EXCLUSIVE — Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said the Biden administration's quiet ending of the COVID-19 national emergency is due to its unwillingness to admit that its pandemic policies were wrong.
"They can't afford to admit it because the body count is way too high," he told the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview.
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The Wisconsin senator said, "They'll never admit they were wrong in how they handled COVID. I don't see how anybody can take a look at how the federal government — really, over the course of two administrations — how they handled COVID, and say it was anything but a complete and miserable failure."
Last month, President Joe Biden signed a bill ending the COVID-19 national emergency roughly three years after it began.
Then, in a May 1 press release, the White House announced that COVID-19 vaccine requirements for federal employees and contractors would end on May 11.
The administration has been less than responsive to questions on the end of the yearslong emergency and other pandemic-era policies since their announcements.
When Washington Examiner White House Reporter Haisten Willis asked press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre last week, "Do you guys plan to rehire anyone who was fired or voluntarily resigned under that policy? Would they get any sort of compensation, back pay, or anything like that?" she didn't have an answer.
According to Jean-Pierre, she didn't have "anything new to share on that at this time."
Johnson said that "early on, I think its actions could be defended just from the standpoint, we didn't know. We didn't know enough about the virus. I mean, nobody understood how deadly it might be, how transmissible [it] might be. We weren't sure of different drugs that could provide early treatment."
But, according to the senator, there's no excuse for the policies that came after doctors began developing treatment protocols. For what happened, he blames the "COVID cartel."
"We're talking about the Biden administration, primarily, the federal health agencies, big pharma—who have captured those federal health agencies, [and] the mainstream legacy media—who've also been captured by big pharma by their investment in billions of dollars of advertising posts to big tech [and] social media giants. That's the COVID cartel," he explained.
Johnson claimed that "collectively, they sabotaged early treatment to push the vaccines on an unsuspecting and uninformed public. They denied vaccine injuries were real and severe, some resulting in death."
"All of this has been covered up, and they're going to continue to cover it up, and that's what we're seeing play out right now," he explained. "They quietly end the emergency, and they just try and ignore all the damage."
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The Wisconsin senator said the administration is unwilling to acknowledge "the incalculable human toll," the "economic devastation caused by the shutdowns," and vaccine mandates and vaccine injuries.
Asked for his response to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky's recent resignation, he called it "one of the rats fleeing the ship," adding that "she cannot justify her actions."