The ‘COVID Cartel’s’ Manipulation of America

A pandemic plan that called for mass vaccination, concerted effort to suppress early treatment

Senator Ron Johnson. (Lei Chen/The Epoch Times)

“It was insane,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) says. “Of our response to COVID I would say that’s probably the best word to sum it up: insane—a miserable failure.”

In a recent episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek spoke with Johnson, who is a member of the Senate committees on the budget, finance, and homeland security and governmental affairs. They discussed the global push for mass vaccination and the concerted effort to suppress early treatment.

Johnson has spearheaded efforts to change America’s COVID-19 policies and has hosted a number of hearings and roundtables on early outpatient treatment for COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccine injuries.

He also shares his thoughts on the Russia–Ukraine War and what he sees as the path forward for the United States.

Jan Jekielek: I’m going to dub you a COVID response skeptic. From the beginning, you were asking big questions about this whole idea of shutdowns.

Sen. Ron Johnson: I’ll take that moniker. Science is all about being skeptical. One of the greatest tragedies of the pandemic is we haven’t even been allowed to ask questions.

I remember early on in the pandemic watching the video coming out of China with everybody in their moon suits. We didn’t know what we were dealing with. We had certainly heard of Ebola and MERS [Middle East Respiratory Syndrome]. Ebola had about a 40 percent death rate or infection fatality rate. MERS had something like a 30 percent rate. Were we dealing with something like that? We just didn’t know, until we had the Princess Cruise. John Ioannidis’s analysis of what happened on the Princess Cruise has stood the test of time.

This was a deadly disease if you were elderly and had certain comorbidities. But if you were young and healthy, it was a flu-like type of disease. I glommed onto that analysis. I also knew that there was no way you could shut down the American economy the way people like Anthony Fauci were talking about it: a 50-day shutdown to flatten the curve.

What exactly are you going to shut down? We’re still going to need hospitals. We’re going to need pharmacies, grocery stores, and gas stations. The economy had to continue to operate.

On one of our Senate calls with Anthony Fauci, I asked: “Dr. Fauci, you’re proposing these shutdowns. Are you taking into account the human and economic devastation you’re contemplating here?”

He just cavalierly said: “Senator, that’s somebody else’s department. I don’t worry about that.”

If you’re a doctor, you may be specialized, but you have to treat the whole patient. You have to understand what your cure is going to do to the patient. He couldn’t have cared less. Very early on, nothing about our response made sense.

I was an early advocate for early treatment. I heard about the possibility of the drug hydroxychloroquine. If you remember, a state senator in Michigan was successfully treated with hydroxychloroquine. I heard about Dr. Zelenko, and Didier Raoult in France. I’m reading about these things. My concern was that we wouldn’t have enough of the drug.

I’m calling up the head of Novartis and texting him. They donated 30 million doses to the national stockpile, but it wasn’t being distributed. My main concern was, again, would we have enough manufacturing capacity for a cheap generic drug like hydroxychloroquine?

I had never heard of ivermectin at that point. I knew about vitamin D, which by the way, Anthony Fauci took and told no one. Isn’t that curious? He upped his intake of vitamin D. Why wasn’t he talking about that early on?

For whatever reason, there was a concerted effort to not research or push any kind of early treatment, anything that might mitigate and lessen the severity of the disease.

It was just: “Get tested. We’ll spend tens of billions of dollars on tests. But if you test positive, do nothing, go home, isolate yourself, and hope you don’t get so sick that you have to go to the hospital.”

But if you do go to the hospital, then we’ll slap Remdesivir in your arm, costing over 3,000 bucks. You’ve had doctors on here, I’m sure, talking about the harm that can do to your kidneys. We’ll put you on a vent, knowing that 80 to 90 percent of people that went on ventilation never got off it.

It was insane. Of our response to COVID I would say that’s probably the best word to sum it up: insane—a miserable failure.

Mr. Jekielek: What was it that you knew? You said you were reading different things, but what was it that you knew to look at that a whole lot of people didn’t?

Sen. Johnson: With John Ioannidis’s study on the Princess Cruise ship, he said, “OK, we’ll get through this.”

I didn’t have the level of fear that they imposed on the rest of society.

That was their main tool. The technocrats and the Faucis made sure the world was deathly afraid of this. As a result, you’re looking for some relief from that fear.

Then, you have a guy like Fauci saying: “I’ve got the cure here. I’ve got a vaccine.”

We didn’t look at all the different generic drugs that were on the shelf. They’ve been used safely for decades. They had the kind of properties that you’d be expecting in terms of being antiviral or anticoagulant or working with respiratory illnesses. We just threw all that aside.

There was nothing in a pandemic plan that called for shutdowns. Fauci first said, “Masks aren’t going to work.”

And they didn’t. All you needed to know was, “Here is the particle-sized virus and here are the opening pores of the mask—this isn’t going to work.” They might be marginally effective, but they weren’t something that you would impose on everybody in society.

We shut down all the mom and pop shops, but we let the big box stores stay open. Bobby Kennedy writes in his “A Letter to Liberals” that a 2021 study showed there was almost a $4 trillion transfer of wealth from the middle class to the Big Tech social media giants. Those are the people that were in charge of the narrative.

That is what has opened my eyes. I’ve been referring to them as the “COVID Cartel.” I’m talking about the Biden administration, the federal health agencies, Big Pharma, and legacy media. The Big Tech social media giants and Big Pharma captured the media as well.

Unfortunately, it’s easy to manipulate a population, and the best way to manipulate them is with fear.

I had an asymptomatic case of COVID in late September, early October 2020. I was around people, and because I’m going to the White House and that type of thing, I was always being tested. I tested positive and never had a symptom. From that experience, I suppose I had less fear, plus I had natural immunity.

In a later interview, I was asked if I was going to get the vaccine. I said: “I’ve already had COVID and I’ve got natural immunity. It’s probably going to be better than the vaccine.”

I was savaged for that. I was called an anti-vaxxer, which is probably just underneath murderer, rapist, racist, and pedophile—the last thing you want to be called is anti-vaxxer.

I had the good fortune of being connected to doctors and medical researchers who had a completely different take, which is why in January 2022, I held the event “COVID-19: A Second Opinion.” I thought it was about time the public heard a different opinion on how we should be handling this pandemic, a different opinion on vaccines and vaccine injuries in general.

When I first talked to Bobby Kennedy about this, he said: “We’re about the same age. When we were growing up, we got three vaccines. Now, it’s 60 or 70, and they’re doing them in multiples.”

Again, I’m not a doctor or a researcher, but there’s so much of this information out there that certainly concerns a guy like me. Why doesn’t it concern the Anthony Faucis and the Collinses and Walenskys and the people who have replaced these folks? Why doesn’t it concern our federal health agencies? The answer is pretty obvious—they are completely captured by Big Pharma.

Mr. Jekielek: I would worry that if Big Pharma has captured our agencies, what if the Chinese Communist Party has captured Big Pharma?

Sen. Johnson: They certainly have influence on medical journals and universities, and access to all the research we’re funding. It’s a pipeline right to the Chinese government. That was so absurd about what Anthony Fauci did in funding all these studies, subcontracting them out to people who then subcontracted them out to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If you are cooperating in any way, shape, or form with a Chinese entity and Chinese citizens in science, you’re basically cooperating with the People’s Liberation Army. There’s no innocent explanation for what we see there.

Mr. Jekielek: Senator, in this recent Twitter Files dump that Matt Taibbi published, there’s a lot of COVID-related communications and censorship of some specific accounts. Taibbi basically says that it’s as if these public health people are acting to elicit a particular behavioral response as opposed to presenting truthful information. I find this deeply troubling.

Sen. Johnson: There’s a very interesting panel that’s on videotape from the Milken Institute in 2019. Rick Bright, who was the guy who sabotaged hydroxychloroquine, is on a panel with Anthony Fauci, and they’re bemoaning the fact that we don’t have a mass vaccination program. One of them says, “It’s probably going to take a pandemic to really accomplish that goal.” This is in 2019. Well, they got their pandemic.

I don’t know what charade was being played in terms of development of the vaccine. They had been working on mRNA. They were just waiting for an opportunity to unleash it globally as part of a mass vaccination program. That’s what this has all been about. Yes, it meant profits for the pharmaceutical companies.

Mr. Jekielek: Some people have called it collusion. How did that happen, not just on this issue, but on many others, along with the idea that vaccination was the only solution?

Sen. Johnson: I wish I had the full answer. You’re Anthony Fauci, and you’ve got a government agency that is granting hundreds of billions of dollars of research grants to hospital systems and research universities. You’ve got grants from the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and they’re all about vaccines. When you have that money flowing, people don’t buck the system.

These guys are all in the same circle. They’re all going to the World Economic Forum. They’ve been brazen about how they’ve allowed their discussions to be videotaped, and how open they are in terms of their plans. It’s astounding. You almost can’t believe what they’re saying. In many respects, the world is being run by a very elite group of individuals.

Mr. Jekielek: Just to clarify, are you saying you think the World Economic Forum runs the world, or is it the billionaires?

Sen. Johnson: There is an excess of influence by very powerful people. The World Economic Forum is one group. Bill and Melinda Gates, their trust, is supposed to be beneficial, and, in many cases, it probably is. The Wellcome Trust is probably very beneficial. But when you’re in charge of making those types of donations to different important causes, causes that are certainly publicized in the press, you have an inordinate amount of influence over what the process is.

The American public, as we talked about earlier, is easily propagandized. It’s easy to pull the wool over their eyes and it’s done repeatedly. It’s done by the Left. I’ll bring partisanship into this. The radical left has infiltrated virtually every institution, not only in America, but globally. It’s a leftist agenda.

It is an agenda that wants to control the population. They think they’re so smart. They think they’re such great angels that they need the power to direct your life, and that you’re not smart enough to direct your own life. You need them to be telling you when you can walk outside during a pandemic and whether or not you need to wear a mask. It’s grotesquely arrogant and full of hubris.

Mr. Jekielek: There’s a powerful structure which has formed, and I call it the megaphone. It’s basically the structure that allows for the creation of a perceived consensus around an issue in society.

For example, with the Russia–Ukraine War, there is a perceived consensus about what should be done, or with COVID, that all the vaccines are safe and effective. Some portion of our population is quite susceptible to this, even switching 180 degrees on their viewpoint within 24 hours. I would not have believed this until we saw it in action.

Sen. Johnson: There’s not one person in charge, there’s not two or three people in charge, but there’s a group of individuals that have pretty much the same Leftist viewpoint—that again, think they’re smart and the better angels. If you give them all the power, they can create a utopia. It doesn’t work, and they won’t admit that this hasn’t worked.

They’ll commission a study that says the vaccine saved 2 to 3 million lives. Okay, where’s the data on that? Prove that to me. They don’t have the data. That’s what we’re battling. We’re up against powerful forces.

Mr. Jekielek: One of the areas where spending has been criticized lately is on the Russia–Ukraine War. I believe this is something that you voted in support of.

Sen. Johnson: I was on Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I was the European chair and the ranking member on the European subcommittee. I’ve been to Ukraine a number of times.

I know the Ukrainian people want what we want. They want to shed the legacy of corruption, the endemic corruption in Ukraine. That’s really what Zelensky’s platform was—to defeat corruption in Ukraine. So I’m sympathetic with it.

And let’s face it, Putin is evil. Ukraine doesn’t threaten Putin. He just wants the territory. He’s bombing population centers. He’s committing atrocities and war crimes. But you have to recognize reality. It’s not a fair fight, and it’s not a level playing field. The only way you stop Putin is if you respond in kind and threaten Russian populations. Nobody’s going to do that because they’ve got nuclear weapons.

I don’t see an acceptable result for this war. You can just see more and more death, and more and more destruction. At some point in time, you have to recognize that reality. I voted for the first appropriation very early on. Then, there was a hope that showing support for the Ukrainians and providing them with the lethal defensive weapons they needed would spank Putin hard enough to leave. That didn’t happen, and I don’t see that happening.

To me, this has got to stop. We’re not going to like the result, but we will like the result less the longer this drags on and more Ukrainians are slaughtered and more of Ukraine is destroyed. I don’t see how this gets any better. It just keeps getting worse and worse. At some point, it has to be ended.

I don’t think Putin would have invaded if Trump would’ve been reelected. We could have visibly ramped up the defensive weaponry earlier on. There are things we might have done to prevent it. But since it has started, I just don’t see any result that we’re going to find acceptable.

Mr. Jekielek: Senator, let’s go back to thinking about what to do here now. Challenging these industrial complexes that we’ve been talking about may seem daunting to the common man and woman.

Sen. Johnson: First of all, you start with the basic problem-solving process. Coming from manufacturing, I’m solving problems all the time. It’s just a basic process. First, you have to admit you have a problem, then you have to properly define it. Once you’ve defined it, then you take a look at what the root cause is. Then, you can start designing solutions. In Washington, D.C., it almost always starts with a solution that’s beneficial to somebody, and it’s generally about spending money. The solution is always about spending money.

The real overall solution is that we need to reduce the size of the federal government and its influence over our lives. As it relates to federal health agencies, we need to define the mission of what those government agencies do. We need those government agencies. We need an agency that actually does protect the American public in terms of food and health safety. We need a CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] that gathers health information on chronic illnesses and reports it, and then makes their grants responsive to what we’re seeing.

They should not allow Big Pharma and outside interests to corrupt their mission. We could do it for a whole lot less money and with a lot fewer people.

This country is something rare and precious, and it was built because people had the freedom to dream and aspire and create. If you crush that freedom, people won’t dream, create, and build. We’ll become Venezuela, and we can’t let that happen.

I’m not going to let them defeat me. They’ve tried to silence me, to marginalize me, but it hasn’t stopped me.

Mr. Jekielek: People say that fear is contagious, but one of the things I’ve learned from the pandemic is that courage can also be contagious. Senator Ron Johnson, it’s a pleasure to have you on.

Sen. Johnson: Thank you. I really appreciate what you’re doing and what The Epoch Times is doing. You’re doing real journalism, and that’s what this country needs. That’s what the world needs.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.