Sen. Ron Harold Johnson (D-Wisconsin) joins me to discuss his experience as the chair of the Homeland Security Committee and the hearings he conducted on the cure-and-prevention efforts for the deadly H1N1 flu pandemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s. We talk about the lack of early detection and treatment of the flu, and why Bill Gates and others are so opposed to early intervention in the fight against this pandemic. We also talk about why Tamiflu is not the silver bullet to the flu epidemic, and what we should be doing to prevent it from happening in the first place. Thank you, Ron, for being a voice of reason and hope for people who are looking at this with great concern. I want to thank you for joining me today, and I appreciate the kind words and words of support you all have shown. My guest today is my guest, Ronald Harold Johnson of Wisconsin, who was, until the Democrats took control of the Senate in 1992, until then, was the Chair of the Committee on Homeland Security and the number one Homeland Security Senator in the United States. He was a voice for reason, hope, and reasonableness, and a voice against totalitarianism and monkey business. In this episode, we talk about how important it is to have an early diagnosis and treatment for a pandemic like this one, and the need for early intervention and early treatment. to prevent further spread of this virus, and how the government countermeasures are a cover-up, not just in the emergency room, but in other areas of the health care system, in order to prevent the spread of the virus. in the public and in the long-term, and in order for people to have a chance to recover from the virus to get better and recover from it from the pandemic to be able to catch the virus in time in a timely manner. and why it s not going to get any worse. Thanks for listening, and for supporting this podcast, and thanks for supporting it! -Bobby Graf (PhD, M.D., PhD, PhD, D.D, MSU, MTSU, PhD, MDS, and M.E., M.C.E.U. (and much more) for producing this podcast. Thank you for your support, Ronald Harold Johnson, R.J. Johnson, D-Wisconsin.
00:00:01.000Today, my guest is Senator Ronald Harold Johnson of Wisconsin, who was, until the Democrats took control of the Senate, he was the chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
00:00:14.000And a lot of the people who watch this podcast are familiar with Senator Johnson for a series of hearings that he conducted, particularly on therapies for the COVID-19.
00:00:31.000And Pierre Corey, I think, was one of your witnesses, but many, many other witnesses and revelations that came out of your hearing.
00:00:41.000And I think for many of us who are concerned about government policies and about the reasonability and the scientific basis for the countermeasures and this weird totalitarian kind of shenanigans and monkey business that we see, I think should concern every American, Democratic, and Republican.
00:01:02.000You were kind of a voice of reason and hope for people who are looking at this with great concern.
00:01:13.000So I want to thank you, and I want to thank you for joining me today.
00:01:21.000You know, what was amazing about that, Bobby, is I thought I was doing a public service, holding hearings, asking just Highly qualified doctors that had the compassion, but also courage to actually treat COVID patients and then provide information.
00:01:38.000You know, what happened as a result of that after my first hearing on early treatment.
00:01:42.000And again, it was a hearing on early treatment.
00:02:19.000I've been amazed at the closed-minded approach to dealing with a pandemic that caught basically the world by surprise.
00:02:30.000We never witnessed this virus before, and so we actually had to have doctors practice medicine, but those that had the courage and compassion to practice medicine were vilified and worse.
00:02:43.000I mean, I think one of the great revelations for people when they heard Peter Corey and Peter McCulloch speak and how they crystallized the issue, which is, you know, we were constantly being told we've got to flatten the curve by being locked inside.
00:03:01.000And they came to you and they said the way to flatten the curve It's through early treatment.
00:03:06.000We start treating people when they get sick so they don't ever have to go to the hospital.
00:03:13.000And the standard of care under Tony Fauci's regimen was that you get the COVID test, you find out that you've got COVID, you wait three weeks until you're so sick that you can't breathe, and then you descend on the hospital.
00:03:33.000And what these doctors were saying was, you know, let's not let it get that far.
00:03:37.000There's a lot of treatments that we are seeing.
00:03:41.000Not just a little, but mountains of peer review science that says if you intervene early with these treatments, You never have to go to the hospital.
00:03:53.000And I think it was just stunning that Dr.
00:03:58.000Fauci and Bill Gates and the people who seemed to be running the countermeasures in the COVID response were absolutely militant about not treating people early.
00:04:14.000Early on, when I first heard of that Michigan State legislator that was treated and she said she was cured by hydroxychloroquine, I'm going, man, would that be fabulous.
00:04:24.000I mean, that would be the silver bullet to this pandemic if we really had a...
00:04:30.000Existing drug, even better yet, a cheap generic drug that could be repurposed for this.
00:04:35.000You know, something that is available in the billions of doses.
00:04:37.000Something that's been around for, in the case of hydroxychloroquine, 65 years has been proven very, very safe.
00:06:17.000He came back later in December in my second early treatment hearing.
00:06:20.000This is after the New York Times has already accused me of being a snake oil salesman.
00:06:24.000He came in and talked about ivermectin.
00:06:27.000And it was the day before that he got a study in from Argentina.
00:06:31.000Where they had prophylaxed 800 healthcare workers with a multi-drug approach, including ivermectin.
00:06:38.000Of the 800 that were prophylaxed using that multi-drug cocktail, not one of them got COVID. The 400 that weren't prophylaxed with it, 58% got COVID. Now, again, I know that's not a random controlled study, but it's pretty powerful evidence that would require further investigation, and yet Our health care agencies to it, and again, did worse than turn a blind's eye toward it, vilified, terminated people that were coming up with this.
00:07:21.000They pulled that video off after 8 million Americans had viewed it, which kind of indicates that Americans weren't particularly happy with the NIH guideline, as you were describing, which basically says, get tested.
00:07:32.000If you have COVID, go home, isolate yourself in fear.
00:07:37.000And if you get sick enough, if your oxygen levels drop too low, check yourself in the hospital and just hope we don't have to put you on a ventilator because that's not a real good successful treatment.
00:07:47.000I mean, it seemed almost like a deliberate attempt to flood the hospitals and to increase this feeling that there was a crisis rather than feeling, you know, we didn't hear the things that you would want, you know, they called Fauci America the doctor, but What do you want to hear from your doctor when you get sick?
00:08:09.000You want to hear that there's no reason for panic, that you are going to get the best treatment, that he's going to consult with other doctors, specialists in the field, and that he's going to give you a course and explain the science behind it clearly and explain the risk clearly.
00:08:27.000And we got nothing like that from this doctor.
00:08:29.000We got a doctor who has never treated COVID himself, who is Not consulting with anybody, as, you know, Peter McCulloch, Dr.
00:08:43.000There was nobody on that COVID White House committee who has ever treated a COVID patient.
00:08:49.000They were all people who were involved in HIV, which, you know, is a long history of corruption on that issue.
00:08:58.000And they were, and they didn't do what you would want them to do, which is to say, which is to summons The best doctors from all over the world and put them in a committee and have an open discussion with all the American people can watch.
00:09:14.000Televised discussion where they're collecting studies.
00:09:18.000I think there's been something like 50,000 studies on COVID that have been published.
00:09:23.000And you want them going through those studies and saying, look, this drug looks like it works.
00:09:28.000We got 19 studies that say this drug works.
00:09:31.000You got to give it a certain time and you got to give it in combination with Sythermax and with zinc and with vitamin D. Why was Dr.
00:09:42.000Fauci not telling us, you know, 85% of the people who are hospitalized are vitamin D deficient.
00:09:49.00095% of the people who died from COVID are vitamin D deficient.
00:10:47.000I just have no explanation for it because, again, it made so much sense.
00:10:51.000If we could have had a repurposed drug, we could have put this pandemic behind us literally months ago.
00:10:58.000And, you know, listen, early on when they started talking about hydroxychloroquine, I was concerned about, you know, if we started providing that as a prophylaxis for everybody, we may not have had enough.
00:11:08.000You know, so I understand initially say, well, hold on here.
00:11:11.000We need to make sure that the people that are using this safely for rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, you know, they need to be able to get their doses as well.
00:11:18.000So my first concern about hydroxychloroquine is if it works, if it works.
00:11:44.000It's one of the things I'm going to continue to investigate.
00:11:47.000But until I actually have some hard information, I'm not going to speculate, but it just made no sense whatsoever that we'd have just almost a total blackout that we'd vilify doctors, as you said, that had the courage to go and actually treat COVID patients, expose themselves to it.
00:13:22.000Hydroxychloroquine, that's approved as an anti-malarial drug.
00:13:26.000I don't believe it's FDA approved for either rheumatoid arthritis or lupus.
00:13:31.000It's been Use that as an off-label drug.
00:13:35.000That's how we advance medicine, by doctors practicing medicine.
00:13:39.000But our healthcare agencies have not allowed doctors, they discourage doctors, they punish doctors for practicing medicine during this pandemic.
00:13:49.000Another thing that makes no sense is why Joe Biden hired Tony Fauci to continue to manage this pandemic.
00:13:58.000When his record on the pandemic is just absolutely cataclysmic, we had in our country one of the worst body counts of any country in the world.
00:14:10.000We have 1,600 per million people dying.
00:14:26.000I think we have 10 times the death rate of Japan.
00:14:29.000Japan has a much older population than we do, but they use early intervention.
00:14:34.000We have 1,000 times the death rate of most African countries, and what do the African countries have?
00:14:41.000They have a much younger population, true.
00:14:44.000They spend a lot of time in the sunlight, but we have more than 1,600 times the death rate in countries like Tanzania, like Vietnam, et cetera.
00:14:54.000Those countries all use ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine for malaria control.
00:15:01.000Pakistan, India have a tiny fraction of the COVID fatalities per population that we have.
00:15:09.000Tony Fauci has failed on board consistently throughout his career.
00:15:14.000In 1984, when he came to work for the National Institute for Infectious and Allergic Disease, Chronic disease rate, which he's in charge of keeping down, was 12%.
00:15:46.000And now drugs are the third biggest Killer.
00:15:49.000And he has taken his agency, which is meant to prevent chronic disease, allergic disease, and he has turned it into an incubator for the pharmaceutical industry.
00:15:59.000So he is measuring successes, how many vaccines he gives, how many drugs he develops.
00:16:05.000You will never hear him say how much healthier Americans are because of his work.
00:16:12.000And his track record on this pandemic has been worse than you can imagine.
00:16:18.000It's just incredible to me that people don't see that.
00:16:23.000It's certainly not a record of success, not by a long shot.
00:16:26.000And what concerns me, in addition, is the censorship.
00:16:30.000Just how closed-minded the media, the social media, people in the healthcare agencies have been.
00:16:40.000One possible explanation would be, and these are facts, is the treatment with either hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin in a multi-drug approach where you use vitamin D and vitamin C and zinc and that type of thing, it costs definitely under $50 per treatment.
00:16:58.000Remdesivir, which, you know, they actually altered the outcome of the study because it wasn't reducing death, but it was reducing hospitalization, say, by a couple days.
00:17:10.000There's no proof on that, but that costs over $3,000 a dose, and remdesivir does result in liver toxicity, so a lot of people that are treated with it can't go through the full course.
00:17:21.000That people are pushing as opposed to generic drugs that are less than $50 for treatment.
00:17:27.000Again, it just makes no sense why there has been this vilification and just completely put your head in the sand about these generic drugs.
00:17:36.000Yeah, on Remdesivir, that is Tony Fauci's pet drug that he incubated for Gilead.
00:17:43.000And then he was the one who ran the study and had to alter the protocol twice.
00:17:50.000During the study in order to make it look like it was successful.
00:17:54.000But then the WHO came with a much bigger study and said that remdesivir does not even reduce hospital stage.
00:18:03.000What he said in his study is just a lie.
00:18:10.000That is what they're giving people in this country.
00:18:12.000And it's the only thing that doctors have the green light to give you.
00:18:17.000As you say, you know, the doctors have to kind of go off-label and against recommendations to get us to give you ivermectin and to give you hydroxychloroquine.
00:18:27.000The thing that we should have done in this pandemic from the outset is, tell us what the infection fatality rate is for a seasonal flu, and let's try to get below that.
00:18:40.000And then we don't have to have any lockdowns.
00:19:18.000Fauci challenged me when I made the true statement is that we tragically lose 36,000 people per year on the highway, but we don't shut the highways down because we need a transportation system.
00:19:55.000And we lose tens of thousands of people per year with the flu.
00:19:59.000We just don't keep a running tally on the TV set and, you know, scare the you-know-what out of people.
00:20:06.000The Oxford Center for Evidence-Based Medicine has been predicting through their analysis really for months now that the final infection fatality rate, which is different from the case fatality rate, The eventual infection rate of COVID is going to be somewhere between 0.1 and 0.35.
00:20:21.000And again, I'm not downplaying COVID. I think we all recognize it is a serious virus, and it turns deadly on a certain percentage of the population.
00:20:30.000It's not a disease I wanted to get, but I got it.
00:20:33.000I tested positive for it twice, but I had no symptoms.
00:20:37.000And I think, again, I'm not a doctor, but my own theory from what I've read and what people have told me is, you know, I was probably exposed to some other type of coronavirus, so I had T-cell immunity.
00:20:49.000Forty-five percent of the population, I've heard some experts say, enter this pandemic with T-cell immunity, which is why you probably had about 40 to 50 percent of people being asymptomatic.
00:21:00.000I'm not pretending to be one, but I obviously have read an awful lot.
00:21:04.000I've talked to an awful lot of medical experts, and all I was trying to do in my hearings was just provide that type of information to people.
00:21:12.000And I don't understand why information is now viewed as dangerous.
00:21:18.000There's Louis Brandeis in a 1927 court decision talking about falsehoods and other things that could be harmful to society said that, well, the remedy here is not to limit speech, not to enforce silences.
00:21:33.000The remedy is more speech, not enforced silence.
00:21:36.000To me, that's what I've been trying to do here.
00:21:39.000I've been trying to provide more speech, expert testimony in a committee where we actually have people sworn in, and they have to testify under, you know, penalties of perjury.
00:21:50.000And yet again, the New York Times labeled those doctors who risked their lives, one of them caught COVID, called them snake oil salesmen.
00:22:00.000Yeah, I love A.J. Rowling's quote where he said that government does not tear out a man's tongue to stop him from telling a lie.
00:22:09.000They tear it out to stop him from telling the truth.
00:22:12.000And as you say, the remedy for if there is really misinformation, you know, let's not shut it down.
00:22:19.000Let's give good information and let's have a public debate, a free flow of information and Let's let ideas triumph in the marketplace of ideas and debate.
00:22:34.000Particularly in the midst of a pandemic, which is an emergency situation where So much is unknown.
00:22:43.000Again, you know, initially it was all about ventilators.
00:22:45.000Well, we found out that the success rate of ventilators was quite low.
00:22:49.000So that didn't look like very good treatment.
00:22:51.000But yet we, you know, did the War Powers Act and we produced a bunch of ventilators.
00:23:35.000Did you see the study that compared Minnesota to Wisconsin?
00:23:39.000I know that you have ties to both of those states.
00:23:42.000One of them had, I think, Minnesota had a very, very strong lockdown, whereas Wisconsin was much more lenient.
00:23:51.000It's a Canadian study, and it compares Wisconsin and Minnesota to very similar states and have very, very different policies.
00:24:01.000And then it compares Florida to California.
00:24:05.000Which again, are similar states that had completely antithetical policies.
00:24:10.000And in both of those studies, the states with the least restrictive lockdowns and masking mandates had much better records of protecting human life.
00:24:22.000And in fact, California, which had much more stringent lockdowns, had 33% greater deaths by age population And Florida, which has a much larger elderly population.
00:24:36.000And Wisconsin had a much better record by almost all metrics than Minnesota.
00:24:43.000And this is a peer-reviewed study that came out last week.
00:24:49.000I've been getting data the entire time, and all the state data, I've been comparing it, looking at overall fatality rates based on population, that type of thing.
00:24:58.000It's hard to draw absolute conclusions to all these things, but I remember early in the pandemic, the epidemiologists, I think even Fauci was saying, we're not going to prevent people from getting this disease until we have a vaccine developed, but it's about flattening the curve.
00:25:13.000So we don't overwhelm our healthcare systems.
00:25:14.000Now, we came close to overwhelming the healthcare systems in New York.
00:25:20.000But generally, we stressed our hospitals.
00:25:22.000I know in Wisconsin, the biggest problem in our hospitals wasn't overpopulating them.
00:25:26.000We couldn't get staff because of all the shutdowns and the fact that people weren't coming into work because they had to take care of their kids because schools were shut down.
00:25:34.000So it was mainly a staffing issue in Wisconsin.
00:25:37.000But for a while there, for a number of weeks, We were leading the nation in new cases.
00:25:41.000We really had a peak in probably November, December.
00:25:45.000Close to 8,000 new cases per year and deaths were up.
00:25:47.000Again, I do not downplay this disease, but I think we have to have the modesty and humility to realize that there's a lot we didn't know.
00:25:57.000And I think we also had to really, and again, I was asked to write a counterpoint in the USA Today because they're going to write an op-ed about shutting the economy down without even being able to read their op-ed.
00:26:10.000I have to write a 300-word counter op-ed.
00:26:13.000I made the argument that we had to keep the economy open because we had to take into account the human toll of the economic devastation.
00:26:43.000I don't think these healthcare agencies did.
00:26:44.000I think the way we've handled COVID has been basically insane.
00:26:47.000But I've also been pretty reluctant to criticize elected officials who had to make really tough decisions, particularly early on, with very limited information.
00:26:59.000I wouldn't want to be President Trump.
00:27:00.000I wouldn't want to be a governor back then.
00:27:02.000People had to make really tough decisions.
00:27:03.000So I really don't want to be critical of it.
00:27:06.000But now, many months later, I think those same elected officials have to have the modesty and humility to take a look at the science, take a look at the evidence, and go, well, maybe we were wrong here.
00:27:16.000We probably should have shifted our policies.
00:27:18.000We shouldn't dig our heels in into decisions that we made that maybe didn't turn out too well.
00:27:23.000They have to look at the evidence, as you were just talking about, state by state.
00:29:58.000Senator Johnson, thank you so much for joining me, and thank you for fighting for American health and for our democracy, and I hope you will continue to make that battle.