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‘TRUTH’ with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Featuring Senator Ronald Johnson—Season 3 Episode 8

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– Hello everybody today my guest is Senator Ronald Johnson of Wisconsin, who was until the Democrats took control of the senate, he was the chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. And a lot of the people who watch this podcast are familiar with Senator Johnson for a series of hearings that he conducted on, and particularly on therapies or the COVID-19 crisis. And Pierre Kory I think was one of your witnesses, many, many other witnesses and revelations that came out of your hearing. And I think for many of us who are concerned about government policies and about the reasonability and the scientific basis for the countermeasures, and this weird totalitarian kind of shenanigans and monkey business that we see, I think should concern every American, Democratic and Republican. You are kind of a voice of reason and hope of people who are looking at this with great concern. So I wanna thank you thank you for joining me today.

– Well, I appreciate it. I appreciate the kind words. What was amazing about that Bobby is, I thought I was doing public service, holding hearings asking just highly qualified doctors that had the compassion, but also the courage to actually treat COVID patients and then provide information. What happened is resolved after my first year on early treatment. And again, it was a hearing on early treatment, myself and the group of doctors, Doctor Peter McCulloch, Dr. Harvey Richard, Dr. George Freed, were labeled by the New York times and Dr. Shaw, “The snake Oil Salesman of the Senate”. So what has surprised me is just the close-minded approach to this. You know, Dr. McCulloch had talked about the four pillars of a pandemic, which is first you try and control the contagion. Secondly, early home treatment. The third pillar would be late hospital treatment. The fourth pillar, vaccine. What’s controversy about that? I just don’t get it. I just, I’ve been amazed at the close-minded approach to dealing with a pandemic that caught basically the world by surprise. We didn’t, had we never witnessed this virus before. And so we had to we actually had to have doctors practice medicine. But those that have the courage and compassion to practice medicine, were vilified and worse.

– I mean, I think one of the great revelations for people when they heard Pierre Kory and Peter McCulloch speak, and how they crystallized the issue, which is, we were constantly being told we’ve gotta flatten the curve, being locked inside, and they came to you and they said, the way to flatten the curve is early treatment. We start treating people when they get sick, so they don’t ever have to go to the hospital. And the standard of care under Tony Fauci is regimen. What is that? You get the COVID test, you find out you’ve got COVID, you wait three weeks until you’re so sick that you can’t breathe, and then you just end on the hospital. And what these doctors were saying was, you know, let’s not let it get that far. There’s a lot of treatments that we are seeing. Not just a little but mountains of peer reviewed science, that says, if you if you intervene early with these treatments, you never have to go to the hospital. And it was I think it was just stunning. Dr. Fauci and you know Bill Gates the people who seem to be running the counter measures in the COVID response were absolutely militant about not treating people early.

– No, it made no sense to me in the early on. When I first heard about the Michigan state legislator that was treated and she said she was cured by hydroxychloroquine. Man, would that be fabulous? I mean, that would be the silver bullet to this pandemic. If we really had a existing drug, even better yet an eat cheap generic drug that could be repurposed for this. Something that is available in the billions of doses. Something that’s been around for at least for 65 years, and proven very, very safe for . I mean, that is the silver bullet that we could put this this pandemic behind us. And immediately, anybody that talked about hydroxychloroquine was vilified. And then the same thing happened with ivermectin. And it made no sense because a tentative medicine is early detection and early treatment. Because what we’re trying to do with every other disease, and even something like COVID, your flu is like COVID to a certain extent it’s the virus. But we all know that if you have, we have something called Tamiflu. But we also know that if you don’t take Tamiflu like almost immediately, it’s no good. If it’s used late, you might as well not even have taken it. So you had to identify drugs, and you had to research that, you had to have robust trials on those types of drugs. You know, the full gamut. I never pushed one over the other. I was just saying, let’s utilize our health agencies, let doctors practice medicine, let them utilize their full awfully prescription rights, use the internet. Let doctors communicate with each other. And then because we’re in the midst of a pandemic. We don’t have time to wait for the double blind, gold-standard randomized trial studies. We need to have doctors practice medicine. We need to attack this. And people like Dr. Corey, by the way he very early on with this critical care group, they came up with the use of corticosteroid steroids. And I actually had him in another hearing early, I think this was in May, where he presented those findings. And as a result, I had doctors contacting me and telling me I help save people’s lives, because I put Corey, Dr. Corey as a witness in May. He came back later in December and my second early treatment here, and this was after the New York Times had already accused me of being, “A Snake Oil Salesman”. He came in and talked about ivermectin. And is the day before that he got a steady in from Argentina, where they had prophylaxed 800 healthcare workers with a multi-drug approach, including ivermectin. Of the 800 they were prophylaxed, using that a multi-drug cocktail, not one of them got COVID. The 400 that weren’t prophylaxed with it, 58% got COVID, no. Again, I know that’s not a random controlled study, but it’s pretty powerful evidence that would require further investigation in our healthcare agencies into it. And again, did worse than turn a blind side toward it, vilified and terminate people that were coming up with this service. They censored 8 million Americans. Watch Pierre Kory’s opening statement. It was a passion plea. He present that evidence, always asked the NIH to do is, look at his manuscript, look at his evidence. And in the end, YouTube censored the cut that video off, after 8 million Americans had viewed it. Which kinda indicates that Americans weren’t particularly happy with the NIH guideline, as you were describing which basically says, “Get tested, if you have COVID, go home, isolate yourself in fear, and if you get sick enough or your oxygen levels drop too low, check yourself in the hospital and just hope we don’t have to put you on a ventilator, because that’s not real good successful treatment.

– It was almost, I mean it seem almost like a deliberate attempt to flood the hospitals. And to increase this, you know this feeling that it was a crisis rather than we didn’t hear that’s names that you wouldn’t want. They called it out the Americans doctor but, what do you wanna hear from your doctor when you get sick? You wanna hear that there’s no reason for panic. That you’re gonna get the best treatment. And he’s gonna consult with other doctors, specialists in the field. And that he is going to give your course, and explain the science behind it clearly and explained the risks clearly. And we got nothing like that from this doctor. We got a doctor who has never treated COVID himself. Who is not consulting with anybody as you know Peter McCullough, after Peter McCullough pointed out and Dr. Kory. There’s is nobody on that COVID White House Committee who has ever treated a COVID patient. They were all people were involved in HIV, which has a long history of corruption on that issue. And they were, and they didn’t do what you would want them to do, which is to say, which is the summons. The best doctors from all over the world and put them in a committee, and have an open discussion where all the American people can watch, televised discussion where they’re collecting studies from all their work. I think there’s something like 50,000 studies on COVID that had been published, and you want them going through those studies and saying, look, this drug looks like it worked. We got 19 studies that say, this drug worked. You gotta give it a certain time. And you’ve gotta give it in combination with zinc and vitamin D. Why was Dr. Fauci telling us, you know 85% of the people who were hospitalized were vitamin D deficient. 95% of the people that died from COVID, were Vitamin D deficient. He was taking vitamin D himself. Why didn’t he tell us, you need to be taking vitamin D. You need to stop drinking sugar drinks. You need to lose some weight. You need to get outside, recreate, and you need to not live in fear. ‘Cause that is part of the stress make your situation worse. None of those things happen. America’s doctor did not act like the doctor that you want at all.

– Now let’s face it Bobby, that’s the $64,000,000 question, and I don’t have any kind of reasonable answer for it. And again, I was pushing early treatments. And again, I was pushing early treatment. Not a specific drug. I was just pushing the agencies. Look at these things. Take a look at the anecdotal evidence, take a look at the observational studies, look at this. Show some compassion. Why didn’t that happen? I just have no explanation for it, because again it needs so much sense, if we could have had a repurposed drug, we could have put this pandemic behind us literally months ago. And listen early on, when they started talking about hydroxychloroquine, I was concerned about, if we started providing those prophylaxis for everybody, we may not have had enough. And so I understand initially say, well, hold on here. We need to make sure that the people that are using this safely for rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, that they need to be able to get their doses as well. So my first concern about hydroxychloroquine is if it works, if it works, can we produce enough? And so I was kind of going down that avenue. I was talking to the producers of it. They were telling me about all the studies that were gonna be coming out in May. And then when I started following up with them it May, saying, well, where are your studies? Where are you studies? Radio silence. And I can’t explain what was happening. I just, to this day, I do not know. I suspect things. It’s one of the things I’m gonna continue to investigate, but until I actually have some hardy information, I’m not gonna speculate. But it just made no sense whatsoever, that we have just almost a total blackout, that you vilify doctors as you said, that they had the courage to go and actually treat COVID patients. Expose themselves to it. Dr. McCullough got COVID. He enrolled himself in a trial. And so, he took the cocktails himself. He took hydroxychloroquine he took ivermectin and he got well. A lot of people have, and it’s gotten so bad though Bobby. I’m reading reports, cause I get all this information. I’m reading reports where families are begging their doctors, that they poisoned the wells so much on this early treatment. They’re begging their doctors to give their loved ones ivermectin hydroxychloroquine, and the doctors are refusing. And of course overruling doctors. I just had a report where a hospital finally, an 81 year old father, husband, was on a ventilator. They gave him one dose of ivermectin, which allowed him to get off the ventilator. And then they wouldn’t give him any more. The family had to take the hospital to court, to prescribe a generic drug, that every doctor has the right to strike off label. They the court four days later, they finally got him on dosage. And apparently the patient is doing quite well now. He’s stable. His family still can’t see him in hospital, but it took a court order to make doctors utilize their awfully prescription rights. This does not need FDA approval. These drugs are generic. Doctors have awfully prescription rights. It’s there. That’s how they practice medicine. That’s how we practiced medicine. That’s how we’ve advanced medicine. Hydroxychloroquine that’s approved as an anti-malarial drug. It’s not FDA I don’t believe it’s FDA approved, through either rheumatoid arthritis or lupus. It’s been used that is an off-label drug. That’s how we advanced medicine. Like doctors practicing medicine but, our healthcare is used to not allow doctors. They’ve discouraged doctors. They punished doctors, for practicing medicine during this pandemic. It makes no sense whatsoever.

– Yeah, I mean, another thing that makes us Joe Biden hired Tony Fauci to continue to manage this pandemic, when his record on the pandemic is absolutely cataclysmic. We had in our country, one of the worst body counts of any country in the world. We have 1600 per million people dying. There are Norway has one 100. We have a hundred times the death rate of Norway. We have 79% rate as and Germany. I think we have six times or 10 times death rate in Japan. Japan has a much older population than we do, but they use early intervention. We have thousand times the death rate of most African countries. And what are the African countries have? Have they have a much younger population, true. They spend a lot of time in the sunlight, but we have, more than 1600 times the death rate in countries like Tanzania, like Vietnam, et cetera. Those countries have all used ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine for malaria control. Pakistan, India, have a tiny fraction of COVID fatalities per population that we have. And, you know, it’s bizarre. Tony Fauci has failed upward could sit with somebody throughout his career. In 1984, when he came to work for the National Institute for Infectious and Allergic Disease, the chronic disease rate which he’s in charge of keeping down, was 12% and it’s 54%. We have sickest children in the world. We have the sickest population in American history. Of all the industrial nations, we have the worst health outcomes. We have a highest drug consumption rate in the world. We pay the highest rates for drugs, and our drugs are the third biggest killer. And he has taken his agency, which is meant to prevent chronic disease and allergic disease, and he has turned it into an incubator for the pharmaceutical industry. So he is metric for measuring success is, how many vaccines he gets. How many drugs he develops. And you will never hear him say, how much healthy America, healthier Americans are , because of his work. And he get his track record on this pandemic has been worse probably you can imagine. It’s just incredible to me that people don’t see that.

– Yeah, it’s certainly not a record of success, not by a long shot. And what concerns me in addition is the censorship. Just how close minded the media, the social media, people in the healthcare agencies abandon, so, why? I cannot explain that. One possible explanation would be and these are facts is, the treatment with either, hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin in a multi-drug approach where you use vitamins, vitamin D and vitamin C and zinc, and that type thing. It costs definitely under $50 per treatment. Remdesivir, which, they actually altered the outcome of the study, because it wasn’t reducing deaths, but it was reducing hospitalization stay by a couple of days. It doesn’t reduce death. There’s no proof on that. But that costs over $3,000 a dose and Remdesivir does result in liver toxicity. So a lot of people that are treated with it, can’t go through the full course. But that’s the drug that people are pushing, as opposed to generic drugs that are less than $50 for treatment. Again, it just makes no sense why there has been this vilification, and just completely put your head in the sand about these generic drugs.

– And Remdesivir that is Tony Fauci’s bad drug, that he incubated for Gilead. And then he was the one who ran the study. And I had to alter the protocol twice during the study, in order to make it look like it was a success. But then the WHO came, with a much bigger study, and said Remdesivir does not even reduce hospital’s days. That’s what he said. And he’s study is just a lie. It has no benefits. And yet, that is standard of care. That is what they’re giving people in this country. And it’s the only thing that doctors have the green light to give you. As you do say, the doctors kinda go off label and against recommendations to get or to give you back and give you hydroxychloroquine. The thing that we should have done in this pandemic from the onset, is tell us what infection vitality rate is. Or seasonal flu. And let’s try to get below that. And then we don’t have to have any lock downs. We don’t have to graduate– and get economy. And why, they crashed our economy, they destroyed the middle class, they’ve obliterated the new deal, they just quite all these American values, our constitution. And there was no accounting. Nobody ever said, we’re going to lose more lives from COVID than we are from a lockdown. Or maybe the lockdown is actually gonna kill more people than COVID, over the longterm. I think it’s

– And let’s face it. No one was gonna study the human toll of the shutdowns. Now, I’ve been saying this since day one. I thought Fauci challenged me when I made the true statement is that, we tragically lose 36,000 people per year on the highway, but we don’t shut the highways down, cause we need a transportation system. We also need the economy. And I don’t care what business organization you worked for. Every business, every organization is essential to someone. And I think you have to take a look at me. Did we succeed? I mean, was this a success? It doesn’t look that way. The average infection fatality rate of seasonal flu is probably about 0.13%. A really bad flu season is about 0.18, a good flu season is about 0.1. And we lose tens of thousands or tens of thousands of people per year with the flu. We just don’t keep a running tally on the TV set and scare the what out of people. The Oxford Center for Evidence-Based Medicine is to prevent predicting through their analysis really for months now, that the final infection fatality rate, which is different from the case fatality rate. The infection fatality rate of COVID is gonna be somewhere between 0.1 and 0.35. And again, I’m not downplaying COVID. I think we all recognize it is a serious virus, and it turns deadly on a certain percentage of the population. It’s not a disease I want to get, but I got it. Now, I tested positive for it twice, but I had no symptoms. And I think, again, I’m not a doctor, so I’m not but my own theory from what I’ve read and what people told me is, I was probably exposed to some of the type of coronavirus. So I had T-cell immunity. 45% of the population, I’ve heard some experts say, enter this pandemic with T-cell immunity. Which is why he probably had about 40 to 50% people being asymptomatic. Again, I’m not a doctor. I’m not pretending to be one, but I obviously have read an awful lot. I’ve talked to an awful lot of medical experts. And all I was trying to do in my hearings was just provide that type of information to people. I don’t understand why information is now viewed as dangerous. It was as Louis Brandeis in 1927 court decision, talking about falsehoods and other things that could be harmful to society. He said, well, the remedy here is not to limit speech, not to enforce silence. It’s more speech. The remedy is more speech, not enforced silence. To me, that’s what I’ve been trying to do here is, I’ve been trying to provide more speech expert testimony in a committee where we actually have people sworn in and they have to testify under penalty of perjury. And yet again, the New York Times labeled those doctors, who risked their lives, one of them caught COVID, called them, “Snake Oil Salesman”. I mean it’s shameful.

– Government does not tear out a man. It’s not gonna stop him from telling a lie. Either like tear downs is I’m telling the truth. And as you say that the remedies for, if there is really misinformation, let’s not shut it down. Let’s give good information and let’s have a public debate, the free flow of information, and then let’s let ideas, try them from the market, in the marketplace of ideas and debate and go through

– Yeah particularly in the midst of pandemic, which is an emergency situation, where so much is unknown. Again, initially it was all about ventilators. While we found out is that the success rate of ventilators was quite low. So that didn’t look like very good treatment. But yet, yeah, we, did the war powers act, and we produced a bunch of ventilators. I’m not criticizing that. It’s just what we tried. We were gonna throw the kitchen sink at this thing. We should have allowed doctors to practice medicine, to try all kinds of things, using their best judgment. And that’s where, Pierre Kory, in his critical care group, they came up to corticosteroids. And that saved people’s lives. It allowed us to do late treatment in hospital without putting people on ventilators. They’re saving lives. Turning people over on their stomachs, allowed them to breathe. There’s all kinds of things that doctors practicing medicine came up with quite early on, but what was forbidden by the health agencies, by the experts was really treatment. And it never made any sense. It does not make sense to this day.

– Did you see the study that compared Minnesota to Wisconsin. You have ties to both of those states. One of the had, I think Minnesota, a very, very strong blocked out, whereas Wisconsin was much more lenient. I don’t know if you’ve seen. It’s a Canadian study. And it compares Wisconsin and Minnesota, to very similar states and have very, very different policies. And then, it compares Florida to California. But check out our similar states that had completely antithetical policy. And in both of those studies, the States with the least restrictive lock downs and masking mandates, and much better records in protecting human life. And in fact, Florida, California which had much more stringent lockdown, at 33% rate of death by age population than Florida, which has a much larger elderly population. And Wisconsin had a much better record by almost all metrics than Minnesota. And there’s a beer views eye that came out last week. Very, very interesting.

– I’ve been getting data the entire time and all the state data I’ve been comparing it, looking at overall fatality rates based on population, that type of thing. It’s hard to draw absolute conclusions to all these things. But now I remember early in the pandemic, the epidemiologist, Fauci was saying, we’re not gonna prevent people from getting this disease, until we have a vaccine developed, but it’s about flattening the curve. So we don’t overwhelm our healthcare systems. Now we came close to overwhelming the healthcare systems in New York, and I think maybe down in new Orleans. But generally, you know, we stressed our hospitals. I know stats is the biggest problem in our hospitals wasn’t overpopulating, it’s we couldn’t get staff. Because of all the shutdowns and the fact that people weren’t coming into work, because they had to take care of the kids, because schools were shut down. So it was mainly a staffing issue in Wisconsin, but for a while there, for a number of weeks, we were leading the nation to new cases. We really had a peak in probably November, December. It was pretty frightening up close 8,000 new cases per year, and deaths were up. Again I do not downplay this disease, but I think we have to have the modesty and humility to realize that there’s a lot we didn’t know. And I think we also had to really and again, I was asked to write a counterpoint in the USA today, ’cause they’re gonna write an op-ed about shutting the economy down, without even being able to read their op-ed. I have to write a 300-word counter op-ed. And I made the argument, that we had to keep the economy open, because we had to take into account the human toll, the economic devastation. And that’s something I don’t think, and I don’t fault it. I asked him one time in a conference call, are you taking into account the human toll, the economic devastation? His answers was basically, that’s not my department. Again, I view that as a pretty callous response. I think when you are in charge of public policy, you have to take a look at the entire costs of what it is you are recommending. And I know Fauci didn’t do that. I don’t think he’s healthcare agencies did. I think the way we’ve handled COVID has been basically insane, but I’ve also been pretty reluctant to criticize elected officials, who had to make really tough decisions particularly early, on with very limited information. I really do sympathize with them. I wouldn’t wanna be President Trump. I wouldn’t wanna be a governor back then. People had to make really tough decisions. So I don’t wanna be I really don’t wanna be critical of it. But now many months later, I think, those same elected officials have to have the modesty and humility to take a look at the science team with the evidence and go, well, maybe we were wrong here. We probably should have shifted our policies. We shouldn’t dig our heels in into decisions that we made that maybe didn’t turn out too well. They have to look at the evidence, as you would just talk to me about state by state. What worked, what didn’t?

– What do you think about Governor DeSantis, and what he’s done in Florida?

– Well, yeah, again, I think you took a pretty common sense approach. You take the comparison there is, I think to New York. And again, New York was hit hard. And it seems like there are different variants that are more aggressive, more lethal. Again, I’m not a doctor, but it just seems that way. New York was hit hard. But what their governor did, was force nursing homes to take COVID patients. I mean, I’m sorry. That made no sense whatsoever. The sadness didn’t allow that again, the approach we should have taken generally was isolate the sick, okay? Quarantine them, yes, that made sense. Protect the vulnerable and then have the rest of us carry on with our lives as safely and responsibly as possible. Let’s face it, we’ve all become germaphobes. I think that was certainly appropriate. I think we’ll continue to be germaphobes. I hope at some point in time, we bet get back to normal life and realize, life is a risk. You are gonna get there are infections you’re gonna get. You can’t, you can’t put yourself in a bubble,. But that’s the approach you should have taken. But what Cuomo did versus what DeSantis did I think the results were pretty obvious. Santis did the right thing. And again, these are tough decisions. There was nothing perfect. People caught COVID, people die. But I think DeSantis did a far better job at protecting the vulnerable.

– Senator Johnson thank you so much for joining me and thank you for fighting for American house and democracy. And I hope you will continue to make that battle.

– Well, thank you for having me on.

– Hey, thank you very much. Anything else that we should touch on?

– No, I think we’ve really covered the subject here again. I just wanna emphasize, we have to be open-minded. We can’t be censoring information. We have to be seeking the truths. And if there’s falsehoods and fallacies out there again as Brandeis said the remedy is more speech not enforced silence. So I’m highly concerned about what’s happening in medicine. I’m highly concerned about what’s happening in our social media concerned about our culture. We do need to heal. We do need to unify, but that’s respecting one another and listening to differing opinions, not being afraid of information. You know, universities should be places where there’s a diversity of thought. You know, there shouldn’t be censorship in universities. There should be open discussion. Our young people should be exposed to the full spectrum of ideas, the full spectrum of political ideology. That’s not happening today. That this is very dangerous. This is a very dark road we’re going down in this country. I hope we, I hope we open up. I hope we’d come more respectful of each other more respectful of each other’s ideas and stop censoring. This is not good for America. This is very dangerous. I’m highly concerned.

– Thank you very much .

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