Senate GOP Ramps Up Attacks On COVID Vaccines Amid FDA Push
Sen. Ron Johnson’s Wednesday hearing on myocarditis was an anti-vax spectacle.
This piece has been updated from its original email version.
On Wednesday, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs’ Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held a hearing titled “The Corruption of Science and Federal Health Agencies.”
While the headline perhaps suggested a critical investigation into the active dismantlement of public health institutions and scientific research by Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services, the subheadline – “How health officials downplayed and hid myocarditis and other adverse events associated with the COVID-19 vaccines” – gave the game away.
The timing of the event too was suggestive, coinciding with a larger push against COVID boosters by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The push came ahead of the next meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which crafts recommendations for the future use of vaccines.
On Tuesday, the FDA announced new plans to greatly curtail access to the jabs for Americans under the age of 65. The following day, the agency required Pfizer and Moderna to expand the warnings about potential risks to the heart on the labels of their mRNA vaccines—a reference to myocarditis, an extremely rare side effect that is usually self-resolving and mild and occurs more commonly from the disease itself.
The COVID jabs, which have undergone extensive safety monitoring and have been given billions of times, provide robust protection against severe illness and death and reduce the odds of transmission and long COVID. Although they do happen, adverse events are exceptionally rare. All told, the vaccines are estimated to have prevented more than 18.5 million hospitalizations and 3.2 million COVID deaths in the U.S.—as well as spared the nation well over $1 trillion in medical costs.
But the jabs’ stunning success record hasn’t stopped right-wing political figures and operatives from politicizing them—nor has the impact of doing so. A 2023 study estimated that the vaccines could have prevented 232,000 American deaths during the delta and initial omicron waves.
Wednesday’s hearing was chaired by just such a politician: Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), a staunch Kennedy ally who became notorious throughout the COVID pandemic for promoting misinformation about the vaccines, holding various hearings and panels with contrarians and anti-vax figures. In January 2022, at the height of the deadly omicron wave, for example, Johnson hosted a “Second Opinion” panel focused on disparaging the COVID shots that was rebuked for promoting misinformation.
Wednesday’s hearing was no different, featuring a panel of expert witnesses that included well-known anti-vaxxers and vaccine skeptics.
Chief among them was Dr. Peter McCullough, a cardiologist whose board certifications were revoked over for spreading pandemic misinformation and whose former employer disavowed him for the same. A longtime ally of Johnson’s, having appeared at multiple anti-vaccine events organized by the senator, including the “Second Opinion” panel, McCullough has published dubious and retracted work on the COVID vaccines and promoted unproven treatments for the disease—namely the anti-malarial hydroxychloroquine and later, the anti-parasitic ivermectin. He and Johnson were involved in an effort to save the emergency use authorization of the anti-malarial, which Donald Trump had billed as a “miracle cure” for COVID, in the summer of 2020 after it had proven ineffective for that purpose.
Prior to the pandemic, McCullough was a member of the right-wing Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which also pushed hydroxychloroquine. He has been active in various pandemic-era anti-vaccine groups, including the US-based The Unity Project and Truth for Health Foundation, as well as the South Africa-based Pandata, which now denies that COVID was ever a pandemic. National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya was also involved with the group.
McCullough has since launched his own foundation and currently serves as the chief scientific officer for The Wellness Company, which hawks an “Ultimate Spike Detox,” purporting to cleanse the body of the COVID vaccines for $89.99—subscribers can save 10 percent.
“This extra-strength formula is the only one designed and used by Dr. Peter McCullough, the world’s leading pandemic expert and developer of the McCullough Base Spike Detoxification Protocol,” a description of the supplement reads.
Joining the former cardiologist was his colleague from The Wellness Company, obstetrician Dr. James Thorp, who serves as the group’s chief of maternal and prenatal medicine. Thorp has spread misinformation about the risks of COVID vaccine risk to pregnant people. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists strongly recommends vaccination given the increased risk posed by infection during pregnancy.
Thorp is perhaps best known for appearing in the widely-panned 2022 conspiracy film “Died Suddenly” about the COVID vaccines. The film was produced by far-right internet personality Stew Peters, a failed rapper-turned-bounty hunter-turned-podcaster known for his promotion antisemitic, neo-Nazi, homophobic, transphobic, and conspiratorial content. The guests on Peters’ podcast have included a number of prominent GOP political figures including Kash Patel, now Trump’s FBI director, and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ).
On Friday, Peters posted an antisemitic AI music video on X portraying Kanye West and Adolf Hitler palling around. Peters posted the caption “HH” for “Heil Hitler.” His film “Died Suddenly” falsely claimed that COVID shots were behind a massive uptick in cardiovascular deaths.
Thorp has engaged in his own conspiratorial and antagonistic rhetoric surrounding the COVID vaccines, once calling them “awesome – a suicidal therapy for the progressive mentally ill.”
Another physician appearing at Wednesday’s hearing was long COVID-focused internist Dr. Jordan Vaughn, who is a senior fellow at the Independent Medical Alliance, the rebranded pro-ivermectin, anti-vax Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance.
Then there was Dr. Joel Wallskog, a former orthopedic surgeon who co-founded the vaccine injury advocacy organization React-19 after allegedly being disabled by a Moderna jab. React-19 has been promoted by IMA and Wallskog’s co-chair, the allegedly vaccine-injured Brianne Dressen, sued the Biden administration over censorship with representation from the Koch-linked lawfare group New Civil Liberties Alliance. Johnson appeared in an IMA live webinar on X with Vaughn Wednesday evening following the hearing, discussing what to expect at the FDA’s Thursday meeting.
The sole non-physician on Johnson’s panel was Aaron Siri, an attorney and long-time Kennedy ally with a storied history of attacking vaccines who has been involved in helping select candidates for the health secretary’s transition team. Siri’s law firm has received millions in funding from Informed Consent Action Network, the anti-vaccine organization run by Del Bigtree, another key Kennedy ally who has served as the communications director for his aborted presidential campaign as well as the CEO of the group MAHA Action.
The sole voice on the panel supporting the vaccines was physician and democratic Governor of Hawaii Josh Green.
Unsurprisingly, given the line-up of speakers, dubious narratives about the jabs proliferated during the three-hour event. Johnson began the hearing with an apology to the vaccine-injured. Throughout the proceedings, he referred to the vaccines as “injections.”
“So much of our miserably failed response to COVID made no sense,” he said, calling out “masking, devastating shutdowns, the sabotage of early treatment, rapid approval of Remdesivir, and the maniacal reliance on the COVID-19 injections...as the only way to end the pandemic.”
”I use that word purposely…injections, they’re not standard vaccines,” Johnson said.
What followed was a spectacle of dubious claims, bad science, and conspiracy mongering. For example, the senator used graphics purporting to show that COVID vaccines had killed tens of thousands of Americans based on unverified data from the FDA’s Federal Adverse Event Reporting System and the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System—something he has done previously and been fact-checked for.
Egged on by Johnson, the anti-vax doctors, took turns suggesting that the mRNA vaccines were dangerous, should not have been approved, and perhaps ought to be discontinued. Some invoked their patients for added effect.
McCullough opened his testimony by complaining that at a previous Johnson-led hearing in November 2020 focused on hydroxychloroquine, Democratic Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) had deployed “an old communist propaganda technique” and “attempting to gain leverage over me” for warning viewers ahead of his testimony that the cardiologist was about to promote misinformation.
McCullough used the platform Johnson gave him to warn that vaccine myocarditis was killing people. “The spike protein is the damaging part of the virus,” he said. “The spike protein is loaded into the body, and it causes tremendous damage. Tremendous damage in some.”
“Until the vaccines are stopped, there will be cases of acute myocarditis and to finish, we’ve had 216 vaccine deaths alone,” he said. “So if the vaccine campaign continues, we have to look at what are we getting out of it now, four and a half years into the campaign and how many more people will die?”
In his opening remarks, Vaughn, using an abundance of medical terminology, also promoted the claim that the vaccine spike protein was dangerous and warned of it spreading “uncontrollably” throughout the body. Speaking of his allegedly vaccine-injured patients, he said their “trust in public institutions has been shattered.”
”Many were coerced under the August 2021 federal mandates despite legitimate hesitations due to prior infection or personal health risks—they knew their body better than the agencies,” he said. “Now disabled, they are dismissed or ignored by the systems that mandated their compliance.”
Later on in the hearing, he falsely asserted that “statistically” no children had died from COVID. After that, with McCullough nodding along, he declared that “the wrong protein” had been chosen to make the mRNA vaccines.
Not to be outdone, Thorp opened by claiming pregnant women had been targeted by a “deliberate” and “calculated” vaccination campaign by the “government-controlled medical-industrial complex.”
The reason for this targeting, he claimed, was that women “are the primary decision-makers of healthcare across the human lifespan—a known marketing principle” and because of their medical vulnerability.
“If they could be convinced the vaccine was safe and effective, it would imply it was safe and effective for everyone,” he said. “From the outset of the pandemic, this vaccine was never grounded in biological science but rather in behavior science, specifically the manipulation of public perception through influence, fear, and persuasion.”
Thorp called the federal vaccine rollout “psychological operations” and claimed pregnant women did not need the jabs because pregnancy itself was “protective” against COVID. He suggested numerous studies showing the safety of the vaccines were corrupt and demanded accountability for mainstream medical associations that endorsed the jabs.
Wallskog and Siri both criticized legal protections for vaccine manufacturers. The latter suggested that “almost every childhood vaccine in this country” was insufficiently tested for safety.