WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, discussed the importance of early treatment of COVID even as vaccines begin to be distributed.
An excerpt from his Sunday interview with Maria Bartiromo is below and video of the interview can be found here.
“We need both [a vaccine and early treatment]. First of all, President Trump deserves a lot of credit, Secretary Azar, for Operation Warp Speed, the Senate in providing billions of dollars to produce the vaccine while it was being tested and approved, so now once it’s approved you can start shipping immediately. So that was a brilliant operation from my standpoint and I hope it is as safe and effective as it certainly seems to be. But even if it is 100% safe, 100% effective, people will still get sick, people will still need to be treated and that is what we largely ignored is early treatment.”
“A lot of it was poisoned by the media, poisoned by partisan politics, but the fact that Dr. Kory testified before our committee – his testimony by the way has almost three million views where he’s talking about the success of Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine there’s growing evidence, you have Favipiravir which is the cheap oral version of Remdesivir and if used early it looks like it might work. So we’ve ignored all of these things and we’re still going to need early treatment rather than the NIH guideline which is basically to send people home, alone and fearful, and do not give any treatment until you’re sick enough to go to the hospital. That just lacks all compassion.”
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