Carlson Covers Hearing on Government COVID-19 Narrative

by Sharon Rondeau

(Jan. 25, 2022) — Just after 8:15 p.m. EST Monday, as a lead-in to his next segment, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” host Tucker Carlson aired a clip of Dr. Robert W. Malone, innovator of the mRNA vaccine technology used by Pfizer and Moderna for COVID-19 vaccines, speaking at a hearing chaired by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI)”titled,, “COVID-19: A Second Opinion.”

During the five-hour session, which Johnson declared at its conclusion only “scratched the surface” of that which needed to be made public, physicians and scientists critical of the U.S. government’s COVID-19 response offered a different view of what might have been done to save lives, preserve medical freedom and prevent injuries from largely untested vaccine products.

A reproduction of Carlson’s show on YouTube contains the segment beginning at 15:55.

Monday’s hearing followed an event Sunday, “Defeat the Mandates,” which featured many of the same physicians and scientists expressing their opposition to vaccine mandates and going as far as to call out “corruption” within the U.S. federal public-health apparatus in combination with “pharma” companies.

In the show’s opening moments, Carlson presented clips from the peaceful protest followed by Malone’s statement at Monday’s roundtable in which he said the current COVID-19 vaccines were designed to curb the “original” SARS-COV-2 virus emanating from Wuhan, China but are ineffective against the latest “Omicron” variant. “In other words, the vaccines are leaky,” Malone said. “They have poor durability, and even if every man, woman and child in the United States were vaccinated with these products, they cannot achieve herd immunity.”

“It’s not an opinion; the numbers are very clear about that…” Carlson said in response to Malone’s statement. Introducing Johnson, he asked, “What stuck out? What did you learn today?”

Johnson responded that at an early stage in the pandemic, he sought “a second opinion” to the government’s response which he termed as “insane.” The physicians with whom he spoke, Johnson said, are “eminently qualified” and have “different opinions” which are “not as deadly” as the government’s.

He cited data showing that the U.S.’s COVID death rate is significantly worse than that of Sweden, which was vilified early on for declining to impose lockdowns and other drastic restrictions.

More than 890,000 Americans have lost their lives in association with the disease, Johnson said, a figure reported by Worldometer; as of this writing, the CDC states the number as 864,203.

“The fact of the matter is, we should have been exploring and researching early treatment,” Johnson said, “and I certainly learned from doctors who have been treating, having the courage and compassion to treat COVID, it is an entirely treatable disease. Probably hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives and didn’t have to.”

Physicians who are actively treating COVID patients are better resources than those who “sit in their ivory towers or in their bureaucratic offices, never see a patient but just make all these pronouncements [and] say they are ‘science’ ’cause they ignore science,” Johnson asserted.

This writer has recent first-hand experience dealing with two physicians who claimed “there is no treatment for COVID-19” and scoffed at the possibility that FDA-approved drugs such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, discussed at length during Monday’s hearing as both effective and cost-effective against the coronavirus as shown by multiple studies, are viable forms of treatment.

“Have you reached a conclusion on why, from the very beginning, they have discouraged treatment of the disease…?” Carlson asked.

“Well, I have my suspicions; I mean, take a look at the money approach,” Johnson replied. …The only drugs that the health agencies have recommended are, they start about $500 a pop, go up to about $3,500,” he continued, “all novel drugs introduced by the pharma companies, whereas the ones that they’ve trashed that have decades’-worth of very good safety profiles, they completely ignore; these things are often pennies a dose. You go figure that.”

On Monday evening, Malone issued on his Substack a brief overview of the hearing as well as a study on ivermectin involving more than 200,000 participants resulting in the authors’ conclusion that it “regular use of ivermectin as a prophylactic agent was associated with significantly reduced COVID-19 infection, hospitalization, and mortality rates.”