US Sen. Johnson Tells Ottawa COVID-19 Vaccine Inquiry Pandemic ‘Mistakes’ Must Not Be Repeated

U.S. Senator Ron Johnson says “mistakes” made during the COVID-19 pandemic cannot be made again, as he testified at the first day of an inquiry into reported COVID-19 vaccine injuries among Canadians.

“Although the coronavirus pandemic has had a tragic and lasting impact on global society, I fully understand why so many people want to forget what happened and simply move on. Well, we can’t,” Johnson testified in Ottawa on Sept. 8.

“How do we want to ensure that the mistakes made in our miserably failed response to COVID aren’t repeated the next time?”

Johnson, who has been prominent in U.S. Senate investigations into COVID-19 and vaccine issues and previously chaired the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, was scheduled as the first witness at the Allison Inquiry, which runs from Sept. 8 to 11.

Conservative MP Dean Allison’s inquiry received over 1,400 applications from Canadians who say they were injured by COVID-19 vaccines, but will only have time to hear from 50 applicants. The inquiry aims to provide a “neutral forum” and will not make findings of fact or reach any final conclusions, according to its official website.

In his remarks, Johnson criticized the global response to COVID-19, which he argued was not as dangerous or as deadly as governments and the media portrayed it to be. He noted that early in the pandemic, a study found the virus to have an infection fatality rate of 0.125 percent, compared to a rate of around 0.1 percent for an average flu season.

Johnson said governments nonetheless implemented lockdowns that “devastated people’s lives,” including by forcing many small businesses to close down, while larger box stores “thrived.”

Johnson also argued that the medical principles of early disease detection and treatment were ignored, and that many doctors who he said had success treating COVID-19 with drugs such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine had their medical licences revoked.

On COVID-19 vaccines, Johnson said there were 1.7 million adverse events and 39,000 deaths in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, where 24 percent of the deaths occurred either on the day of vaccination or within two days.

Johnson also said he believes that many cases of “long COVID” are actually vaccine injuries, given that many patients had symptoms develop shortly after receiving the vaccine.

Johnson criticized the U.S. vaccine injury compensation program, saying it only compensates a “certain narrow type of injury” like myocarditis. He says if the programs were operated more fairly, Americans would likely be given hundreds of billions of dollars in payouts.

Conservative MP Chris Lewis told Johnson that although he did not want to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, he did so to comply with the House of Commons vaccine mandate and gain entry to Parliament.

Lewis said that shortly after his mother got the vaccine, she developed esophageal cancer and eventually passed away. He said the doctor referred to it as “turbo cancer,” and asked Johnson if he had heard of this happening as a result of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Johnson said he had “absolutely heard of turbo cancers” and that there are “plausible mechanisms” for the vaccine to cause cancer, but that this was “very difficult to prove.”

While the Allison Inquiry is a non-partisan event, the Liberals have said they will not attend, with Liberal MP and Chief Government Whip Mark Gerretsen saying in August that the inquiry was “more like a political grievance session than a genuine attempt to improve anything.” The NDP and Bloc Québécois MPs have not said whether they will attend.