Wisconsin’s wrongheaded ( some say dumb), Senator Ron Johnson recently published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled ” Youtube Cancels the US Senate”. RoJo is furious that Youtube took down two videos from an early December 2020 Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing ( RoJo chairs the committee) during which testimony was given by Dr. Pierre Kory of the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) , exhorting the benefits of ivermectin in preventing and treating Covid-19. Ivermectin has not been studied via a large randomized controlled trial, which is the issue at the heart of the matter, not government censorship of alternative medical opinions which is what RoJo would like us all to believe. You won’t get an understanding of the issue reading RoJo’s op-ed so I’ll provide a resource here and you can make up your mind.
Medpage Today has an excellent piece explaining who’s involved and the issues at stake. It explores every angle in-depth and I highly recommend it. If you’re a staffer for Ron Johnson and you happened to have stumbled onto the wrong blog and are reading this, I highly recommend you have your boss read it too.
The upshot, in my view, is that a U.S. Senator should not be involved in shilling for unproven Covid-19 treatments, even if he or she is an informed educated individual, which Johnson’s op-ed reveals he is not. What should someone in Ron Johnson’s position be shilling for? That’s an easy question to answer.
We have a Covid-19 vaccine that has been subjected to a large, randomized controlled trial, the Moderna vaccine, which has a 94% efficacy rate. And as the Ralph Nader founded advocacy organization Public Citizen stated last November, the Moderna vaccine is the people’s vaccine. According to them the American taxpayer funded 100% of the vaccine’s development. We also paid Moderna 1.5 billion dollars to secure doses in advance.
Moreover, Social Security Works executive director Alex Lawson writes that the Biden administration has the authority to license the ” Moderna”, aka the” public” vaccine to generic manufacturers beyond Moderna so that we can significantly ramp up production for use in the United States and globally. And Biden can invoke the Defense Production Act to compel manufacturers to ramp it up. This strikes me as the single best strategy I’ve read to address this pandemic nationally and worldwide. This is a global crisis that needs a global solution. As Paul Wellstone used to say ” we all do better when we all do better”.
So, Senator Johnson, if you’re interested in using your influence to help, stop peddling unproven treatments and start pushing for proven, practical solutions. Call on President Biden to license the Moderna vaccine to generic manufacturers. Urge him to invoke the Defense Production Act to do so.
You could even publish another op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Maybe this time you’d make some sense.
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