Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told Newsmax on Friday that the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been ''a miserable failure.''
''Almost 900,000 lives lost in the last two years — the human toll of the economic devastation. How can anybody take a look at our response to COVID and call it a success,'' Johnson said on ''Eric Bolling: The Balance.''
''It's been a miserable failure, and yet the mainstream media are attacking doctors that have actually treated patients and they're still relying on the Faucis of the world that have failed us so miserably,'' referring to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to the president.
Johnson hosted a forum on Monday called ''COVID-19: A Second Opinion,'' which invited a group of medical experts to the Senate for the five-hour event.
The experts presented alternative perspectives on the pandemic and how the U.S. and other nations responded, as well as treatments and the effectiveness of the available vaccines.
The video of the lengthy conference on the video platform Rumble has had more than 1.4 million views.
Johson said Friday that the media and government health experts dropped the ball in responding to the virus and could have reacted in a way that would have been ''more rational'' and less deadly by listening to physicians and medical experts who were actually treating patients with the disease.
''Our response to COVID should have been, could have been, far more rational, far less divisive,'' he said. ''And the coronavirus itself should have been far less deadly, had we robustly explored early treatment, and allowed doctors to practice medicine. That is what the takeaway from that a second opinion event really should be.''
Johnson said the forum relayed important information on the pandemic but was not covered by the mainstream media.
''What the mainstream media has been doing covering this is they've been attacking me,'' he said. ''They've been attacking these doctors, that again, have had the courage and compassion to actually treat COVID [patients].''
Johnson said that instead of listening to doctors and others with different opinions, the media have tried to make them the bad guys and shut down what they are saying.
''This is a scandal, how we've treated COVID,'' he said. ''How we have censored, we've suppressed, we vilified these doctors, again, that have had the courage, and compassion to actually treat COVID patients. I put my faith in those types of people.''
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