Sen. Ron Johnson: Here’s What We Found in 11 Million Pages of COVID Records

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Subpoenaed documents released by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) reveal that American public health officials were well aware of COVID-19 vaccine safety signals for myocarditis and ischemic stroke in people over 65—well before they alerted the American public.

Last year, as chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Johnson issued a subpoena to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) seeking six categories of COVID-related data, including vaccine safety surveillance data and myocarditis records.

From the subpoenaed data—enormous dumps of what has ultimately become about 11 million pages—Johnson’s team found that the CDC was well aware of the myocarditis risk even in early 2021. Yet they downplayed it instead of alerting the public, Johnson said.

Johnson’s team also found that the White House modified wording about a safety signal for ischemic stroke with the bivalent booster for people over 65, changing “moderately elevated” to “slightly elevated,” according to records.

In our wide-ranging interview, we dive into what Johnson and his team discovered after sifting through millions of documents. What did America’s public health agencies really know about the COVID-19 vaccines back in 2021 and 2022? What was hidden from the American public? And what has compelled Johnson to make this issue his number one priority?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Senator Ron Johnson, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Senator Ron Johnson:

Thanks for having me on.

Mr. Jekielek:

You just recently had a large document dump related to, let’s just call it COVID data. So tell me about why you chose to publish what you did recently.

Senator Johnson:

Well, we got the document dump probably about a year ago now. I mean, this was with RFK Jr. coming in as Secretary of HHS [Dept. of Health & Human Services], promising radical transparency. I provided him a friendly subpoena to just help prompt the people underneath him to, you know, support him in his desire to let the public, you know, have the information the public deserves. Unfortunately, the agency itself did not respond to our specific document request, which is our preference, so that they’ve got to sort through it as opposed to us.

But I think Bobby got a little frustrated because we weren’t getting the information, so he really just ordered, give them information, so we got—we thought it was originally about eight million pages; I think it ended up being about 11 million pages. So now you have to use AI [artificial intelligence], and you know people think AI is just a real, you know, like a miracle, and it is, but you still have 11 million pages to sift through, and you have to know exactly what the search terms are. And as I talk to my staff, they’ll put in, you know, one of these adverse events for the COVID injection, and they get 200,000 pages. So now they have to sift through it. So it’s an iterative process.

But early in that iterative process, one of the first things we put in the search engine was myocarditis. And the staff, you know, sifting through all those thousands and thousands of pages that that inquiry provided, we saw that they absolutely had and admitted that they had a safety signal on myocarditis. This is by about May of 2021, and they hid it. They didn’t immediately issue a warning on the Health Alert Network [HAN]. They downplayed it in any communication. So we held our first hearing, with me as chairman of PSI [Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations], in May of 2025 with that revelation, knowing that that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Mr. Jekielek:

If I can just comment, we did know that there was some kind of signal around myocarditis; I think that was one of the few things that we did know. Could you just clarify what you mean when you say this?

Senator Johnson:

Yes, we knew that like by January, February of 2021, the Israelis were asking the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] about it because they were seeing it with the myocarditis, particularly in young men, seeing a safety signal, so that’s what kind of prompted them to have this internal communication, and what we revealed is they yes, the CDC had a safety signal, and then they didn’t immediately warn people; they downplayed it; they hid it.

Okay, so fast forward, we continue to sift through documents, and my staff then determined that they also were seeing a safety signal on ischemic stroke in people over 65 toward the tail end of 2022 into 2023, week after week after week. So this is a consistent safety signal showing up with a bivalent booster. And within those communications, once again, you see that, okay, they’ve got this issue of study or didn’t issue a study, but they produced a study or had a study conducted for them.

There were points in there; they say, well, the study’s complete, but they’re not showing the results of it. Then when people ask for the results, well, the study’s not complete. So they’re just obfuscating the whole issue. And once again, they didn’t issue an alert on the health alert network. When they actually did write about it, they switched the internal communication from moderate risk to slight risk. So again, this is, so you got myocarditis, you got ischemic stroke over 65.

And one of my concerns about producing this information seems, okay, well, that’s all it is. I mean, the COVID injection was so beneficial; you know, saved three million lives, and I want to talk about that claim. Okay, um, save three million lives, so okay, you have some, you always have side effects right, but the main point I wanted to make in the letter that we wrote to HHS about this ischemic stroke and the hearing we will probably have toward the tail end of April is that we also found out and uncovered the fact that they were well aware of the inadequacy of their safety surveillance analysis systems.

I know The Epoch Times very early on got their PRR [proportional reporting ratio] report, which was showing safety signals all over the place, but then CDC said, oh, but that’s a bad system. We’re really relying on empirical Bayesian analysis, and they make it sound like this is all this complex analysis. But they knew within their analysis of the empirical Bayesian system that there’s a situation called masking.

So, in particular with the COVID injections, you had Pfizer and you had Moderna, very similar platforms that both mRNA, very similar types of adverse events, very similar types of deaths. I mean, they’re very similar. So what CDC did in their analysis is they would compare Pfizer; let’s say there were 10,000 deaths of Pfizer, they would be comparing Pfizer to Moderna and all the vaccines, so let’s say you had 10,000 deaths with Moderna, 10,000 deaths with Pfizer, and a thousand deaths with other vaccines. So now you’re comparing Pfizer’s 10,000 deaths with Moderna and all the vaccines at 11,000. You go, there’s no significant safety signals, it’s masked.

Now switch it. Now you’re looking at Moderna; you’re comparing Moderna to Pfizer and all the vaccines. You’re comparing 10,000 adverse events or deaths with 11,000. You mask the signal, and they knew it. They fully understood that. And again, you know, just lame laypeople like ourselves, as we’re looking at this in 2021, and you’re seeing charts that show the number of deaths due to vaccines going back 26 years, it’s just this, you know, pretty steady line, not very many per year.

Now you’re talking about various data, VAERS [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] data. All of a sudden, in 2021, it just spikes. I didn’t need a proportional reporting ratio analysis. I didn’t need empirical Bayesian analysis to tell me there was something seriously wrong here. I remember publishing my VAERS charts where there were a couple thousand deaths, then more thousand deaths, then 10,000, 20,000. We’re up to about 39,000 deaths.

Early on, there were 46 percent of those deaths occurring on the day of vaccination or within one or two days. Now we’re about 24 percent. Of the 39,000 deaths reported worldwide on VAERS, 24 percent are occurring on the day of vaccination or within one or two days. And they say, well, you know, VAERS doesn’t prove causation. I mean, that’s a heck of a correlation.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, but also now we can see, you know, looking back very clearly, I mean, some people saw it earlier, I think, but there was a huge disincentive to write those reports in the first place.

Senator Johnson:

Yes, they did not want to create vaccine hesitancy. Again, when we release this, we now have the documents, so now we’re conducting interviews. And so we want to complete those interviews before I publish all the results. But within those documents, you’re seeing people make those kinds of comments. So I’ve got to remind you guys, the administration, they really want to make sure that everybody gets these boosters. You know, we can’t, so in other words, don’t publicize this, downplay this, hide this because we don’t want to create vaccine hesitancy. Right. But on this issue of masking, that really is the, you know. It sounds crazy.

Mr. Jekielek:

If I may, just, I have to comment on this, like it just doesn’t make sense. As someone who’s, you know, done an analysis and experimental design in my life, it doesn’t seem to make sense to me to test an adverse event of one vaccine vs. another. You would need to have something that you need to have some sort of control group where you’re lacking control.

Senator Johnson:

By the way, now you’re talking about the childhood vaccine schedule as well. I mean, as Aaron Siri has pointed out and Bobby Kennedy, they’ve never tested any of the vaccines on the current childhood schedule against a true placebo. They’re always doing it against the previous version or the vaccine with all the adjuvants, you know, without necessarily the live virus. They’re never testing it against strictly saline.

Mr. Jekielek:

But when it comes to COVID, you told me that they’re looking at Pfizer vs. Moderna and they’re saying that they’re similar, but that’s not a test for adverse events, is it? Like, it doesn’t make sense.

Senator Johnson:

What they should have done is they should have just tested Pfizer, a standalone, against all other vaccines, excluding the COVID vaccines.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay.

Senator Johnson:

Again, that’s what the simple charts would do when you’re seeing, you know, maybe 100 deaths a year due to vaccines, whatever. And then all of a sudden we’ve got 8,000 in a year. You go back to swine flu, where they had finally about three dozen deaths reported and about 400 cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome. They pulled that vaccine out of the market.

And yet, when I talked to Francis Collins at the end of April, when there were a few thousand deaths occurring on VAERS, he said, well, Senator, we’ve attributed about six deaths to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, thrombosis with the women of childbearing age. So we’ve attributed six deaths, but Senator, people die. But 46 percent of these deaths are occurring on the day of vaccination or within one or two days. They’re not concerned about that? No, they were not.

Or if they were concerned, they were far more concerned about their end of the pandemic, their solution, and their vaccine injections. You can’t create vaccine hesitancy. Again, the pandemic was completely mismanaged from the PCR [polymerase chain reaction] testing all the way down.

Unfortunately, all the people that mismanaged it, all the people that contributed to this management, which is the people in the federal health agencies, you know, Fauci, Collins, all those people, the entire medical establishment, members of Congress who are pushing the COVID injection on their constituents, you know, this entire group, nobody wants to admit they’re wrong.

So we have not had a COVID reckoning; we have not really taken a look at that critically and said, you know, we completely blew this, okay, and lives were destroyed because of the horrific mistakes we made in ignoring early treatment, sabotaging things like ivermectin, budesonide, these, you know, other molecules that did work, should have been fully explored, should have been fully tested, should have been recommended, should have been used.

There’s a great anecdote of an attorney who was contacted by these families whose loved ones are in a hospital, oftentimes held against their will, because once you were checked in, you couldn’t check out, like Hotel California. They were just begging the hospital administration and the doctors, please just try ivermectin, just try it. Nope, they wouldn’t do it. So, they started taking these hospitals to court.

This attorney just became specialized in this. I don’t know the exact numbers. This is, you know, close. Of the 40 cases he won, only one person died. In other words, the hospitals were forced to give their loved one ivermectin or one of these treatments. Of the 40 cases he lost, they all died. I know that’s not a randomized controlled, you know, double placebo, blah, blah, blah, you know, but it’s pretty strong evidence, just as the basic VAERS was strong evidence.

So within these documents now, we know, you know, one of the communications is showing the results of a more sophisticated system that would have unmasked this, which was being pushed on people like Peter Marks early in 2021. They were told our current surveillance system is inadequate; it is going to mask; this is going to be a problem. And those people are referred to as pests. Don’t give them any more data. Tell them to stop their work. So they were being purposely told, we don’t want to know this.

Okay, but they had a better system they were trying to get them to use, and so these people are communicating themselves using this better system. They show this report; there are 49 instances of extreme masking, and out of that, 25 are showing a safety signal—things like sudden death and stroke. So they knew this, and the people at the CDC ignored it. They shoved these people off to the side; they told them to stop their work. The only analysis we’re interested in looking at is the stuff that we want to look at that masks this, and they knew it.

I think this is a bombshell. I think this is a huge scandal. The question is, when we hold our hearing, when we present our report and our findings and finish our interviews, will the legacy media cover this? Will the corporate media cover this at all? They’re part of the cover-up.

Mr. Jekielek:

Just for the benefit of the audience, right, it’s this Bayesian analysis system. Just the way the statistics are done is what the effect of that is—you get this masking. And then these people were basically saying, hey, our system is going to create this masking. We actually want to know what the truth is. And those people were shut down. That’s basically what you’re saying.

Senator Johnson:

You have a VAERS system that they were touting before they got the emergency use authorization. I mean, Tom Shimabukuro is saying this is a great system. You know, we’re going to be watching this stuff like a hawk. Well, of course, they didn’t do that. But as soon as it starts signaling these things, now they start denigrating it. So you can’t rely on VAERS because you have a bunch of cranks, a bunch of anti-vaxxers putting in false reports.

We also know from the Harvard Pilgrim study that was commissioned by the CDC to try and figure out how to fix VAERS. This is well before the COVID strike. The Harvard study showed that only about one percent of adverse events are ever reported because VAERS is very burdensome to complete. Doctors are not encouraged to do it. And so you’ve got this massive spike in deaths and serious adverse events showing on VAERS, and they’re denigrating it. They go, you can’t rely on that in crates.

While internally, the people who developed the system to analyze what they’re getting on VAERS, the very people who developed what they were using say, that’s not going to work. We’ve got a different system that will work. Use it. They were completely ignored. They were called pests. They were told to stop their work. Tell them not to give us their study.

But now we have evidence of their study. Now we have to gather more evidence. So again, they knew this, and they covered it up. And how many lives were devastated because our federal health officials simply were not transparent and honest with the American people, and really with the global population?

Mr. Jekielek:

And I mean, this is, by the way, just what the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations does. You’re the head of this. So out of curiosity, aside from this, it seems like you’re putting a lot of effort and a lot of your committee power into these types of questions. What else are you looking at? We’ll jump back to this in a moment; I just thought I’d mention for those that don’t know what PSI is.

Senator Johnson:

It is the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and yes, it can pretty well do an investigation on anything. You know, I’m obviously focusing on this because here during COVID, I was holding hearings as chairman of Homeland Security on early treatment. Those doctors who had the courage and compassion to treat people, their lives and careers were destroyed, which kind of caught my attention, going, what is going on here? And then I held all these public events where I allowed the injection-injured to just tell their story. Those people were denigrated. I mean, to this day, they’re still not being acknowledged.

This morning, I saw a video from a person who’s being treated for severe COVID injection injuries. The only place you can get treatment is in Japan. He’s got a central line in his aorta. Apparently, they’re having results, but it’s like one of the few places in the world that actually acknowledges the fact that these injuries, these disabilities that people are suffering from, were caused by the COVID injection.

Again, if you’re not willing to look at the root cause of what’s causing your ailment, you’re not going to be able to solve it. So here in America today, people that claim they’re injured by the COVID injection are gaslit, their doctors say it was all in their head. It’s just psychosomatic. I mean, the medical establishment, almost in total, is ignoring and denying these injection injuries, which means these injection-injured individuals are, I mean, they’re just being ignored. They’re not getting adequate treatment. We’re not putting research dollars into finding out what’s happening now.

We’re putting some research dollars into long COVID, which is probably a very similar phenomenon, probably caused by the spike protein, which was the nasty part of the coronaviruses. The spike protein was what was most toxic about it, and yet that’s exactly what the mRNA turned your cells into—a manufacturing site to produce. There’s a body distributed all over the body. I mean, it’s pretty easy for a layman to understand how dangerous those mRNA injections were and why it should not have been unleashed on a global population.

By the way, so you ask, what else are we looking at?  So now we have a doctor called Dr. Wafik El-Deiry. He was the director of oncology for Brown University, a very prestigious institution; he’s published papers on oncology. I think he edits an oncology peer-reviewed type of journal. He published a study with another doctor and just looked at over 300 case studies of cancers that people suspected were caused by the COVID injection. I mean, a lot of these are occurring right at the site of injection. I mean, there’s all kinds of reasons for suspecting this.

And so he just wrote a paper on the plausible mechanism of how the COVID injections could have caused these cancers. By the way, the spike protein is showing up in tumors. It shouldn’t be in tumors, okay? Again, indicating it might be sparking the malignancy. So he writes this paper, and now his career is being destroyed; it’s been destroyed. He’s been fired and forced to resign from his directorship at Brown University as their director of oncology.

He has been persecuted—the best word, yes, he’s persecuted—by others like Elisabeth Bik and other people who are just going back to every last one of his publications, or a lot of his publications, are being picked apart. They’re just putting claims that he has to defend. So again, they’re trying to destroy his reputation, his past research, and this is not unusual. I’ve got a number of other doctors who complain about the same thing. It’s such an esoteric issue.

Mr. Jekielek:

Like the same group, you mean, attacking them?

Senator Johnson:

Yes, there are a lot of the same people. And it’s like, who are these people? What are their qualifications? Who’s backing them? Who’s putting them up to destroying the research that is contrary to the medical establishment or the federal health agencies or the Big Pharma narrative? That’s what’s going on.

If you’re trying to do a study or if you’re trying to publish research that is contrary to what Big Pharma wants, what these powerful interests want, they come out and destroy you, just like the doctors who push early treatment. No, we’re going to have the Pfizer and Moderna injections; that’s how we’re going to end this pandemic. Early treatment need not apply; we need to sabotage a Nobel Prize-winning drug, ivermectin, an incredibly safe drug, by the way.

Mr. Jekielek:

A couple of questions. First of all, you mentioned this, you know, not wanting to cause vaccine hesitancy. When you look back now, I remember this being talked about often over the years as I was covering these types of questions during the COVID years. Do you think ultimately that’s the reason, based on everything you’ve seen now, that just the operative principle was anything that might cause vaccine hesitancy or getting people, you know, basically keeping the uptake of the COVID shots up? That was the operating principle; is that what you’ve come to?

Senator Johnson:

Or harming the multi-billion dollar profit industry?

Mr. Jekielek:

Or not harming it, you mean?

Senator Johnson:

Yes, you don’t want to harm this, so yes. But I think there’s ego involved on the part of, like, Anthony Fauci. He just wanted to be the savior. Probably in the back of his mind, he realized, I probably caused and helped this pandemic be created. So at minimum, I want to be the solution for it. Who knows?

All I know is I was fortunate enough to be talking to Michael Yeadon, the 30-year head of research for, you know, vice president of research for Pfizer, especially in toxicology, who just went through the basics of why he was beside himself when he found out what this COVID injection was going to be. He was just beside himself.

So once I got that education, there was no way I was going to get that injection, which is also why I was very carefully following VAERS as soon as they started publishing the results and why I was so alarmed by it. I mean, millions of people were involved, what I’m saying, in affecting the policy as it played out, right?

Mr. Jekielek:

So is it the thing that people were thinking, whatever it is that we need to do, we need to just make sure there’s no vaccine hesitancy or whatever. Is that it?

Senator Johnson:

Yes, that was a big part of it, but again it’s the public I’m trying to understand this—the public has been hoodwinked into believing these experts and I guess my job, my job is to, as much as I can, reinstill the basics of science which is skepticism, right? I mean, I mean when you hear scientific consensus, there is no worse term for science than that.

Science is all about taking a look at the consensus and poking a hole in it and testing it and going, I’m not quite sure of that. And so all of their efforts to not create vaccine hesitancy have literally created, I think, a necessary and legitimate explosion in vaccine hesitancy where there’s not only just the covert injection but you know everything on the childhood vaccine schedule.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, the polling, the polling shows this doesn’t it, like it’s certainly around. I don’t think that I, if I recall correctly, they can’t recruit for trials now around mRNA.

Senator Johnson:

Yes, Pfizer has just canceled their trial for their latest booster or whatever because they couldn’t recruit enough people. There’s obviously people that have been speaking about this, a relatively small group. But because they have alternate media now, their voices are being heard. But what’s really driving the injection hesitancy is the fact that people saw it for themselves. I mean, the Rasmussen poll said that something like 25 percent of the American population believe they know somebody who died from the injection.

So many people, again, there are millions of adverse events reported to VAERS. Again, that dramatically understates how many there actually were. So, you know, I’ve talked to so many people who tell me their stories of, yeah, I was out for a week. You know, my blood pressure spiked. Right. I mean, it’s like, you know, I just talked to somebody, a perfectly healthy athlete, who was forced to get the injection. That’s when he started getting, and ended up with four cases of COVID after he got the vaccine that, by the way, was the number one adverse event—was getting COVID. So, but um, but you know, yeah there

There are more polls out there now that there are a lot more people who are willing to question, you know, should I be vaccinating my children? I just watched a podcast with Joe Rogan, and this is important because thought leaders like him are coming out saying, well, duh. I mean, you see the dramatic increase in the number of doses of childhood vaccines. At the same time, you see the dramatic increase in autism and other chronic illnesses.

As part of our PSI hearing, Del Bigtree through ICAN [Informed Consent Action Network] and Aaron Siri prompted Henry Ford Health to conduct a study using their data, vaxxed vs. unvaxxed, about 18,000 people—16,000 fully vaccinated, 2,000 completely unvaccinated. The summary result is that the vaccinated were sicker; they were two-and-a-half times more likely to have a chronic illness than the unvaccinated. You look at the Amish population just with respect to that study.

Mr. Jekielek:

What happened with that study?

Senator Johnson:

You heard we held a whole hearing on this. Aaron Siri and Del Bigtree got to know the doctor who was in charge of that medical center, and they kind of did a dare. He said, listen, if you want to shut us up—anti-vaxxers up—and I don’t think either Del or Aaron, I’m not an anti-vaxxer, but if you want to shut up the anti-vaxxers, do a study. You’ve got the data right there. I think they will. The only thing they said was, okay, the only thing we ask of you, and we appreciate you doing the study, is that you will publish results regardless of what they reveal.

Unfortunately, the study showed the exact opposite: that if you got vaccinated, you were two-and-a-half times more likely to suffer from a chronic illness. Now, it showed no correlation with autism, but again, when you have so few cases, you still have to say even 18,000 people is underwhelming. But what it shows is it should have required more study. Actually, what they did with the study was bury it until I became aware of it. Both Aaron and Del prompted this guy, but they didn’t want to step on them and force disclosure of a study they got in confidence.

But I don’t have that worry. Let’s hold a hearing, and I will, using Senate business, release the study that should have been released. Again, I’m not saying it’s definitive, but it should have been released back when the results were in, and it should have prompted more study and more thought.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, I was going to say, this kind of thing, it’s stark, and it definitely says we need to look into this more. I mean, at the very least, that’s what it says.

Senator Johnson:

By the way, for your listeners, if you want to focus on the seminal work that brings us all together, it literally is Aaron Siri’s latest book, Vaccines, Amen. I’ve read Dissolving Illusions, Turtles All the Way Down, and Dr. Peter McCulloch’s book, Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality. They’re all great books. But if you want to skip the step-by-step process that I went through to come to my conclusions, just go to Aaron Siri’s book, Vaccines, Amen.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s just a great book, just to help kind of understand sort of the development of the whole process and kind of the messaging around it and so forth.

Senator Johnson:

It lays out the reality. Let’s go to some of the mythology. I mentioned this because it came up in one of our hearings. My ranking member wanted to refute everything I’m trying to reveal here. He actually went out and held a press conference before our voice of the vaccine injured. I was just given these parents, these people who believe they’ve been vaccine injured. I’ve just been given the platform to tell the story, right? So the ranking member goes out and says, I hope nobody pays attention to this thing. It’s not credible enough. It’s not worthy of the public’s attention. I think it was in that hearing that he had a chart that he showed from the Commonwealth Fund saying that the COVID injection saved 3 million lives in 2021 and 2022.

Now, bear with me. It’s relatively simple numbers, but you have to hang with me on this. In 2019, before the pandemic, there were 2.85 million deaths in America. So under 3 million, right? So the year of the pandemic, by the way, if that were to grow, just kind of, you know, that number of deaths had been growing slowly because of population increase and also the aging of the population to the point where last year should have been around 3 million deaths. Okay. It was slowly growing. You know, last year should have been about 3 million.

So in 2019, 2.85 million. The year of the pandemic, it shot up to 3.4, so obviously something was happening here. Okay, another half-a-million deaths. 2021 was the year of the vaccine, right? If it really was going to end the pandemic, you would think we’d come down, back, you’ll start moving towards the baseline, toward that normalized baseline.

We didn’t; we went to 3.5 million. The next year, we came down a little bit to 3.3, but we’re still way above that normalized rate of deaths. Okay, so again, 2.85 to 3.4 to 3.5 to 3.3, so they were claiming in this Commonwealth Fund study that the vaccine saved 3 million lives in both 2021 and 2022. So again, deaths were going up; it’s way above the baseline. In order for that to be true, you’d have to assume we were going to have 5 million deaths per year in both 2021 and 2022. It’s just farcical.

Again, I don’t need an empirical basis or a sophisticated mathematical analysis to just show there’s no way the injection saved three million lives in 2021 and 2022. There’s no way. If you were old and vulnerable, the vaccine might have given you some protection where you didn’t have a severe case. That’s possible, but I just don’t know. There really have not been decent studies to prove that. You’ll never have decent studies to prove that. But just the basic math disproves three million lives saved from the injection in the U.S. in 2021-22. It’s farcical.

Mr. Jekielek:

You mentioned the hearing that you held about giving a platform for the vaccine-injured people. You know, as you well know, The Epoch Times made a film about the plight of these people. Where are we at right now?

Senator Johnson:

I’ve been told that Jay Bhattacharya has agreed to produce an ICD [International Classification of Diseases] code, which is what doctors and all health care providers use to get reimbursed for a particular health condition. So the COVID vaccine or injection-injured have never had an ICD code. So if they seek medical care, they’re having to do it for something else. So that’s incredibly important for the injection-injured, that they have that code to acknowledge the fact that their condition, the things they’re suffering from, their disability has been caused more than likely by that COVID injection. That would be very helpful. So that’s some progress.

 Mr. Jekielek:

It helps you to know that there’s this, these are the types of treatments which you might consider; these are the types of…

Senator Johnson:

But here we are, six years past the pandemic, and we still don’t have the ICD code they’ve been asking for for quite some time. So maybe they’ll get it now, so that’s some progress. As I mentioned, that video I saw of this gentleman who’s got a central line in his aorta, getting treatment in Japan. By and large, the COVID injection-injured are still being largely gaslit and ignored. They are being told it’s all in their head, or that this kind of stuff happens and you suddenly have a stroke.

Mr. Jekielek:

There was, you know, Brianne Dressen, who, you know, testified in this hearing, who was in the film, who I’ve interviewed. She talks about having gotten, her and a very few others having gotten the golden ticket, so to speak, being able to be treated at an NIH facility for her injury, so there is some knowledge around how this stuff can be treated, even within the government.

Senator Johnson:

I wish I could say that Bri has been cured. She hasn’t been. I think it’s been very helpful to her. But yes, she’s one of the very few that have gotten that kind of treatment. But she was gaslit. She was lied to by people like Peter Marks, and they led her down the primrose path. They kept it all very quiet. They didn’t disclose anything because they didn’t want to harm their chance to have the NIH actually take this seriously. And that was all BS on the part of Peter Marks.

Mr. Jekielek:

What I’m thinking here, right, is that there is some knowledge around how to, even within, like, you know, of course, there’s a whole lot of knowledge that has been developed independently by some of these doctors, like at the Independent Medical Alliance and so forth about treatment. And on the other hand, there is knowledge within the government about how to do it. Like some, Brianne, of course, she’s not cured, but it helped her a lot. She should be the first person to say that. And so, one, it would seem like there’s an opportunity here, right?

Senator Johnson:

But only if—only if their injury is acknowledged, if they’re given the benefit of the doubt in terms of, no, we’re interested in this. I mean, I would first go to Japan asking, what’s happening over there? Again, that’s just off of one video, but you have to have that kind of open mind. You go, what is being tried? And then, you know, part of the things we’re getting involved in is rare diseases because it’s just incomprehensible how the FDA has been handling treatments for rare diseases and just given these people that have very little hope, just given the middle finger. It makes no sense. I was the champion of the Right to Try Act back in 2018 when we finally passed that.

Mr. Jekielek:

So just to be clear, that’s legislation that allows people to try a novel treatment that has not been fully FDA approved.

Senator Johnson:

Right. If they’re terminal and they have no other option, no other treatment, not available for clinical trial. So unfortunately, to get it passed, we had to really narrow it because the establishment, Big Pharma people didn’t really like that law, but they couldn’t prevent it from being passed. A lot of that was based on my contact with ALS [amyotrophic lateral sclerosis] patients. Tailoring that process, we also got connected with the Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy community and Jordan McLinn and his mom, Laura. I’ve gotten involved in that community as well.

During that same time frame, back then, there was no treatment for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. It’s a genetic disease; it produces very stunted growth, loss of muscle control, and early death. I think it might be all boys, but generally young boys. There was a treatment that had been tried and seemed to have some success. The families were really advocating to make this more widely available.

They had an FDA advisory panel where I think there were like 50 or 60 of these families just begging this advisory panel. I think there were 11 people on it. You know, please just give us access to this. I mean, we’re willing to take the risk. We know what the end result of our child’s disease is going to be. This gives us some hope. This is looking like some real progress.

And in a vote of 10 to 1, the FDA said no. But the company is providing it for free. These are completely informed parents. As best as you can be informed about a drug that may help, but may have some side effects. They’re willing to take that risk.

Mr. Jekielek:

Including death, because the other side of it is so bad.

Senator Johnson:

And the FDA continues to deny this. Now, at that point in time, we made such a stink about it that the FDA overrode that advisory panel and they did approve it. Now this exact same drug is going to be pulled. I had people up on the hill here, people outliving their potential, certainly out walking their potential. And the FDA, you can’t understand it. I mean, there are other rare diseases with the same type of issue.

There’s a drug for a condition called ataxia that reduces the progression of the disease by 50 to 70 percent. We had a doctor from Harvard who’s working with these patients, you know, testifying, and he says the FDA reviewers are saying, why should we listen to you? Because I’m a doctor employed by Harvard and I’m treating these patients; I see the results. Maybe who else are you going to listen to? But they’re just saying no. Sanfilippo syndrome is the same type of thing. It’s like, why would you say no?

Again, you’ve got the companies that are willing to— you know, some of these things too, by the way, there’s so few patients with these rare diseases that there’s no economic incentive. But for some companies, it’s worth providing drugs, and you know, doing the experimentation research on a very small population because they learn for the treatment of other potential diseases that have an economic benefit.

But if you pull the rug out from one of those companies where they can’t provide these drugs, they can’t even conduct the research, they can’t understand, we will have no development for rare diseases. That’s what’s at stake. And again, for the life of me, I cannot understand what’s happening in the current FDA in terms of what’s happening here.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, so let’s talk a little bit about this because I think there are probably some viewers of this show and some people who have been guests on the show that are kind of sure, there are codes coming in, right? These vaccine injury or COVID vaccine injury codes are coming in soon. But a lot of people, I guess, were expecting more action faster. But how do you relate to that?

Senator Johnson:

Those of us who are pushing a different approach, something that’s against the current narrative or the current protocol or the current drugs being used, the highly profitable drugs being used. I mean, cancer, oncology drugs would be one of them. We’re up against powerful interests. We’re up against big pharma, who has spent billions now on advertising on TV, having bought the narrative on network news programs. It’s interesting.

If you take a look at the journalism that occurred before the 1986 act and certainly before the 1991-92 regulation change that Clinton allowed big pharma to start advertising, there was investigative journalism on childhood vaccine injuries. It’s why you had the 1986 act; your people, you know, parents were being put on Phil Donahue and other outlets, and you know, 60 Minutes was talking about this stuff.

Mr. Jekielek:

This is something that Aaron Siri basically, I think, told me at one point, perhaps even on camera. He said, well, you know, companies were saying we’re going to go bankrupt if we’re faced with these lawsuits. And that’s part of the reason for the legislation in the first place.

Senator Johnson:

Again, you can understand the rationale if you believe that vaccines really can save millions of lives. They probably need some vaccine manufacturers. So in order for that to happen, based on what children were experiencing, children getting severely disabled or dying, what is SIDS [sudden infant death syndrome] all about? I started thinking about SIDS because during COVID we had SADS [sudden adult death syndrome]. Never heard of SADS before.

Well, gee, what has changed? Never heard of SADS until the COVID injection started coming, but it couldn’t be the COVID injection because we know that only does good. What’s so bizarre about all this is what is a vaccine, what’s it impacting? It’s impacting your immune system. So many of these chronic illnesses are about immune dysregulation or autoimmune diseases.

But the people pushing this on us, they’re unbelievably blind. You know you’re purposefully impacting the immune system, but they have this religious belief that, well, the way we were designed, it only has a beneficial impact on the immune system. There’s no way we could be doing any harm; it’s only good. There’s no harm.

That is absurd. I mean, particularly when you look at the correlation of the number of vaccines given with the increase in autism, the skyrocketing rates of autism, chronic illness—it’s like, okay, what’s changed? Same thing with SADS. It’s like, all of a sudden, you have this term. You have to come up with a term because adults are dying suddenly. What changed?

Well, yes, we had COVID, but I didn’t hear about SADS during 2020. You didn’t see athletes drop dead on the field or collapse on the field or in newscasts. I mean, you’ve seen the video reels. I’d never seen that until the COVID injection began. So again, you don’t have to be a research scientist. You don’t have to be a medical doctor to realize this ought to be looked at.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right. There’s a lot of people in this country that will listen to the types of things you’re saying right now and say, that’s actually, you know, foreign disinformation. There are people trying to subvert a good system that’s working, that have sold this lie. And there’s all these, you know, and it’s worked because of social media, because we know social media is very effective at spreading crazy ideas, right? And good ideas, too, right? What would you say to people who genuinely worry that this whole line of thinking or discussion is, you know, some kind of subterfuge misinformation?

Senator Johnson:

I would say read Vaccines, Amen because it just shows the lies you’ve been told. I mean, the COVID injection is going to stay in your arm. They knew it wouldn’t stay in your arm. They knew it would biodistribute. You know, the lipid nanoparticle is designed to permeate difficult-to-permeate barriers. So we’ve been lied to time and time again. And then if you read Aaron Siri’s book, he’s got one chart on page 84, which I think is just excellent.

The book Dissolving Illusions is all about making the case that most of these infectious diseases were pretty well conquered before vaccines ever came on the scene. They were conquered because we stopped living in squalor, you know, basic sanitation, a lot cleaner water. You take a look at the rates of infection of whether it’s diphtheria or, you know, all these things dramatically declined by 1995 through 1998, before the vaccines even came on or, you know, began being administered.

So on this one chart, you know, Aaron lists the number of deaths for each of these diseases the year before the vaccine started being administered for that disease. If you total them all up, it’s less than 5,000 a year. This is dating back to the 40s and 60s, and we’ve gotten better since then at treating illness, right? So these claims of vaccines having saved 154 million lives, now that’s globally, but, you know, in the U.S., millions of lives, well, only 5,000 people a year suffer from the diseases that we’re vaccinating against. Again, just simple math; you go there, these claims are complete BS, total and complete.

There’s an excellent video too where they have a TV program talking about measles and how deadly another outbreak is, and then it juxtaposes that, or whatever you pronounce that word, compares it to a Brady Bunch episode where the whole family’s got measles and Alice comes down, I got it too, and they’re laughing it off, like when I was a kid. I know there’s a difference between German measles, rubella, and normal measles.

And yes, there’s no doubt measles can be devastating and can cause death. But when I was a kid, we got sent over to the house of children who had chicken pox or mumps or German measles. I mean, we wanted the whole neighborhood infected so we got it over with. And now, all of a sudden, you know, we literally vaccinate against chicken pox.

One of the things in Aaron Siri’s book is if you’ve actually had measles, just a study—you have a dramatically reduced risk of heart disease. Well, why would that be? I mean, how could that possibly be? Well, you know, when your body, which is our God-given immune system, is a marvel. I mean, what it does is marvelous, okay? And I don’t think we can even begin to fully understand it all.

And that’s what we’re, that’s all these research scientists try to do, is figure out how we can help it, okay? But your body’s immune system reacts to an infection like measles, and apparently, in doing so, it sets up potentially some kind of protection against future heart disease or what causes that. So it’s not a plausible mechanism.

Again, I’m not a doctor, not a research scientist, but that’s what a study says. So by vaccinating everybody against measles, you may, in your ignorance, have just reduced your ability to fight off or prevent heart disease, you might have increased the occurrence of heart disease; you know, again, we just don’t know.

I’ve said this in a couple of my events where in my opening statement, I’ll say, listen, I am amazed at the knowledge that mankind has developed through the millennia. I mean, it’s just what we have learned is amazing. What we can do is amazing. But you compare that to what we still don’t know. I think what we don’t know vastly exceeds what we actually do. And it would do us well to have that level of modesty and humility as we approach it. Trust me, I’m not saying I’m a know-it-all. There are so many things I don’t know. I understand that. But what I have found out is I’ve researched it.

And that’s getting back to your question. What do you say to these people? Do your research. Read these books. Your eyes will be opened. And take a look at what happened during COVID. Did it make any sense to you at all that our federal health officials’ guidance was, if you get, first of all, this PCR test, which dramatically overstated the number of cases, which is why you had so many asymptomatic cases? Right? But their guidelines, if you got COVID, if you had tested for it, is go home, don’t do anything, maybe take Tylenol, which, by the way, is a more dangerous drug than ivermectin. But put that aside—do nothing, go home, be afraid, and hope and pray you don’t get so sick that you get put in a hospital and thrown on a ventilator, where about 90 percent of people died on a ventilator, where they wouldn’t administer some of these drugs that I believe proved pretty effective at curing you. So again, it’s a matter of educating yourself. It would be nice to be able to believe these experts, but understand there aren’t many peer experts. There’s no expert that knows it all.

And so many of these experts are conflicted; you know, particularly in the medical community, with big pharma and stuff. I mean, they’re doing research for them. Most of the research we rely on to approve a drug is funded by the actual company—that’s true across the board. It was Big Ag, Big Food; all these studies that say, this thing’s perfectly safe. And how do we know that? Well, it was studied by Monsanto. I mean, you literally can’t make this stuff up.

So no, I’ll go back to science being skepticism. We have to be skeptical. We’ve been lied to way too many times. There are so many powerful interests, whether it’s ego, whether it’s reputation, or whether it’s billions of dollars; there’s something driving people to push things on. the population that they shouldn’t push, that we ought to be skeptical of.

Mr. Jekielek:

You mentioned you got this 11-million-page document from Bobby Kennedy, chief of HHS. Where do you think the MAHA [Make America Healthy Again] agenda that Bobby took the mantle, so to speak, at HHS on, where do you think it’s been most effective, most successful, and how consequential is that?

Senator Johnson:

I think without a doubt in terms of food, how do we evaluate ingredients, what’s safe to eat, you know, what’s healthier to eat. That is something that is supported by everybody. I mean, that’s completely nonpartisan vs. things I’ve been talking about here in terms of vaccines, COVID injection. People do not want to admit that maybe they shouldn’t have fully vaccinated their children, or they maybe shouldn’t have taken that COVID shot, or that maybe that COVID injection might result in cancer down the road.

I fully understand that I just can’t ignore reality, but when it comes to food I think we all realize I shouldn’t be eating those Skittles. Yes, that resonates. I don’t think we have we should from my standpoint we should know so much more about nutrition in the human body and what we should put in it, what we shouldn’t, you know, you know some of these supplements, that type of thing we just know a whole lot more, you know, some of these supplements, that type of thing. We should just know a whole lot more. You know, what are the right levels of, you know, different things we can test with blood tests, that kind of stuff. We should know so much more than we don’t because we’ve been so dedicated to, well, we just want a pill. Where’s the pill?

I think with Casey Means and her book, Good Energy, I thought it was just beautifully written from a standpoint of our bodies, we need energy, right? I mean, everything needs energy. Our energy comes from the sun and through photosynthesis, we get the plants collected, then animals eat the plants and they convert that energy into meat and then we have to convert both plant and animal into energy in our bodies. And that’s what our mitochondria does.

And so if we harm our mitochondrial health, if we inhibit its ability to convert that food into energy, we’re not healthy because if we can’t convert it to energy, we can’t heal ourselves. So again, just to me, in layman’s terms, the way she laid that out, go, that makes sense. Maybe I ought to quit eating those donuts. You know, maybe I ought to be eating more whole foods. I mean, it’s just, it’s obvious, isn’t it?

Now, doing it is easier said than done. I’m hoping that big food and big agriculture embraces this. I think it creates all kinds of great opportunities for smaller farmers, you know, pure organic types of things, you know, higher level, probably more expensive. But again, we kind of need those niche businesses. But I’m hoping Big Ag recognizes the fact that this is something we should do. Let’s look at our ingredients.

In the one event we held with Bobby Kennedy, Casey Means, and a bunch of these nutritionists, the thing based on grass is generally recognized as safe, Europe actually approves them. Like we approve drugs, they approve ingredients for food. They have 400 approved ingredients. We have 10,000. So somewhere in that 10,000 vs. that extra 9,600, there’s probably stuff that we probably shouldn’t be putting in our food, okay? Like petrochemical-based dyes, okay? I mean, is there a need for it?

You know, the Food Babe held up Fruit Loops from Canada, kind of like sort of dreary colors, and the Fruit Loops in America is like, whoa, give me some sunglasses. They’re bright and attractive. Do we really need that? So again, hopefully just common sense will drive big food and the American consumer to just trend toward healthier things, fewer ingredients.

I’m looking at processed food, and I’m trying to buy the stuff that has the fewest number of things in it. Just as a start. I don’t know much about these things, but if it’s just got, you know, basic food ingredients, and I can pronounce them, not that I’m saying every ingredient that has big, long names is harmful. We just don’t know. And so we need to know.

So I think the first task of Bobby Kennedy, I’ve always said this, is he needs to return, restore integrity to science because science has been corrupted. You need some turnover. You need fresh eyes looking at the stuff. I mean, that puts him in so much control over so many people, which is why you get these people to write that proximal origin paper, right? Even though the people who wrote that came and said, hey, this is looking pretty man-made to me. Within two phone conferences, no, there’s no way this thing was man-made. That’s just thorough corruption.

So that’s Bobby Kennedy’s first task: he has to restore integrity to science, and I’m not opposed to government funding of it, but there have to be far greater controls over how we do that, and sometimes government has to because there’s just not a profit motive to drive certain research.

Mr. Jekielek:

Are you saying, as an addition to the dietary guidelines you mentioned, in addition to, you know, removal of some of these chemicals like petrochemical dyes and things like that, that this is an area where progress has been made?

Senator Johnson:

Yes, but it’s going to take some time for that progress to be felt because you have to first redirect the effort, you have to set up the controls, and then you actually have to start undertaking the studies. It’s a multi-year program, so I’m hoping that at the end of this administration, the next administration continues those same efforts.

Mr. Jekielek:

So something that you were involved in in the previous Congress, which is pretty close to my heart, I just wrote a book about it, the book is Killed to Order. It’s about China’s forced organ harvesting industry. You were in the Senate behind the Falun Gong Protection Act. It didn’t pass that time. It has just recently been reintroduced as a bipartisan Falun Gong and Victims of Forced Organ Harvesting Protection Act.

Senator Johnson:

You’ve done a phenomenal job researching this and exposing it and highlighting it. I mean, you literally have done a phenomenal job. I can’t explain—literally, I can’t explain why we didn’t pass that a few years ago. I’m no longer in foreign relations, so other people have taken the lead on that. I’ve talked to the chairman of Foreign Relations; he doesn’t seem opposed to it.

So, I think because of all the work you’ve done, you’ve set up the conditions where we just need to get that in a markup in Foreign Relations and bring that to the floor of the Senate for unanimous consent. I don’t see how anybody could object to that law. Congress is so dysfunctional; there are so many priorities tugging at us all that there needs to be a champion, and there needs to be public support. That means things have to be exposed, and you’ve done that.

Mr. Jekielek:

So I just have to say this for the record. What Killed to Order does is bring together the work of 20 years of really excellent researchers who, in some cases, gave up their lives—not the previous lives that they had been living, right—in order to do this. In fact, Ethan Gutmann has a book called The Xinjiang Procedure, which was published almost at the same time, looking at how this whole horrible practice was built on the backs of the Falun Gong practitioners. But then, around 2015 or 2016, when really not that much had been done, they sort of added and dehumanized another group of people, adding another group of people who are also very vulnerable. So I’m just personally very concerned that this will just continue unless…

Senator Johnson:

I appreciate your kind of spreading the credit around, but I mean the bottom line is if it weren’t for The Epoch Times employing you and you utilizing that platform, this would not have gotten the type of exposure and the public pressure that can be brought to bear to make sure this thing actually crosses the finish line.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, we’ll be watching very closely and then reporting on everything that comes out. It’s great to hear that. Final question. You told me some time ago that the reason you ran again was mainly because you wanted to help these people who have been COVID injection-injured, to use your term. I asked you a little bit earlier how that’s coming. How far do you think you can take this?

Senator Johnson:

Probably the main reason I ran is because I couldn’t turn my back on my country. I realize this is a unique position. I’m a reasonably unique individual here in Washington, D.C. with my manufacturing background and my willingness to speak out, go against the grain, go against the narrative. But a big part of that was nobody else was even acknowledging the vaccine or the injection injured, much less working, you know, working to help them out, you know, give them a platform or advocate for them.

So no, that was a big part of my running in 2022. And we’re making progress. I mean, one of the reasons, you know, you had me on is because now we have gotten these documents to just prove that we’ll expose what happened. It starts that COVID reckoning. Again, it’s frustrating. I mean, I think this, you know, I think I know what happened. I understand the corruption. But the general population doesn’t know it.

And until you can show it in all its gory detail, until you have the absolute proof, until you can show, here’s an email, this is what they said. I’m not telling you this is what I assumed happened. This is what they said. But we can’t publish that. Take that information. Tell her not to give us any more. Don’t do any more of these studies. We don’t want to know that all these adverse events are masked, that there are safety signals for 25 of them, including sudden death and stroke. We don’t want to know that. Tell her to shut up. She’s a pest. So now we’ve got that. Hopefully, that will be a blockbuster. So the legacy media will actually pay attention.

What’s happened, for example, the voice of the vaccine injured, I told you my ranking member went out in a press conference and said, I hope nobody watches this. It’s not credible. It’s not worthy of attention. So we had one hit piece pre-written by, I think, MS NOW, is that what they call it now? And that was it. So what the press is basically doing in reaction to mine is not necessarily attacking me so much anymore. They just ignore what I’m revealing. They’re ignoring what I expose.

So I appreciate this opportunity. I appreciate really everything the Epoch Times does. I mean, you’re a true journalistic effort now. We’ve lost that. We don’t have that in the legacy media. It’s a shame. But I appreciate you giving me this platform and tolerating me for an hour.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Senator Ron Johnson, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Senator Johnson:

Thanks for having me on.

 

This interview has been partially edited for clarity and brevity.