U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson blasted government control of health care on Thursday during a Committee on the Budget hearing on Medicare for all, repeating an earlier charge that government agency heads “sabotaged” early treatment of COVID-19.
The Wisconsin Republican shared a clip of his remarks saying that a “cornucopia of widely available generic drugs was ignored” as a possible treatment for the virus.
“I don’t see how anybody can take a look at our response to… the government response to this pandemic — a million people dead, the human toll, the economic devastation of these ill-advised widespread shutdowns, shutdowns that didn’t work, what we’ve done to our children — how anybody could say that was a success,” Johnson said. “It’s been a miserable failure, so why in the world would anybody want to put government more in charge of health care?”
“Our government sabotaged COVID-19 early treatment. Safe, cheap, widely available drugs were completely ignored. Why would anybody want to put government more in charge of health care after their miserable response to this pandemic?” Johnson tweeted, in posting the footage on Twitter:
Our government sabotaged COVID-19 early treatment.
Safe, cheap, widely available drugs were completely ignored.
Why would anybody want to put government more in charge of health care after their miserable response to this pandemic? pic.twitter.com/GbiiIy1ojw
— Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) May 12, 2022
His claim that government agencies downplayed other alternatives outside of vaccines is not new.
In an October 2021 letter sent to Xavier Becerra, Secretary of Health and Human Services; Anthony Fauci, Director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Rochelle Walensky, Director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and Dr. Janet Woodcock, Acting Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Johnson slammed the FDA for “mocking” the use of ivermectin.
The letter was signed by 21 Republican colleagues, including U.S. Senators Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Mike Lee of Utah and Ted Cruz of Texas.
“Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, public health officials have not only ignored potential early treatments, but at times seem to have participated in an aggressive campaign against the use of specific early treatment options. Even though a basic tenet of medicine is: early detection allows for early treatment which produces better results; your agencies have overtly discouraged the use of cheap and widely-available early treatments like ivermectin in favor of expensive new drugs like Remdesivir (which costs more than $3,000 per treatment),” he wrote.
“Despite the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding a study examining the effectiveness of ivermectin as an early treatment for COVID-19, your agencies have already demonstrated your strong bias against this and other potential early treatment drugs,” he added.
“The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) mocking of ivermectin, conflating a widely-available human drug that was the basis for Nobel prize winning research, with its veterinary version, has cast doubt over the integrity of this study’s eventual results,” Johnson continued. “We strongly believe you should explain to the American people why your agencies have failed to sufficiently examine and ensure access to a growing list of drugs being used by doctors who have had the courage to ignore NIH’s ongoing compassionless guideline of doing virtually nothing until COVID-19 patients are so sick they require hospitalization.”
U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said in August 2021 that it was hatred of former President Donald Trump that restricted research of ivermectin more, and that hatred also kept researchers from looking closer at hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug touted by the now-former president.
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Tom Tillison grew up in Maryland before moving to Central Florida as a young teen. It is in the Sunshine State that he honed both his passion for politics and his writing skills. Tillison also contributes to BizPac Review.
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