Oh ye of little faith. Sen. Ron “just-asking-questions” Johnson (R-WI) is outraged that these high-and-mighty scientists think they can just go around making something that prevents deadly sickness instead of just leaving it to the Almighty.
During an interview with local radio host Vicki McKenna on Monday, RonJohn reiterated some of the same anti-vaxxer rhetoric he’s been not-so-subtly adopting for months now, but this time he brought God into the mix.
While seemingly suggesting he has no idea how asymptomatic COVID-19 cases work, the Wisconsin senator also went after the science community, questioning the basis for vaccine development and asking why experts “assume that our natural immunity is going to be awful” or “non-existent.”
“Why do we assume that the body’s natural immune system isn’t the marvel that it really is?” he asked. He then moved into more chaotic realms.
“Why do we think that we can create something better than God in terms of combating disease?” the GOP senator fumed. “There are certain things we have to do, but we have made just so many assumptions and it’s all pointed toward everybody getting a vaccine.”
The problem with Johnson’s logic is obvious. It doesn’t account for people who aren’t him. COVID is, of course, a lethal virus, most threatening to the most vulnerable among us — cancer patients, the elderly, the immunocompromised, anyone with an underlying condition.
Johnson’s been spewing conspiracy theories and pseudoscience about the vaccine for some time, mostly centered around his clearly ongoing belief that he doesn’t need to get vaccinated because he already had COVID.
Earlier this year he suggested the shot wasn’t safe because it hadn’t yet been fully approved by the FDA. (That line of reasoning no longer works — it now has full approval.) He’s also firmly in the camp of folks who think the federal government’s inoculation push is all part of some master plan to control Americans’ lives, guised as a public health effort. He was one of the early voices in support of, essentially, letting the virus run rampant across the country in order to develop herd immunity — which was then considered a dangerous approach to public health when so many people were dying from the disease.
