Ron Johnson: Dumb Senator And Snake Oil Salesman

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Sen.Ron Johnson was speaking at a Heritage Foundation event about one of his favorite subjects – junk science and quack medicine. RoJo was ranting about how everything involving COVID was corrupt and that Big Pharma was quashing reports that supported hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin in order to get quick approval for their evil vaccine that kept millions of people alive, when he said this doozy (emphasis mine):

The fact that they sabotage early treatment, I mean, truthfully, I was working with Novartis. They were all excited about trials on hydroxychloroquine. That just ended in my conversations, is just, you know, radio silence after the end of April. It’s like somebody turned a switch going, we’re not looking at early treatment. You know, then they went and sabotage, you know, ivermectin. You know, you’re not a horse. I mean, why did they do it? Well, if you had an effective therapy, you can’t get an emergency use authorization on a vaccine. Okay. Again, this was, this was corrupt. This was sinister and hundreds of thousands of people, you know, doctors have said this. I’m not a doctor, probably lost their lives lacking early treatment. So people need to understand that that’s what we need to hold people accountable to.

Someone needs to follow RoJo around so that when he says something stupid like this that even with Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, over a million Americans died.

But what makes this all the more egregious is that RoJo is saying this crap even after the study that supposedly supported hydroxychloroquine was thoroughly debunked and retracted on scientific and ethical grounds:

But scientists immediately raised concerns about the paper, noting the sample size of only 36 patients and the unusually short peer-review time: The paper was submitted on 16 March 2020 and published 4 days later. On 24 March, scientific integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik noted on her blog that six patients who were treated with hydroxychloroquine had been dropped from the study—one of whom had died, and three of whom had transferred to intensive care—which potentially skewed the results in the drug’s favor. Larger, more rigorous trials carried out later in 2020 showed hydroxychloroquine did not benefit COVID-19 patients.

[…]

The retraction notice states Elsevier and the International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, which co-own the journal, decided to retract the paper because of ethical issues, “as well as concerns raised by three of the authors themselves regarding the article’s methodology and conclusion.”

For the next four years, at least, we would be better off taking everything the Republicans say with a grain of salt and lots and lots of Vitamin C. And be ready to wear a facemask again, or still. It won’t hurt.

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