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Sending Dr. Anthony Fauci to jail has never been the driving motivation behind the years-long investigation into the federal government’s response to COVID-19, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told Children’s Health Defense CEO Mary Holland in an exclusive interview.
Instead, Johnson said he hopes to establish an accurate historical record of Fauci’s role in the pandemic and lay the groundwork for a broader public reckoning.
“I do hope people realize that, you know, even if Fauci doesn’t go to jail, that’s really never been my goal,” Johnson told Holland following Fauci’s July 29 congressional hearing.
“I just want the truth [about Fauci] known,” Johnson said. “I don’t want him going down in history as Saint Fauci. I want him going down as he should, as probably one of the most infamous villains in American history.”
Johnson said Fauci’s “arrogant narcissistic dictates” harmed physicians whose “lives and careers” were destroyed, and gaslit people injured by COVID-19 vaccines who “to this day cannot get treatment.”
Holland agreed that accountability ultimately is about establishing an accurate historical record.
“We’re not going to bring people back to life,” she said. “But we need to have the truth, and we need to have some kind of atonement for what happened.”
Johnson said last week’s hearing marked the beginning — not the end — of that effort.
In his view, it put disputed evidence into the public record, highlighted an unwillingness by government officials and the media to acknowledge mistakes, drew attention to information that has received little mainstream media coverage and launched the next phase of the U.S. Senate investigation.
‘Nobody is willing to admit they’re wrong’
Johnson said one of the clearest lessons from his years investigating the pandemic response is that government officials and other institutions still refuse to acknowledge mistakes.
He pointed to an exchange with former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins in April 2021. Johnson asked whether Collins was monitoring the thousands of reports submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) following COVID-19 vaccination.
Johnson said Collins replied that six deaths had been attributed to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
“So what about the other 2,920 deaths?” Johnson asked. “Senator, people die,” he recalled Collins responding.
“That’s how uncurious they were” about the repercussions of their COVID-19 policies, Johnson added.
He said he continues to encounter the same mindset while interviewing current and former officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
“We’re starting to interview the CDC and FDA employees,” he said. “They’re completely unrepentant. … There’s nothing you can show them that would shake their confidence in these injections.”
That unwillingness to reconsider past decisions extends beyond federal health agencies, Johnson said. “What we are dealing [with] across the board is nobody is willing to admit they’re wrong,” he said.
Referring to COVID-19 vaccines and mandates, Johnson said government officials and medical doctors “won’t admit they were wrong in pushing this or mandating or coercing people to take these things.”
He argued the same is true of much of the mainstream media.
“News media is not going to admit it was wrong in putting all their hopes and dreams behind Fauci,” he said.
Johnson: Hearing put evidence into the public record
Johnson acknowledged that it was frustrating that Fauci repeatedly invoked what he claimed was his Fifth Amendment right not to answer any of the committee’s questions.
Even so, the hearing accomplished one of its primary goals by placing evidence and allegations into the public record, according to Johnson.
“All we can really do is continue to gather evidence, lay it out in just irrefutable form,” he said. “I think that’s what this hearing did today. … I combined my 10 questions into kind of one disclosure of this truth with one question to have him plead the Fifth.”
The hearing also reinforced how many questions remain unanswered.
“I was literally inundated with people saying, ‘You gotta ask him this,’” Johnson said. “Which just shows there are so many unanswered questions that the American public deserve answers to.”
The hearing also drew attention to information that has received little or no coverage from major news organizations. “For my part, what I was trying to do is raise the public awareness of what the legacy media is not covering,” Johnson said.
Among the issues he highlighted were allegations that Fauci “used government employees’ resources to solicit over a million dollars in award prizes” and evidence he said showed that former FDA vaccine chief Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., was diagnosing and treating people with COVID-19 vaccine injuries without publicly acknowledging those cases.
Johnson argued that the longer officials wait to acknowledge mistakes, the harder accountability becomes.
“Every day they lied just compounds a problem,” he said. “You’ve lied for one day. Now two days. Now a week. Now five weeks. Now seven months. Now three years. So they will never admit they’re wrong. … It’s unbelievably frustrating.”
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‘There’s so much more to uncover’
Johnson said the July 29 hearing was only the opening phase of “a rigorous investigation. “There’s so much more to uncover,” he said.
Investigators received Fauci’s diary only days before the hearing, Johnson said, and are now reviewing it alongside roughly 11 million pages of records already obtained.
“We’re just beginning,” he said.
The committee is interviewing current and former FDA and CDC officials and plans to seek additional testimony from Fauci.
“We’re just going to subpoena him. Well, we’re going to invite him first,” Johnson said, adding that his office does not intend to wait long before issuing a subpoena if Fauci declines to appear voluntarily.
Johnson also said the committee is planning public events examining hospital treatment protocols during the pandemic after receiving testimony from families who say loved ones were mistreated.
“I read probably the first 30 of them, and … they’re just heart-wrenching,” Johnson said. “It’s so hard to read it when you see it happen time and time and time again at different institutions across the U.S.”
He said he also expects to hold hearings examining sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS.
Rather than relying solely on traditional congressional hearings, Johnson said he wants families, physicians and attorneys to publicly share what they experienced during the pandemic and regarding COVID-19 and other vaccine-related issues.
“I want these people to tell their story,” he said.
Watch Johnson and Holland discuss Fauci hearing here:
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