According to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), the last thing we need in the United States to control spread of the latest deadly COVID-19 variant is a mandate that every American be vaccinated, because such measures are only necessary if a disease is “incredibly deadly.”
During an appearance on Fox News Friday evening, Johnson was asked by host Brian Kilmeade:
“Could you ever get behind a vaccine mandate for everybody?”
Johnson responded:
“No, not unless there’s some incredibly deadly disease. I mean, much higher infection-fatality rates than we have with COVID.
“We don’t know the final infection-fatality rate but right now it’s looking like it’s not going to be much more than double a bad season of flu.”
Question: Could you ever get behind a vaccine mandate for everybody?
Ron Johnson: No, not unless there’s some incredibly deadly disease pic.twitter.com/dySLgROgJK— Acyn (@Acyn) July 31, 2021
Perhaps realizing he’d just made a complete fool of himself, Johnson then added:
“I’m not downplaying this. We’ve had 600,000 excess deaths over the last year.
“But you know one thing we didn’t do, Brian, and this was a huge failing on the part of our health agencies, is we didn’t explore and research, early treatment with the cheap, repurposed generic drugs.”
First of all, Johnson is in serious need of a rigorous fact check, which was provided by Newsweek:
“According to data from Johns Hopkins University, the fatality rate from COVID-19 in the U.S. is 186.49 per 100,000 population. The CDC website notes that in 2019, the fatality rate from influenza was 1.8 per 100,000 population, while the fatality rate from influenza and pneumonia was 15.2 per 100,000.
“Estimated deaths from influenza during the flu season from October 1, 2019 to April 4, 2020 were between 24,000 and 62,000. The number of flu illnesses for that period are estimated at between 39 million and 56 million.
“An article from Johns Hopkins Medicine most recently updated on July 29 also noted that the mortality rate from COVID ‘is thought to be substantially higher (possibly 10 times or more) than that of most strains of the flu.'”
Johnson’s absurd remarks also drew fire on social media, where many wondered why he felt the need to spread more lies about the danger of COVID:
Just to clarify, Ron Johnson is actually a U.S. senator??
— DQ (@DaphneQuonset) July 31, 2021
Maybe the families of some of the over 600,000 dead American COVID victims can show up at Ron’s door & have him explain what it would take for a disease to be considered “incredibly deadly”.
— Serenity Now! (@Cpo10za) July 31, 2021
Has he had a severe head injury ?
— No , just Dan (@dluxmaroon) July 31, 2021
Question: Could you ever get behind a vaccine mandate for everybody?
Ron Johnson: No, not unless there’s some incredibly deadly disease pic.twitter.com/dySLgROgJK— Acyn (@Acyn) July 31, 2021
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