Fauci is rewriting history. He is doing so to 
     disguise his shameful role in delaying promotion of an AIDS 
     treatment that would have prevented tens of thousands of 
     deaths in the first years of the epidemic.

  The article goes on to say:

       In 1987, pioneering AIDS activist Michael Callen begged 
     Fauci for help in promoting the use of Bactrim as PCP 
     prophylaxis and issuing interim guidelines urging physicians 
     to prophylax those patients deemed at high risk for PCP.

  The article goes on:

       Had Fauci listened to people with AIDS and the clinicians 
     treating them, and responded accordingly, he would have saved 
     thousands of lives. In the two years between 1987, when 
     Callen met with Fauci and 1989, when the guidelines were 
     ultimately issued, nearly 17,000 people with AIDS suffocated 
     from PCP. Most of these people might have lived had Fauci 
     responded appropriately.

  Another doctor, Dr. Barry Gingell--I am continuing with the article 
here--

       a medical advisor to Gay Men's Health Crisis, met with 
     Fauci to plead for his support, they didn't just say there 
     was ``this preliminary activity and some small trials,'' as 
     Fauci claims. They explained that many frontline AIDS 
     physicians, following the lead of Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, were 
     already using Bactrim effectively to prevent the recurrence 
     of PCP. The science was clear. A decade before, clinical 
     trials by Dr. Walter

[[Page S9021]]

     Hughes had proven its efficacy in preventing PCP in other 
     immune-compromised populations, like children with leukemia.

  It continues:

       Fauci refused to acknowledge the evidence and, according to 
     one account, even encouraged people with AIDS to stop taking 
     treatments, like Bactrim, that weren't specifically approved 
     for use in people with AIDS.

  Dr. Sonnabend wrote in 2006:

       Why, in the case of AIDS, was Bactrim, a known preventative 
     measure against PCP, introduced so many years after a need 
     for it had been recognized? To this must be added the 
     question of why this neglect, the consequences of which can 
     be measured in the tens of thousands of lives lost, has 
     received almost no attention.

  The media has continued to cover for Dr. Fauci.
  The article goes on:

       If we don't tell the truth about the history of the AIDS 
     epidemic, it will be subject to more whitewashing--

  As we witnessed this weekend. My aside.

       --more distortions and more rewriting to suit the legacies 
     of the officials in charge. These are the same officials who 
     seem incapable of ever acknowledging or taking responsibility 
     for mistakes they made--mistakes that cost our community 
     thousands of lives.

  Now, why did I take so much time to read an excerpt from this article 
from 2017?
  It is because it is the major point I was making in my comments to 
Brian Kilmeade. Dr. Fauci, he is using the exact same playbook for 
COVID as he did for AIDS: ignoring therapy like Bactrim or the 
cornucopia of cheap, generic, repurposed drugs that are available, that 
are being used successfully to treat COVID and save lives.
  The solution, I have always felt, has always been early treatment. 
But, again, Dr. Fauci is ignoring therapy and pushing a vaccine.
  Why?
  There are multiple medical experts who have looked at this, who are 
treating COVID, who are doing the research, who say upwards of 500,000 
lives were needlessly lost because we ignored and, I would argue, 
sabotaged early treatment with cheap, generic, repurposed drugs.
  In fact, the FDA completely trash-talked one of these repurposed 
drugs, a Nobel Prize-winning drug termed by the World Health 
Organization as a miracle drug, Ivermectin, calling it horse paste; 
saying: Come on, you all; you are not cows.
  Fake news stories saying that people are lining up, clogging 
hospitals because of overdoses of Ivermectin, only to find out that is 
a completely false news story--like false studies published in medical 
journals that had to be withdrawn 2 weeks later early in the pandemic, 
which also poisoned the use of some of these repurposed drugs.
  Let's take a look at some facts. Let's take a look at some facts 
that, when I go on media and I describe these facts, I am censored by 
the COVID gods; I am removed from YouTube, as is sometimes the radio 
talk show host.
  But let's look at the facts of drugs versus the vaccine. Now, many of 
you will be shocked by this because this is all being censored. This 
information, this is not allowed. Again, there is one narrative; it is 
the narrative of the COVID gods. No second or third opinions are 
allowed. No questions are allowed to be asked, much less answered.
  So let's take a look at Ivermectin. I have got two columns here: 
Total adverse events reported to either the FAERS system--the adverse 
event reporting system from the FDA for drugs--and the VAERS system--
the vaccine adverse event system reported through the CDC.
  So the top three. First of all, Ivermectin. Over 26 years--26 years 
of reporting--Ivermectin has about 3,756 adverse events reported in 
through FAERS. So that is adverse events. In terms of deaths, it 
averages about 15 reports of deaths per year.
  Now, let's get something straight here. There are two main criticisms 
of FAERS and VAERS. It doesn't prove causation. I get that. But it also 
dramatically understates the adverse events.
  So, again, we are going to use this as a comparison.
  Ivermectin: 15 deaths per year, on average, over 26 years of usage.
  Hydroxychloroquine: 23,355 total adverse events over 26 years. On 
average, about 69 deaths--death reports per year.
  How about the seasonal flu vaccine?
  Again, 26 years' worth of history: 198,776 total adverse events 
reported on VAERS, but an average of 80 deaths per year for the 
seasonal flu vaccine.
  I look at these, and I go: These are pretty safe drugs. No drug is 
100 percent safe. No human body is exactly the same. But you have to 
look at these drugs as having a very safe and reliable safety profile.
  So if you have COVID--and let's face it, the current NIH guideline on 
COVID is to do nothing: go home, foray it alone, isolate yourself, hope 
you don't get so sick you have to check yourself into a hospital.
  The only thing they are recommending for use is monoclonal 
antibodies. Try and get those. I have talked to so many constituents 
that haven't been able to. Either they are not sick enough or they 
become too sick or it has taken too long.
  So, virtually, the NIH guideline continues to this day: Do nothing.
  Now, a quick aside: How many other diseases is that the 
recommendation? Isn't it always early detection allows for early 
treatment, produces better outcome?
  Of course, that is what we recommend for every other disease, except 
COVID because Fauci ignored therapies and pushed vaccines. He has just 
been--he has got his blinders on. It is vaccines, vaccines, vaccines.
  And then they scaremonger both Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
  I don't know. Are you afraid of those? If you have got COVID, would 
you give those a shot?
  I certainly would. And, by the way, I am not a doctor; I am not a 
medical researcher. But I have been in contact with doctors who have 
the courage and compassion to treat. And so when I have a friend or a 
constituent who calls me and says, ``What can I do?'' I refer them to a 
doctor who treats them.
  And I have example after example of these things working, keeping 
people out of hospitals and certainly preventing death. I know it is 
anecdotal, but the evidence is mounting, and it is getting to the point 
of being--I think it is at the point of being irrefutable.
  So now let's compare this to the drugs of choice of Dr. Fauci and the 
COVID gods. Let's take a look at Remdesivir. The studies were weak. 
They changed the endpoint of reducing death--because it didn't--to 
reducing days in the hospital. But they still rushed through the 
emergency use authorization, and it has been the treatment, because it 
is blessed by the COVID gods, that hospitals will apply.
  Now, in fairness, hospitals also do dexamethasone. They will do other 
things--corticosteroids. Pierre Kory testified before my committee in 
May of 2020 about corticosteroids.
  But Remdesivir is the big one; over $3,000 a dose when these cost 20 
to 50 bucks, total, as part of a multidrug, multivitamin--vitamin D, 
zinc. Remdesivir: 6,500 adverse events. I don't have it here. 1,612 
deaths so far since it has got its emergency use. That is an average of 
921 a year. That is Remdesivir.
  Now let's look at the COVID vaccine, and this will shock you. It 
should shock you because nobody is talking about it. And when a guy 
like me talks about it, I get censored, I get vilified, I get attacked.
  927,740 total adverse events. And, remember, one of the criticisms is 
VAERS dramatically understates the number of adverse events.
  Total deaths: 19,532. Now, again, I realize VAERS doesn't prove 
causation, but almost 6,000 of these worldwide deaths occurred on days 
0, 1, or 2 following vaccination.
  I know Fauci, I know Janet Woodcock, I know Francis Collins are not 
concerned about this. I am concerned about this. Other people who have 
been able to avoid the censors and see this, they are concerned about 
it. They are making those tough choices. They also realize COVID can be 
a deadly disease. They have to make an informed decision whether or not 
to get vaccinated.
  Shouldn't they have all the information?
  But they are not being given all the information. It is about time 
they are.
  Let me conclude by just asking--for the audience, really--why do I 
continue to push these truths?
  And they are truths. There is no misinformation up here. This is the 
truth. These aren't my numbers. This isn't my data. This is the CDC and 
the FDA's data.

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  Why do I continue to talk about these things when I get attacked, 
when I get vilified, when I get ridiculed, when I get censored?
  It is pretty simple. It is because I have acknowledged the vaccine-
injured. I have held events to let them tell their stories--like little 
Maddie de Garay, 12 years old. Now she is 13. She participated in the 
Pfizer trial. She is in a wheelchair. She can't eat. She has a feeding 
tube.
  Pfizer has ignored her, cast her aside.
  They are not paying for her medical bills. That is a scandal right 
then and there. Brianne Dressen participated in the AstraZeneca trial: 
paralyzed from the waist down. Fortunately, she has gotten her leg 
function back. But she is not whole. She is not cured.
  Ernest Ramirez: he lost his only son, his best friend. He is a single 
dad.
  I have given the vaccine-injured--the survivors, I have given them a 
forum to tell their stories, and the media just shrugs. All they want 
is to be seen and heard and believed so they can be cured or so they 
can prevent other people from experiencing their trauma.
  The real reason I continue to tell the truth--although I am 
attacked--is because not only have I given these individuals a forum to 
tell their stories, but I have seen their tears. I have hugged the 
vaccine-injured, the surviving spouses, the surviving parents, the 
surviving children.
  Why won't we acknowledge these truths? Why won't we acknowledge the 
vaccine-injured?
  Until we do, until we acknowledge what the root cause of the illness 
might be, how is there any hope of healing them?
  So again, our response to COVID has been a miserable failure. We must 
acknowledge that. We can't deny reality. We need to embrace early 
treatment because we are going to continue to need early treatment.
  The vaccines aren't 100 percent guaranteed effective. New variants 
will emerge. We are going to have to treat. Better start now and might 
as well give these cheap generic, widely available drugs a shot.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Smith). The Senator from West Virginia.