Sen. Ron Johnson: The Covid report the media — and the government — don’t want you to hear

By SEN. RON JOHNSON

June 22, 2026 – On April 29, 2026, as Chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, I held a hearing and released a report titled “Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals.” There has not been a bigger government scandal during my lifetime, and yet even now that we have documented proof of corruption, most of the legacy media refuses to report on it.

My report details how in March 2021, Peter Marks — director of the FDA center that approves vaccines and is responsible for safety surveillance (CBER) — was briefed that the algorithm they were using to analyze the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) would mask or hide COVID-19 vaccine adverse event safety signals. Twenty-six days later, using an updated algorithm, senior FDA officials were shown 25 safety signals, including sudden cardiac death, pulmonary infarction, cerebral artery occlusion, basal ganglia stroke, agonal rhythm, and Bell’s palsy.

For the next three months, they received updates showing more serious safety signals. Instead of warning or informing the public, they ordered the data analyst to “cease and desist” and then lied to the American public that “they weren’t seeing safety signals” and that any adverse events were “rare and mild.” The whole point of using sophisticated algorithms to analyze VAERS is to find needles in the haystack — nonobvious potential harms that doctors and patients should be alerted to.

With the COVID-19 injections, we didn’t need sophisticated algorithms. The sheer volume of adverse event reports overwhelming VAERS was enough to trigger my oversight efforts. We faced impenetrable stonewalling until Secretary Kennedy’s commitment to radical transparency provided my Subcommittee with 11 million pages of documents. The documents make clear that FDA and CDC officials did not use an “err on the side of caution” standard to alert the public. Rather, they insisted on definitive proof of causation — a standard they knew would never be met.

They were far more concerned about not causing vaccine hesitancy than they were about informing the public of adverse events. They wanted to ensure that the injections would receive full licensure approval so that President Biden could mandate them to the military and millions of civilians, including healthy college students.

Perhaps the most egregious coercion involved healthy children who had virtually zero chance of serious harm from COVID-19. That coercion was based on another false claim that the injections would stop transmission. Some children were killed and others have been permanently disabled from the COVID-19 injections. Imagine being the parent who believed all the lies they were told and decided to have their now deceased or injured child injected.

Also in March 2021, Dr. Avindra Nath, clinical director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), began leading a team of clinical researchers who were diagnosing and treating individuals with serious COVID-19 injection injuries. Twenty-three study participants were diagnosed and treated, then instructed to “not talk about the study” until the NIH could release its findings and conclusions. Dr. Nath maintained that early recognition and intervention were crucial for effective treatment. Yet no guidance was provided to physicians — one participant remarked that the NIH scientists had “taken the data and left us hanging.”

Adding insult to injury, in April 2021 the CDC published a report stating that similar adverse events were “anxiety” — not a problem with the shots. It was not until study participants began speaking publicly in 2022 that the NIH quietly posted its study on a preprint server that virtually no one read, leaving medical teams nationwide in the dark and the injection-injured left untreated.

We will never know the full extent of the harms (or the benefits) of the COVID-19 injections. But we do know that federal health officials were aware that serious harm was being done within months of them granting Emergency Use Authorization. We also know that those same officials turned a blind eye toward the safety signals that were screaming at them, but they refused to warn the public. The public pays federal health officials to evaluate drugs for safety and efficacy, and we have the right to be informed.

How many deaths and injuries could have been avoided had federal health officials simply done the job we paid them to do?

Currently, VAERS shows 1,676,100 cumulative worldwide adverse events and 39,099 deaths associated with the COVID-19 injection, with 9,332 (24%) of the deaths occurring within 2 days of injection. Most of these tragic adverse events occurred well after federal health officials should have informed the public about the risks they knew existed. Instead, they hid or downplayed those risks. As a result, millions were harmed after being denied their right to fully informed consent.

That’s why I consider this to be the biggest government scandal in my lifetime, and one that is crying out for full media attention and coverage.

The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA TODAY, and Fox Digital have all declined or ignored requests to publish this op-ed.

NBC, ABC, PBS, CNN, and MSNow have all refused to cover my report.

Read the full report here.

Sen. Ron Johnson serves in the US Senate for Wisconsin.