(The Daily Signal) — Two weeks ago, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., got an email from a recently married man who learned his 36-year-old wife couldn’t have children shortly after she got her second COVID-19 shot.
“She chose career, got the baby/family bug, and now she can’t have children,” the husband said in the email, which Johnson read aloud Monday at the opening of a Capitol Hill forum on government officials’ transparency about COVID-19.
“She cries, all the time,” the husband’s email said. “Apologizes to me like it’s her fault. Someone needs to make them pay. And we need safeguards so this doesn’t happen again.”
Johnson’s forum — titled “Federal Health Agencies and the COVID Cartel: What Are They Hiding?” and held in the Senate Russell Office Building — featured a roundtable discussion including 22 testimonials from scientists, medical doctors, former government officials, and journalists about what they said were problems with the vaccines and government efforts to censor the dangers.
The cover-ups involving both the origins of COVID-19 in China and adverse effects of the vaccines likely are linked to protecting the bioweapons industry, contended Dr. Harvey Risch, professor emeritus of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine.
After arguing otherwise for years, federal agencies today mostly contend that the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. Risch went further, saying that he believes that the new coronavirus that caused COVID-19 resulted from research on a bioweapon — funded in part through National Institutes of Health grants to the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.
“This work is what I consider to be the fruit of our bioweapons industry,” Risch said during the roundtable discussion.
He explained that a 1975 bioweapons treaty included a loophole allowing small quantities of bioweapons to be developed in order to research the effectiveness of vaccines. This loophole was likely exploited, he said.
“Many billions of dollars spent on the bioweapons industry over the past decades for all this work, [and] where are the successful commercial vaccines to show for it?” Risch asked.
He added: “The cover-up and forced vaccinations of the entire planet were orchestrated to protect the integrity of the bioweapons industry.”
Federal public health officials from the National Institutes of Health and one of its subagencies, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have denied the use of “gain of function” research, a term that describes a risky process of making a pathogen more dangerous or contagious for the purpose of studying a response. However, lawmakers and experts have accused government agencies of splitting hairs on the definition.
Journalist Lara Logan, formerly of the CBS News program “60 Minutes” and now with Fox Nation among other media outlets, said the news media willfully has promoted narratives favored by the powerful in both government and the corporate world.
“These are the worst of times for the media in this country. We live in an age of informational warfare,” Logan said.
She said companies, institutions, and journalism schools have failed the country.
“For too long, we’ve allowed nonprofit organizations [to] masquerade as nonpartisan media watchdogs, when in fact they are highly paid political propagandists and assassins whose entire reason for being is to crush anyone who stands in their way,” Logan said.
Logan said State Department agencies fund nongovernmental organizations abroad that silence dissent from official narratives and largely do the same in the United States.
“These nonprofits that I’m talking about are a vast censorship network that includes government agencies. They use deception to mask their actions with lofty goals such as preventing the spread of misinformation, disinformation, hate speech,” she said, adding:
“They use phrases like ‘protecting democracy.’ And make no mistake, words matter. The media is collaborating with government agencies and operatives to censor and shape the information narrative to justify certain actions. For instance, when the president of the United States threatens the unvaccinated, saying ‘Our patience is wearing thin,’ and accuses them of putting communities at risk, his words are designed to justify hatred, censorship, and intimidation.”
On the question in the forum’s title, “What are they hiding?”, evolutionary biologist and podcaster Bret Weinstein answered: “They are hiding everything.”
“Every single institution dedicated to public truth-seeking is under simultaneous attack,” Weinstein said.
“Our research universities have huge sums of public money to reach preordained conclusions,” he added. “Professors teach only lessons consistent with what students pick up on TikTok. The New York Times and The Washington Post only report important stories after they have become common knowledge. Morticians must now raise alarms over patterns missed by medical examiners. … We have literally witnessed the Department of Homeland Security attempt to set up a truth ministry.”
Johnson and others talked about reports of problems with the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, a database maintained by two agencies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration.
In a statement last week to The Daily Signal, an FDA spokesperson argued that the VAERS system contains raw data and isn’t by itself conclusive.
“The VAERS website is transparent about the system’s limitations,” the FDA spokesperson said. “When any member of the public opens the website, the user must then acknowledge reading and understanding specific information that includes, among other important details, ‘VAERS data available to the public include only the initial report data to VAERS. Updated data which contains data from medical records and corrections reported during follow up are used by the government for analysis. However, for numerous reasons including data consistency, these amended data are not available to the public.’”
Johnson argued during his forum Monday that elite institutions damaged their credibility during the pandemic.
“I believe the growing corruption of science, scientific research, medical journals, federal health agencies, and, as a result, the practice of medicine, has been exposed in the failed response to the pandemic,” Johnson said. “To repair the damage that has been done, we must honestly and relentlessly pursue the truth.”
Fred Lucas
Fred Lucas is chief national affairs correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of "The Right Side of History" podcast. Lucas is also the author of "Abuse of Power: Inside The Three-Year Campaign to Impeach Donald Trump."
