by Francis Kapper
Despite having uncovered attempts by the government to avoid accountability for injuries and deaths associated with the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, Republican Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson is experiencing stonewalling by legacy media — including Fox News — of his attempts to share his findings.
Johnson published an op-ed on his X account Wednesday detailing how nearly 40,000 people died after having received the COVID-19 vaccine and how federal health officials hid vaccine safety concerns from the public. He also accuses Fox Digital and several legacy media outlets of declining or ignoring requests to publish the article.
Johnson, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, self-published the op-ed on X and later on his Senate website under the headline, “The story the media — and the government — don’t want you to hear.” In the piece, Johnson alleges federal health officials knew about serious COVID-19 vaccine safety concerns in 2021 but failed to apprise the public of them.
— Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) June 18, 2026
“The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA TODAY, and Fox Digital have all declined or ignored requests to publish this op-ed,” Johnson writes.
Johnson also posted a Majority Staff Interim Report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations which details how “Biden health officials purposely turned a blind eye toward COVID-19 vaccine safety signals.” The report also references cases of “‘Death and sudden death’ associated with the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.”
While Fox News covered Johnson’s report on May 3, it did not, at the time of writing, accept his offer to follow up on the coverage with his op-ed.
Johnson noted NBC, ABC, PBS, CNN, and MS NOW likewise all refused to cover his report.
Fox News Media, Johnson’s office, and the Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
Johnson also notes Peter Marks, the former director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), an FDA center which approves vaccines and is responsible for safety surveillance, was briefed that an algorithm used to analyze Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System data would “mask” or cover up adverse events. Johnson alleges the team at CBER received data for over three months pointing to the danger of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Rather than spreading awareness and informing the public, Johnson alleges “they ordered the data analyst to ‘cease and desist’ and then lied to the American public that ‘they weren’t seeing safety signals.’”
“I consider this to be the biggest government scandal in my lifetime, and one that is crying out for full media attention and coverage,” Johnson writes in the op-ed. “Currently, VAERS shows 1,676,100 cumulative worldwide adverse events and 39,099 deaths associated with the COVID-19 injection, with 9,332 (24%) of the deaths occurring within 2 days of injection.”
“Most of these tragic adverse events occurred well after federal health officials should have informed the public about the risks they knew existed. Instead, they hid or downplayed those risks. As a result, millions were harmed after being denied their right to fully informed consent,” Johnson says in his op-ed.
“We will never know the full extent of the harms (or the benefits) of the COVID-19 injections. But we do know that federal health officials were aware that serious harm was being done within months of them granting Emergency Use Authorization,” he adds.
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Francis Kapper is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
