WASHINGTON – On Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) spoke at the ‘Weaponization of U.S. Government’ Symposium hosted by the Heritage Foundation. Interviewed by Children’s Health Defense President Mary Holland, the senator gave an account of the federal government's weaponization during COVID and stressed the importance of Congressional oversight.

Watch Sen. Johnson’s full remarks here.

On the weaponization of government during the COVID pandemic

“I'm passionate about this, because I've been living with this insanity since early 2020 when… I made the comment, ‘we tragically lose tens of thousands of people on the highway, but we don't shut down our highway system. We can't afford to shut down the American economy.’ So Fauci from the podium said, ‘oh that’s way out there.’ No, it was a good analogy, but again, nothing we did during COVID made sense whatsoever. It was all insane… 

“All the things we knew were just thrown out because our entire response was focused on Operation Warp Speed and the development of a vaccine. And we've gone vaccine crazy in this country for one primary reason: drug manufacturers have no liability for any problems of the vaccine. So that's why our childhood vaccine schedule has gone from about three vaccines that I got when I was growing up, to over 70 doses, injected in, multiple doses at the same time… Well, gee, what could go wrong?

“… COVID should have opened our eyes to all kinds of things. The censorship, the weaponization of government, the fact that the pharmaceutical companies are pushing more and more drugs, irregardless of the adverse events, and nobody really checks up on those.”

On President Eisenhower’s farewell address warning

“Eisenhower actually warned us about four things. The military industrial complex — which we have not taken his warning as seriously as we should have. His second warning was about public finance of scientific research, and this relates to COVID. He said that if you allow the public to fund this, you're going to have scientists not pursuing science, you’re going to have them pursuing grants, and their science is then going to be corrupted by that, and we’d end up with a scientific and technological elite that's going to drive public policy. That's what we saw during COVID. His third warning was one that we're completely ignoring, which is we shouldn't be plundering our children's future. And the fourth one, he didn't spend much time on it, but it might be the most important one also, as it relates to COVID is, we cannot allow global society to descend into a state of dreadful fear and hate. That's what drives all this — scare the you know what out of the population, whether it's about climate change, whether it's about foreign adversaries…”

On the need for Congress to take oversight seriously

“You know, I'm right now Ranking Member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the Senate. That should be the Senate's premier oversight investigatory body. I got my funding cut when I became Ranking Member. Do you how many staff members we have to do oversight over millions of government employees? We've got five. That's how unserious Congress is about oversight, because they really don't want anybody looking into how they misspent taxpayer money.” 

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