I think Ron Johnson speaks for the 25% of the Republican Party that has completely lost its grip on reality. That’s a lot of people.
In an interview with conservative Wisconsin radio host Vicki McKenna, herself a vocal coronavirus vaccine skeptic, Johnson launched into a condemnation of “vaccine passports,” a credential that would allow businesses to verify vaccination status.
But Johnson also went a step further, declaring he sees “no reason to be pushing vaccines on people,” arguing their distribution should be “limited” to those most vulnerable to coronavirus, and asking, “if you have a vaccine, quite honestly, what do you care if your neighbor has one or not?”
Johnson said he is “getting highly suspicious” of the “big push to make sure everybody gets the vaccine,” stating it’s “not a fully approved vaccine” but also arguing that the fact it is 95% effective means only a limited number of people need to be vaccinated.
The comments put Johnson at odds with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who spent much of the last Senate recess urging Republican men to get vaccinated amid public opinion polling that shows they are the least likely to do so.
Johnson is one of the Senate’s most prolific promoters of coronavirus pseudoscience, holding hearings last year as the chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to promote unproven treatments like Hydroxychloroquine.
32%. That’s the share of residents in Carbon County, Wyoming, which voted for former President Donald Trump by a 53-point margin in 2020, who are vaccine hesitant, according to an estimate from the Centers for Disease Control. That’s compared to just a 7% hesitancy rate in San Francisco County, California, which went for President Joe Biden by 73 points.
I called Ron Johnson the dumbest man in the Senate long before this Trumpian nonsense. And, by the way, even if he decides not to run, Mo Brooks and Tommy Tuberville and God knows how many other Trumpish fools will take his place. The GOP Senate has become a cesspool of morons.