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Mainstream media outlets continue to ignore evidence that federal health agencies acted in an “unbelievably corrupt” manner during the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said Monday.
Speaking on “The Jimmy Dore Show,” Johnson said years of congressional investigations, hearings and records requests have uncovered evidence that federal health officials concealed information about COVID-19 vaccine injuries — yet major news organizations refuse to cover the findings.
“The majority of the legacy media is completely ignoring what I consider the greatest government scandal in my lifetime,” Johnson told Dore.
Johnson pointed to reports submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
“Prior to 2021, on average VAERS reported about 280 deaths associated with various vaccines,” Johnson said. “With the advent of the COVID injections, they reported 21,000 worldwide deaths. So 280 on average to all of a sudden 21,000.”
Johnson said federal officials ignored warnings early in 2021 that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were analyzing VAERS data using methods that obscure vaccine safety signals.
According to Johnson, an FDA analyst who independently applied an updated analytical method identified 25 safety signals, including sudden cardiac death, pulmonary infarction and Bell’s palsy.
Instead of investigating those findings, Johnson said agency officials shut down the effort.
“They told her to cease and desist,” he said, arguing that FDA officials knowingly continued using a flawed approach.
“On March 1 of 2021, FDA officials already knew the algorithm they were gonna use was gonna hide safety signals,” Johnson said. “They clung to that algorithm. They didn’t use the new one. So they go lie to the American public and say, ‘We’re not seeing safety signals.’”
Information about those safety signals became public only after years of oversight efforts, lawsuits and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, Johnson said.
“A bunch of us, including Children’s Health Defense,” filed FOIA requests seeking the data, he said. “Listeners have to understand how thoroughly corrupt the FDA and the CDC was in hiding what they knew.”
‘There was no informed consent on these injections’
Johnson said the early suppression of vaccine injury data extended beyond the FDA and CDC to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
He said NIH researchers were quietly diagnosing and treating COVID-19 vaccine-injured patients within months of the vaccine rollout — while withholding that information from the public.
NIH scientists told patients to “stay silent” about the research, Johnson said. “They said, ‘We want to complete our studies so that we can give complete information to the medical community so they know how to treat this stuff.’”
But the NIH didn’t release the study, and the government continued to mandate the COVID-19 vaccine, according to Johnson. Researchers “finally released it in 2022, but they didn’t tell anybody about it. They just put it on a preprint server.”
Those actions deprived Americans of the information needed to make informed medical decisions, Johnson argued.
“There was no informed consent on these injections,” he said.
“The NIH was treating people vaccine-injured. FDA was lying that they weren’t seeing these safety signals,” he said. “And as a result, the American public was not informed.”
Dore echoed Johnson’s claims, arguing that public health officials repeatedly misled Americans.
“They lied about the creation of the virus. They lied about where it came from. They lied about masks. They lied about the vaccine stopping transmission,” Dore said. “There wasn’t a thing that they haven’t lied about.”
‘A lot of doctors … don’t have a clue’
Dore and Johnson also discussed Johnson’s U.S. Senate hearings, which featured testimony from people injured by COVID-19 vaccines and researchers who raised questions about vaccine safety, but received little mainstream coverage.
Johnson said some political opponents have actively discouraged the public from watching. He singled out Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), whom Johnson said: “has to be bought and paid for by Big Pharma.”
Before one hearing, Blumenthal “held a press conference … and said, ‘I hope nobody watches this. This isn’t worthy,’” Johnson recalled.
The hearings are highlighting “people whose lives have been destroyed by vaccine injuries, and he’s telling people, ‘Look away,’” Johnson said.
Johnson also argued that some experts brought forward to rebut COVID-19 vaccine safety concerns demonstrated limited knowledge of the vaccines themselves.
In a Sept. 9, 2025, clip aired by Dore, Johnson questioned Dr. Jake Scott about the makeup and behavior of the mRNA vaccines. After Scott struggled to answer several questions, Johnson explained how the mRNA is “designed not to degrade” in the body.
“Do you know that or not? Because I talked to a lot of doctors [who] don’t have a clue,” Johnson said.
Recalling the exchange, Johnson told Dore he was surprised by Scott’s responses.
“I was pretty well shocked that … he didn’t know these things,” Johnson said.
Johnson said he encountered a similar situation during a June hearing, when oncologist Dr. Julie Gralow was unable to answer comparable questions.
“The person that Blumenthal brought in, eminent oncologist … she didn’t know it either,” Johnson told Dore.
The Democrats’ medical expert witnesses claim that the COVID injection is safe and effective — yet they don’t understand how it works.
– It was modified NOT to degrade.
– It has been shown to circulate in the body for 700 days after injection.How can they assure the American… pic.twitter.com/EMuT1xcv7T
— Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) June 4, 2026
The Defender is 100% reader-supported. No corporate sponsors. No paywalls. Our writers and editors rely on you to fund stories like this that mainstream media won’t write. 
This article was funded by critical thinkers like you.
‘Absolutely no coverage in the mainstream media’
Johnson said experts who dismiss concerns about vaccine safety are often unfamiliar with evidence raised by critics.
Referring to Gralow’s testimony on possible links between mRNA vaccines and cancer, Johnson said, “She was definitively saying, ‘There’s no proof that the mRNA injections cause cancer. There’s no proof.’ Well, again, there’s not going to be proof if, first of all, you’re completely ignorant of what the shot is.”
He argued that researchers calling for additional safety studies are routinely dismissed.
“All they’re saying is, ‘Let’s do more research,’” Johnson said. “But these guys want to shut the research down.”
Dore said exchanges like those highlighted by Johnson illustrate why the public rarely hears competing viewpoints.
“You have the top doctors in their fields, the most cited doctors in their fields, come and testify,” Dore said of Johnson’s hearings. “It gets absolutely no coverage in the mainstream media.”
Dore suggested Big Pharma spends billions of dollars on prescription drug ads to influence news coverage. “What they’re trying to do is make the media reliant on their money so then they can control what they say and what they don’t say,” he said.
Johnson, who worked in sales before entering politics, agreed.
“Those ads are absolutely useless except for one reason and one reason only: to buy the media. To buy the narrative,” he said.
Johnson argued that the same officials and institutions that championed the COVID-19 response are reluctant to revisit those decisions and confront the harm those policies caused.
“Do you want to admit that something you approved, something you pushed on people, killed them or permanently disabled them?” Johnson asked.
“That’s why to this day, doctors by and large aren’t admitting this. The federal health officials still aren’t. The media certainly isn’t,” he said. “Which is why I cannot get on a major news network with what I consider is the greatest scandal in government history.”
Watch Johnson on ‘The Jimmy Dore Show’ here:
Related articles in The Defender
- Sen. Ron Johnson: Emails Show FDA Ignored ‘Overwhelming Evidence of Harm’ From COVID Vaccines
- The Story the Media — and the Government — Don’t Want You to Hear
- Children’s Health Defense Publishes Peer-Reviewed Paper Exposing Failure of FDA, CDC to Monitor and Report COVID Vaccine Safety Signals
- COVID mRNA Vaccines Should Be Pulled Off the Market, Oncologist Says
- Mary Holland: ‘Humanity Cannot Afford to Forget the Dire Toll That COVID Took Upon Us All’
