Johnson uses God in anti-vaccine talk
Republican senator continues efforts to create doubt
With COVID-19 infections hitting records and threatening to overwhelm hospitals in Wisconsin, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson hasn’t stopped his push to discredit mass vaccinations.
In fact, the Oshkosh Republican has all but doubled down in the new year.
In one interview with Vicki McKenna, of WISN-AM, Johnson, who tested positive for COVID-19 in October 2020 and has not been vaccinated, said, “Why do we think that we can create something better than God in terms of combating disease? Why do we assume that the body’s natural immune system isn’t the marvel that it really is?”
He added: “There are certain things we have to do, but we have just made so many assumptions, and it’s all pointed toward everybody getting a vaccine.” Johnson’s critics pounced.
Late night host Stephen Colbert took Johnson to task in a monologue: “OK, yes, I get it: God created our immune systems. But he also created Ron Johnson, so he has been known to shank it.”
And one of Johnson’s Democratic rivals, Outagamie County Executive Tom Nelson, weighed in, tweeting, “Pastor’s son here. Let me tell you — this is a bad take. Vaccines save lives. They’re the best tool we have to protect ourselves and our communities. Some might even say getting vaccinated is the Christian way. And by some people, I mean the Pope.”
Pope Francis has urged people to get the COVID-19 vaccine. He also said “humanity has a history of friendship with vaccines.”
Despite the pushback, Johnson continued to play to his base and press on with a series of interviews on the subject through the week. Johnson’s most provocative statement occurred in an interview with Fox Business News when he appeared to tie mass vaccinations to the COVID-19 variants.
Johnson told Fox Business News: “Where do the variants come from? These are variants that are evading the vaccine. Could the mass vaccination into the pandemic, could that be driving these variants? I don’t know.”
Patrick Remington, a former epidemiologist for the CDC and director of the preventive medicine residency program at the UW-Madison, disputes Johnson’s assertions on COVID-19, especially on vaccines.
“I think the danger is that many of the things that Ron Johnson says begin with a kernel of truth. But what happens is by the time they come out publicly, they are so distorted, that they are bad for public health,” he said.
Remington said “variants can emerge in highly vaccinated populations. We know that. That’s just basic biology. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the real problem of variants, which happen in populations that have low rates of immunity. That transmission is rampant, that viruses are replicating billions and billions of times. Those are the places with a real dangerous variants that can emerge.”
Remington said the next variant may not only be more contagious, but deadlier as well. “So we need to do everything we can globally to stop transmission,” he said. “And the single most important thing to do that is mass vaccination.”
Ben Weston, Milwaukee County’s chief health policy adviser, also insisted that mass vaccination is necessary to stem the pandemic.
“Variants of the virus occur through mutations that take place when the virus replicates,” Weston said in a statement. “Virus replication takes place through infection and transmission. The vaccine decreases infection and transmission. The more we can vaccinate globally, the fewer variants we will see.”
Ajay Sethi, associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explained that “viruses like SARS-CoV-2 evolve as they replicate in a person with infection and as they spread from one person to the next. When that evolutionary process yields a strain that has a genetic makeup which is very different from the original virus, it is considered a ‘variant.’ ”
He added that “a virus is a ‘variant of concern’ if it has the potential to threaten the pandemic response in some way. It may be more infectious than other variants, cause more severe illness, not be detectable by current tests, less affected by current treatments, partially escape immunity provided by current vaccines, or a combination of these.”