This is no B.S.: Ron Johnson is the Conscience of the Senate

How baffling can the truth be?

For many years, I considered Republican U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky to be the conscience of the United States Senate, a man who stood for principle over party, especially over the uni-party, and for country over career.

Now, I must say, I have assigned in my mind a new senator for that role: Wisconsin’s very own Ron Johnson.

Don’t get me wrong, I still very much admire Paul, his idiosyncrasies notwithstanding. It’s just that, since the pandemic, Johnson has scaled new heights as a truth-teller and patriot, a role I did not previously think he was capable of, and the country is so much better off because of it.

And my view of him in this role has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he is from Wisconsin, that’s just gravy on top of the cheese, or something like that.

This past week, predictably, progressive media and various propagandists have been piling on the senator, with one pundit labeling Johnson’s truth-telling as “baffling B.S.” This stark contrast—what we see as truth, she sees as baffling B.S.—shows just how far apart the nation is, but it also makes me wonder how she knows that what he’s saying is B.S., if she’s so bewildered by it all. Too much reading her own stuff, methinks, and not enough critical thinking.

So let me clear up the bafflement, if that’s a word, and even if it’s not a word. Over the last six or more years, Ron Johnson has insisted on telling the truth as he sees it about anything and everything he thinks is important, no matter how much the government, with its phalanx of uni-party political cross dressers, bureaucratic mannequins, and progressive stenographers in tow, would like to shut him up.

They haven’t been able to because voters keep standing in their way.

Precisely because he doesn’t deal in B.S., and because he has the trust of the people, he is the conscience of the Senate. Johnson’s courageous stands, no matter who he offends, is what we used to call dissidence, and dissidence only baffles inside the totalitarian bubble, after truth tellers outside the echo chamber expose the real B.S.

Over the past few weeks, Johnson has continued to expose the cockamamie on several fronts, and in particular he upset the narrative applecart with some inconvenient truths no one in the establishment wanted him to point out, leading to last week’s punditry crisis and meltdown.

For one, in a speech at the Milwaukee Press Club that got our Wisconsin comrades seeing, well, red, Johnson called for lifting Covid vaccine requirements for healthy children. He also told reporters he supported ending the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccination requirement for attending school or child care. The press rewarded the senator with alarmist hyperbole. Here’s how one media outlet contextualized his call to end the requirements:

“It comes as a measles outbreak continues to sweep across the country, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting more than a thousand confirmed cases in 31 states right now. Wisconsin had a confirmed case last year in Dane County.”

Oh yes, one confirmed case of measles in Wisconsin last year, doomsday is obviously upon us. Of course, the press wants you to believe that Johnson’s suggestion, if acted upon, would lead to vast epidemics of measles and other childhood diseases, as well as deaths. And even if it isn’t acted upon, they hand wring, how irresponsible can he be?

What really offended much of the media last week was Johnson’s claim that many childhood illnesses, including measles, had been largely defeated through improved hygiene, health care, and nutrition, in addition to vaccines, and that more effort should be placed on treatment.

I hate to break it to the media, but Johnson was spot on. To use measles as an example, since the corporate media brought it up, the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963, and here was what was happening at the time, as reported in the Journal of Infectious Diseases in 2004 by epidemiologist Melinda Wharton, who served as director of the CDC’s Immunization Services Division under both presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump 1.0:

Same thing with polio. From 1923 to 1953, the polio death rate in the United States decreased by 47 percent, again because of improved hygiene, health care, and better nutrition. Same trend for tuberculosis.

Now, before everybody gets out their poison pens, though I do love fan mail, there’s an obvious addendum, and Johnson stated it. In most cases, the drop in mortality and incidence was even greater following the release of the vaccine, especially for measles, and Johnson specifically acknowledged that vaccines helped in the (almost) eradication of many diseases.

The (his) point is, vaccines aren’t and never have been a silver bullet. They are, or should be, just one tool in the tool box, to use that tired old saying, and they often come loaded with vaccine-induced injuries and even death. That’s why gold-standard vetting of them is necessary. That’s why the nation’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) was established (though ignored in the case of Covid jabs)—to raise red flags for further vetting when excess injuries are reported for any one vaccine. That’s why treatments become as important as vaccines, as well as rigorous inquiry into the actual causes of disorders and diseases, so vaccines can be properly vetted and thus safely administered, at the appropriate age levels and to the appropriate demographics, when they are used at all.

I, for one, would never argue against measles vaccination. A measles epidemic among toddlers would be extremely catastrophic. If not for looking at vaccination all these years as the end-all and cure-all because Big Pharma and Big Government said so—the reason progressives swallow this B.S. without any critical thinking is the baffling question to me—we might have long ago paused and asked some legitimate questions, like why can’t there be a single-dose measles vaccine rather than bundling it with mumps and rubella, with the frontal assault on undeveloped immune systems that studies have shown that combination can cause? Why universally administer Hepatitis B vaccines to newly born infants, when many advanced nations do not, including most of Europe as of 2023? Why is the youth vaccination schedule in the U.S. among the most burdensome in the western world?

Johnson is right to point out that vaccines shouldn’t be pushed blindly.

Johnson made another important point: Vaccines have not become widespread so much because of their actual effectiveness as because of their perceived and promoted effectiveness through massive marketing campaigns by government and industry. As Johnson pointed out, they have become widely employed, too, because of the civil liability immunity given to manufacturers.

“One of the reasons we put all of this emphasis on vaccines is because of the blanket liability for vaccine manufacturers, which is why we’ve gone from three different vaccines in the childhood schedule to close to 30 and 80-some doses, and nobody even asks the question, could that maybe harm our kids,” Johnson was reported telling the media. “I think we ought to get a lot more science on this and ask the questions. We haven’t even been able to ask the questions."

Johnson was also right to endorse Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s, decision to eliminate Covid vaccine recommendations for pregnant women—another criticism leveled against the senator—given the available evidence of the dangers of such vaccination. Certainly there are credible scientists and doctors who say the shots should be recommended, albeit many of them with Big Pharma conflicts of interest, but once again a raft of opposing viewpoints and evidence has been deleted completely by the other side. There’s enough of the latter to foreclose an actual recommendation to get the jabs.

At a recent congressional hearing chaired by Johnson, Dr. James Thorp, an obstetrician, gynecologist, and maternal fetal medicine specialist, said it was difficult to conceive of a more egregious breach of medical ethics by a government-controlled, medical-industrial complex than the systematic promotion of Covid-19 vaccinations to pregnant women.

That effectively also vaccinated their unborn and newborn children, Thorp said, through transplacental transfer. From the outset of the pandemic, Thorp said, the vaccination campaign to get pregnant women to take the jab was never grounded in biological science but rather in behavioral ‘science’—specifically, manipulating public perception through influence, fear, and persuasion.

Thorp said much of the deception was institutionalized in what is known as the Shimabukuro study, published in the digital version of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Agree or disagree with Thorp, and his testimony is contested, the bottom line is, the Trump administration is replacing government dogma in the health agencies with critical inquiry—a let’s-look-at-both-sides-now approach—and, in the U.S. Senate, Johnson is the voice for open inquiry and the scientific method, not for the B.S. of government dogma.

The nation needs a voice warning again blind trust in vaccination, and the nation needs a voice warning about potential harm in vaccinating pregnant women with the Covid jab, not to mention the threats posed to children’s health and medical freedom by mandatory vaccination requirements. The nation needs someone who is willing to challenge the narrative, to see if the narrative can withstand the challenge. That someone is Ron Johnson.

What’s baffling is why progressives don’t think any of this contrary evidence should even be considered or discussed.

More conscience

At the same hearing at which Thorp appeared, Johnson, who is the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations, displayed more courage and conscience, accusing federal health officials of unconscionably knowing about but failing to properly warn the public of the risks of myocarditis and related heart inflammation conditions following mRNA Covid-19 vaccinations during the pandemic.

The hearing followed the release of a 55-page report and more than 2,400 records related to the government’s cover-up, which came after Johnson issued a January 28, 2025, subpoena for the records.

“There should be nothing partisan about revealing the truth,” Johnson said at the hearing. “That was this subcommittee’s experience in the last Congress, as we conducted bipartisan investigations into the assassination attempts on President Trump and the Coast Guard’s cover-up of sexual abuse, and attempted to obtain information the government withheld from the 9/11 families.”

Unfortunately for Johnson, in Washington revealing the truth is something no partisan wants, and that was especially true of the Biden administration. Over the last four years, Johnson said, Biden’s federal health officials withheld information from the public regarding the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the safety and development of the Covid-19 injections.

“During that period, I sent over 70 oversight letters to the Biden administration seeking information related to Covid-19 that were either completely ignored or inadequately addressed,” he said. “Many of these letters requested documents and data on Covid-19 vaccine adverse events, vaccine safety surveillance analyses, and government communications about the injections’ potential health risks.”

Those crucial government records belong to the American people, Johnson said, but the Biden administration refused to release them and the senator said he wanted to know why: “If the Covid-19 injections were as safe and effective as Biden health officials consistently touted, then what would they have to hide? Why would the Biden administration need to suppress evidence demonstrating the safety of the Covid-19 injections?”

While his request for records was far from complete, Johnson said the information he did get contained evidence of the Biden administration’s efforts to downplay and delay warning the public about the risks of cardiac-related adverse events associated with the mRNA injections. Specifically, the interim staff majority subcommittee report detailed the Department of Health and Human Services’s awareness of and response to cases of myocarditis—a type of heart inflammation—following Covid-19 injection.

What the records showed

Johnson said the records the subcommittee obtained revealed what he called simple, yet troubling, answers to the questions he was asking.

“Biden administration officials knew in early 2021 that the mRNA Covid-19 injections could result in adverse health events and they downplayed the risks to avoid alarming the public and create vaccine hesitancy,” he said at the hearing’s outset. “As a result, they violated what should be the inviolable principle of informed consent.”

Johnson then proceeded to outline critical facts that, far from being B.S., was information Americans needed to know. Among other things, according to the report, on February 28, 2021, the Israeli Ministry of Health notified officials at the CDC of “large reports of myocarditis, particularly in young people, following the administration of the Pfizer vaccine.”

Then, in mid-April 2021, Johnson said, CDC officials discussed safety signals for “myocarditis with mRNA vaccines” based on DOD and Israeli data, but still did not take immediate steps to warn the public.

“For context, by the end of April, 2021, just four months into the Covid injection rollout, VAERS (the nation’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) was already reporting 2,926 deaths worldwide within 30 days of injection, with 46.1 percent of those deaths occurring on day 0, 1, or 2 following injection,” Johnson said. “When I asked then-NIH director Francis Collins about what VAERS was showing at that point in time, he acknowledged six deaths had been attributed to the Johnson & Johnson injection, but as to the other 2,920 deaths reported on VAERS he callously stated: ‘Senator, people die.’”

From May 17 to May 21, 2021, Johnson said, CDC officials discussed whether to issue a formal health warning—called a Health Alert Network (HAN) message—on myocarditis, noting that health care professionals across the nation may not be aware of the risk because “providers aren’t reporting these cases to VAERS [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System].”

“Following a May 24, 2021, vaccine safety meeting that included FDA and CDC officials, U.S. public health officials exchanged draft meeting notes which included the question: ‘Is VAERS signaling for myopericarditis now?’; and the answer: ‘For the age groups 16-17 years and 18-24 years, yes,’” he said.

On May 25 of that year, one day following the meeting where FDA and CDC officials acknowledged a safety signal for myopericarditis, Johnson said, the Biden White House distributed talking points to top U.S. health officials, including then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci, downplaying the risk of myocarditis.

Johnson said records show that on May 26, 2021, the CDC and FDA decided to “nix the HAN” and instead opted to publish less formal “clinical considerations” about myocarditis on CDC’s website.

On May 28, 2021, four days following the apparent discussion confirming a safety signal for myopericarditis, CDC posted on its website “clinical considerations” about myocarditis rather than issuing a formal HAN, Johnson said.

“These ‘clinical considerations’ omitted any mention that doctors should ‘consider restricting patients with myocarditis from rigorous activity like competitive sports for at least 3 months until cleared by a healthcare professional,’” he said, in part quoting the records.

Rather than provide the public and health care providers with immediate and transparent information regarding the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis following Covid-19 injection, Johnson said, the Biden administration waited until late June 2021 to announce changes to the labels for the Moderna and Pfizer Covid-19 vaccines based on the ‘suggested increased risks’ of myocarditis and pericarditis.

“The safety signal for myopericarditis that CDC and FDA officials discussed at a May 24, 2021, vaccine safety meeting should have been more than sufficient justification to formally warn the public about the health risk through the HAN which is CDC’s ‘primary method of sharing cleared information about urgent public health incidents,’” he said. “Instead, the following day, on May 25, 2021, the Biden White House distributed talking points to top U.S. health officials which stated that reports of myocarditis and pericarditis occurring after vaccination were ‘rare’ and that ‘getting vaccinated gets us back to normal.’”

Johnson said federal health officials’ primary concern was not vaccine adverse events linked to myocarditis, but instead appears to have been vaccine hesitancy and mandating the injection for virtually every American.

“It is not surprising then, that they weren’t finding what they weren’t looking for,” he said. “It is also not surprising why, for four years, the Biden administration kept the vast majority of this information hidden from the public and Congress. They did not want the public or Congress to ever know the complete extent of their awareness of and lack of response to mRNA Covid-19 vaccine adverse health events.”

Now all that might sound like B.S. to progressives, but it sounds to me like a conscience standing up for the American people, with rock-solid evidence, and doing his best to expose government wrongdoing.

Johnson has also spent the better part of the last several weeks bringing up another topic uncomfortable to Republicans: the One Big Beautiful Bill. The senator says it spends too much, increases the deficit too much, and is unsustainable and unacceptable.

“You have to bend the deficit trajectory down, and this bill, I’m sorry, doesn’t even come close to doing that,” Johnson said this week. To CNBC he put it this way:

“This is immoral, what us old farts doing to our young people. This is grotesque, what we’re doing. We need to own up to that. This is our moment.”

This is certainly Ron Johnson’s moment. He’s had a lot of moments lately, stepping up to speak truth to power.

His is the most powerful voice in the Congress, the conscience of the Senate, and that’s no B.S.