Sen. Ron Johnson says he can't stand it when he's 'challenged by medical experts'

It’s difficult to fully articulate how much the state of Wisconsin and the nation as a whole lost when Ron Johnson took Russ Feingold’s seat in the U.S. Senate. It was such a significant downgrade that it’s hard to come up with anything remotely comparable. Classic Coke switching to New Coke doesn’t quite capture it. It would be more like if Coke had replaced its original formula with a jar of pureed lungfish or the battery acid from an abandoned El Camino.

Johnson was elected … [the author has taken a 15-minute vomit break; please stand by] … during the tea party wave election of 2010, when a partially eaten tube of braunschweiger could have succeeded in most purple states and districts simply by running as a Republican. Having lived in Wisconsin for much of RoJo the Clown’s tenure, I’ve always told anyone who’d listen that my state dumping Feingold for Johnson felt a little like your mom divorcing your dad so she could date Carrot Top.

And true to form, Johnson’s quaggy rat brain has followed his Fried-Pie Piper down every dank conspiracy burrow imaginable. But it’s the COVID holes he’s slithered down that are the most off-putting.

On Thursday’s episode of the podcast The Highwire With Del Bigtree, Johnson let everyone know how little respect he has for medical experts who paid all that dough to get degrees from ivory-tower institutions like Harvard and Johns Hopkins when they could have learned everything worth knowing for free on Facebook. Watch:

JOHNSON: “What drives me nuts is when I’m challenged by medical experts. [Laughs] Okay, show me the data. The one that’s driving me nuts right now is this sudden adult death syndrome.”

BIGTREE: “Oh, my God. Yeah.”

JOHNSON: “I’m reading articles written about that, and the doctors are baffled. The medical experts are baffled. What could possibly be causing the death of adults just dropping dead? What could it be? And I’m going, ‘Isn’t it pretty obvious?’ I mean, you look at the VAERS report, we’re up to 28,714 deaths on the VAERS system. Did anything change in 2021? Did we do something different in medicine that just might be a possible reason for SADS? But again, the COVID cartel is completely oblivious to it.”

First of all, Johnson has been distorting the VAERS data for months, and God only knows how many people have actually died as a result of his and others’ constant drumbeat of disinformation. VAERS—which stands for “Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System”—is a database consisting of raw, unvetted reports of alleged vaccine side effects, and the Department of Health and Human Services, which hosts the database, takes pains to explain that a death reported to VAERS can’t be assumed to have been caused by vaccines.

Anyone, including Healthcare providers, vaccine manufacturers, and the public can submit reports to the system. While very important in monitoring vaccine safety, VAERS reports alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness. Vaccine providers are encouraged to report any clinically significant health problem following vaccination to VAERS even if they are not sure if the vaccine was the cause. In some situations, reporting to VAERS is required of healthcare providers and vaccine manufacturers.

VAERS reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable. Reports to VAERS can also be biased. As a result, there are limitations on how the data can be used scientifically. Data from VAERS reports should always be interpreted with these limitations in mind.

This disclaimer is printed right on the VAERS website, and so you’d think a U.S. senator who keeps citing these data might have stumbled across it sometime over the past year—but apparently not.

But that’s not all! Johnson, who for some reason still goes out of his way to dissuade people from taking full advantage of lifesaving vaccinations, is also distorting information about SADS.

From a Verify fact check on sudden adult death syndrome:

SADS has existed long before the COVID-19 outbreak, and subsequent vaccines were available.

In an email to VERIFY, the SADS Foundation said the first documented case of SADS was described in Germany in 1856 and had been researched in the U.S. since the early 1970s. The SADS Foundation is an organization that provides services to educate the public about SADS.

“Over two years into the pandemic, there’s been no indication in the largest [vaccine] programs in the world of an increase in death from these conditions,” Michael J. Ackerman, MD, Ph.D., with the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine told VERIFY via the SADS Foundation.

Hmm. Whom to trust? A doctor who works at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine or the dean of the UW Clown College? We don't want to drive Ron Johnson to drink, but I think most of us are inclined to go with the guy who actually studied medicine. Weird how that works, huh?

If you’re a glutton for harsh, soul-crushing punishment, you can listen to (and view) the entire podcast here.