Coronavirus

Floor Speech

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Mr. JOHNSON. Mr. President, last week, I came to the floor in support of Senator Scott's bill pushing back on what many of us consider the unconstitutional COVID vaccine mandates. I used my floor time to describe the lack of transparency of our healthcare Agencies by talking about the information that our healthcare Agencies, the media, and the news media are not providing the American public. I come to the floor today to expand a little bit on that information.

Now, last week, I presented this chart, which shows the daily number of new cases. Those are the blue lines. You actually have daily deaths--the tragic deaths--very thin red line. But you also have this line showing the percent of fully vaccinated Americans.

Now, I pointed to this chart because this is not what I would expect to see if we had 100 percent effective vaccines. Now, let me again state, I was a big supporter of Operation Warp Speed. I am not an anti- vaxxer. I have had every vaccine up to this one because I had COVID.

So I had hoped and prayed that the COVID vaccine would be 100 percent safe and 100 percent effective, but this chart is not what I would expect to have seen with a vaccine that was highly effective and what we all were hoping would happen once we had a high percentage of Americans vaccinated, together with those who already had COVID, like myself, with natural immunity.

You can see, prior to the vaccine even being able to take effect, as the first major surge of the pandemic was winding down, I would have expected to see a continued winding down, but that is not what we saw. We have seen this surge in Delta, and we have seen additional deaths, and the tragedy continues.

Now, back on September 9, President Biden said: This pandemic is of the unvaccinated.

And he also said: This is not about freedom or personal choice.

No, this is exactly about freedom and personal choice. President Biden also said in July of this year--on July 21, he said: If you are vaccinated, you are not going to be hospitalized. You are not going to be in the ICU unit. You are not going to die. You are not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.

Today, I received an email from a constituent in Wisconsin. I am going to read an excerpt. I am not going to identify the individual because he fears reprisals. He has seen what happens to people that tell the truth about COVID and COVID vaccines, so I will keep his name anonymous.

But let me quote from his email: Both my parents were fully vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine in the spring. Yet, in August, my mom became infected and then gave it to my dad. They became so sick that my sister, fully vaccinated with Moderna, moved in with them to care for them. She used PPEs and was careful, and she caught COVID too. Hence, my family, three of us, caught COVID while fully vaccinated. They spread it while they were fully vaccinated, from vaccinated to vaccinated. My mom and sister recovered. Dad died in a week at home after a 3-week stay in the local hospital.

Now, that is a tragedy. I wish what President Biden said would have been true, but it is not. That talks to the vaccine's efficacy.

Let's talk about vaccine safety. I have heard so often from who I refer to as the ``COVID gods''--the healthcare Agencies, the media, the news media--that vaccine adverse events are rare, and they are mild. Well, they are rare, and they are mild until they happen to you.

Here is a chart that compares the number of deaths reported on the VAERS system. Now, this is the CDC's own vaccine adverse event reporting system. And I charted this all the way back to 1990, at the beginning of the VAERS system, and I got deaths associated with the flu vaccine there in blue. You can barely see them. But the largest year, the peak year for the VAERS-reported deaths associated with the flu vaccine was--in 2010, there was 162 reported deaths.

Now, again, I understand that the VAERS does not prove causation. I have got that. But if you compare our experience since 1990 with the flu vaccine--by the way, it is generally about a third of the number of doses for an annual flu season versus what we have experienced with the COVID vaccine.

So you compare that very low level of deaths reported on VAERS to what we now experienced with COVID, for just this count here, and it is 15,737 worldwide for the 3 vaccines that have emergency use authorization in the United States. In total, it is 15,937 deaths reported on the VAERS system.

Now, again, I realize that does not prove causation, but I do need to point out that 5,272 of those deaths occurred on day zero, 1, or 2 following vaccination. Now, if I were in the CDC or FDA, those Agencies that in October of 2020 touted the VAERS report, their early warning safety surveillance systems--before the vaccines ever got the emergency use authorization--they were talking about how they were going to rely on these to provide the safety signals. I remember one member of the CDC saying: We are going to take adverse events so seriously that if somebody loses a couple of days work, lost work time because of an adverse event, we are going to get a CDC representative on the phone with that individual, and we are going to look into it.

That simply has not happened.

Now, one thing that the FDA has done is they have ridiculed some of the early treatment drugs. I don't have it on the chart here, but I just want to put things in perspective. So, now, again, 15,937 deaths in about 10 months with the COVID vaccine. Ivermectin, since 1996, over 25 years, has 379 total deaths. That is 15,937, COVID vaccine; Ivermectin, 379 in 25 years; Hydroxychloroquine, about 1,039 deaths over 25 years; Remdesivir, which appears to be the drug of choice for hospitalized COVID patients, 1,499 deaths. Again, that is information our Federal Agencies aren't providing the American public, but this is information people need to know.

Now, why am I giving you this information? Well, first of all, on social media, this is suppressed. This is being censored. People like me that would even broach the subject of VAERS have been attacked.

So I think it is important to come to the Senate floor so the American people understand what is happening. But the main point I am trying to make is, those individuals who believe in their own health autonomy, believe in their own personal freedom, many of whom have already been infected with COVID, are reading the science and believe, based on what they are reading, that their natural immunity is probably as, if not more, effective than the vaccinated immunity and have chosen not to get the vaccine. That is their right. You may not agree with that, but it is not your body. It is not your right to impose on someone else a mandate to take the vaccine or take away their job, take away their livelihood, and take away their healthcare.

By the way, I am not the only one that thinks this. President Biden, back on December 4, said: I don't think it should be mandatory. I wouldn't demand it be mandatory.

The Press Secretary said: The vaccine mandate is not the Federal Government's role.

And yet here we are, nurses being fired. What do you think that is going to do to our healthcare system? We already have a severe healthcare worker shortage. We are going to exacerbate that problem.

These mandates are unconstitutional, but they are going to be incredibly harmful for military readiness and for our healthcare system. They are also going to be incredibly corrosive to our society.

I have been inundated--even well before President Biden announced his ill-advised and unconstitutional mandate, I have been inundated with emails and letters and phone calls from people who are so concerned about being coerced, being forced to take a vaccine under duress. It has had an incredibly corrosive effect on our society.

But I want to quote from one particular letter. I got this letter from a nurse. She has a master's degree. She is also a professor of nursing. She is describing what happened inside a meeting of their faculty as they were deciding how to handle mandates in their nursing school.

She writes: Some of the biggest issues today are the conversations occurring behind closed doors. Our nursing department faculty got together to decide how to handle the nearly 50 percent of students that hadn't yet received their COVID-19 vaccination and faced being dismissed from their nursing program unless they complied. The students were referred to as ``ignorant,'' ``uneducated,'' ``killers.''

This name-calling, although deeply inappropriate, is becoming the cultural norm against the masses of those who decide that it is within their right to attack the personal choice of others.

But if I were a student or a parent of a student who heard that interaction that I am about to share with you, you would be beyond furious.

When it was determined by consensus of the faculty group that we were not going to allow any special accommodations--in other words, switching of clinical assignments or sites--to allow for the unvaccinated students to progress, and that will be the standard practice in all other nursing programs soon, one faculty member exclaimed to the group: ``Good luck finding a new career.''

And the group responded with laughter.

This nurse writes: Let that sink in for a moment. They laughed. They laughed at the thought of someone's dreams being crushed.

That's the effect these unconstitutional, coercive, freedom-robbing mandates are having on our society. There is no need for them.

As the previous email from my constituent that I received today proves, even if you have been fully vaccinated, you can catch COVID. You can transmit COVID. You can die from COVID. Now, it is a tragedy. I wish it weren't so, but it is true.

When are we going to start following the science? When are we going to reclaim the freedom that has been lost in this pandemic?

There has been enough harm done during the course of this pandemic. I am begging this body; I am begging the President, do no further harm.

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