Ron Johnson slams Trump team for not approving unproven COVID-19 treatments

Sen. Ron Johnson said in an interview on Thursday with the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist host of a podcast that President Donald Trump’s COVID-19 response team got in the way of what he considered the best approach to handling the coronavirus pandemic. But, the Wisconsin Republican said, he kept quiet about it at the time so as not to hurt Trump’s reelection campaign.

Johnson made the comments in a nearly 90-minute interview with anti-vaccine figure Del Bigtree on his program “The Highwire” that was flagged by the political opposition research group American Bridge 21st Century.

Criticizing Dr. Anthony Fauci, the experienced expert on infectious diseases who clashed with Trump and others on the right, as well as Dr. Deborah Birx and others on Trump’s COVID team, Johnson discussed hearings he led in 2020 as chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, during which he himself was criticized for inviting anti-vaccine activists to testify in favor of unproven and medically risky treatments for COVID such as the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine, which has been shown to be ineffective against the virus.

“I don’t expect the general public to really listen to hearings. It’s kind of the aftermath, and what news reports are written about it. Again, from my standpoint, we were making news, but I wasn’t Fauci, I wasn’t Birx — they had a different narrative here. And so I realized I wasn’t making a whole lot of headway and this was kind of out of my control at this point in time. And you know, quite honestly, I wanted to make sure that President Trump got reelected and I didn’t want to get too overly critical on his administration, to be quite honest,” he said. “I had some real problems with what was happening inside the administration. I mean, again, he was not obviously aware of these things. But he couldn’t get it done. His team wasn’t serving him well.”

The Trump administration’s response to the pandemic failed to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths due to COVID in the United States.

In the early days, Trump belittled the threat of the virus, falsely claiming that it was “under control” and would not spread in the United States and that it would quickly go away when the weather warmed up.

He admitted to journalist Bob Woodward that he intentionally misled the public, telling him, “I wanted to always play it down.”

As the virus spread across the world and shut down the U.S. economy, Trump falsely said the seasonal flu was worse than COVID, pushed hydroxychloroquine as a “miracle cure,” refused to wear a mask and mocked those who did, and hosted events that ended up as “superspreaders” of the virus while flouting his own safety guidelines.

Johnson, who has long pushed false claims about the supposed dangers of COVID-19 vaccines and touted dangerous and unproven treatments, had nothing to say about the actual failings of the Trump administration’s response, instead arguing that the COVID team’s failure to push hydroxychloroquine was because it would make have made it harder to get actual vaccines against the virus approved.

“I can’t explain it. But it sure seems at some point in time, the cabal — I call them the COVID cartel — decided, no, it’s going to be vaccine,” Johnson said. “And, and of course, that’s one of the explanations of why they’d want to tank and sabotage early treatment, which they did, was if you have an effective therapy, you’re not going to get emergency use authorization on a totally novel therapy that’s not a vaccine.”

According to a November 2020 article in the scientific publication Microbes and Infection, Bigtree’s program frequently presents similar “government and the media are lying to you” themes, like Johnson’s, in its continued opposition to vaccination.

Johnson, who had previously promised not to serve more than two terms in the Senate, is facing an uphill race this November against Democratic Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes in his quest for a third six-year term. Polls show Johnson is widely unpopular, with the second-lowest approval ratings of any senator in the country after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Johnson frequently reminds supporters that he has been endorsed by Trump.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.