Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who has been writing oversight letters on COVID vaccine safety since June 2021, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to discuss what he described as the most egregious government scandal of his lifetime, one that has now been unfolding in congressional hearings and documented in a report from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for nearly six weeks without a single major network covering it.
The core finding of Johnson’s investigation, which he has been pursuing alongside Senator Rand Paul who is focused on COVID origins, is that Peter Marks, the head of the FDA division responsible for both approving vaccines and surveilling their safety, was briefed on March 1st, 2021, that the algorithm being used to analyze the VAERS adverse event reporting system would completely mask and hide safety signals. Twenty-six days later, he was shown twenty-five adverse events generating safety signals, including sudden cardiac death, pulmonary embolism, Bell’s palsy, and various types of strokes. He did not alert the public. The FDA continued using the algorithm they knew was suppressing signals and then told the American public they were not seeing safety signals.
Johnson said the volume of deaths reported to VAERS in 2021 alone made the cover-up unnecessary for anyone paying attention. Since VAERS was established in 1990, the average annual deaths reported in association with vaccines has been approximately 280. In 2021, the year of the COVID injections, that number was 21,000. He said you do not need a sophisticated algorithm to recognize that as a screaming safety signal. The sophistication of the Bayesian empirical analysis they were relying on was precisely the tool used to obscure what was plainly visible in the raw data.
The investigation has also uncovered that as early as March 2021, NIH was diagnosing and treating people with COVID injection injuries and told those researchers to remain silent, not wanting to pre-release the information before the study was complete. What they had already found was that early intervention was crucial for the injection injured. They did not publish the study until 2022, only under sustained pressure from injection-injured patients, and even then placed it on a preprint server with no public announcement.
Johnson also described a separate mini-scandal within the larger one involving an FDA analysis of ninety-six deaths in children. The agency concluded ten of those children died, which Johnson said dramatically understates the actual number of children who died after receiving the injections and should never have been given the shots in the first place. He said the FDA has been attempting to water down even that number.
On the question of criminal accountability, Johnson said the government does a very good job of protecting itself and that government employees operate with significant legal insulation. He said his investigation has only just begun, that they now finally have the documents after five years of oversight letters, and that they are beginning to interview witnesses. If witnesses lie to the committee they can face perjury charges, but Johnson said his primary focus right now is full exposure so that what happened can never happen again.
He said he has been attempting to put faces and names to the vaccine injured since June 2021, holding multiple hearings including a voice of the vaccine injured event with childhood vaccine injured witnesses, and that the legacy media has consistently ignored or actively suppressed the coverage. He said he has texted President Trump directly and that Trump indicated he would work with him on the issue, but that until Trump’s administration formally acknowledges the injection injuries and does right by the military members who were kicked out of the service for refusing the mandate, the full reckoning he is seeking will remain incomplete.
On the reflexive antivax smear applied to anyone who raises these questions, Johnson said his work is not about being opposed to vaccines as a category. It is about documented indefensible conduct: hiding adverse information that should have been part of the public policy discussion, silencing researchers who found early intervention protocols that could have helped the injured, and denying injured people the recognition and care they deserve. He said the government’s standard playbook is ridicule, vilification, and marginalization of the people telling the truth, combined with misleading fact-checks that distract from the central story, which is the cover-up itself.
On the CIA’s response to the whistleblower hearing on COVID origins, where the agency’s press office dismissed the proceedings as political theater, Johnson said he demanded an apology from Director Ratcliffe at the hearing and has not received one. He said the CIA is a problem unto itself, as are most federal agencies, and closed by citing Thomas Sowell’s answer to how he went from being a Marxist to a conservative: he worked for the federal government.