Ignorant and lazy does not make for a good Senator
I was a freshman in college in the early 1970’s. One evening the town police came storming into a nearby dorm to arrest a couple of juniors who were selling recreational drugs door-to-door on campus. The guilty students were promptly expelled. The next day, the student body was up in arms over the fact that the town police did not have jurisdiction on campus, and protests ensued. At the time I was taking a freshman seminar on scientific ethics; the professor was a brilliant if somewhat crusty biology professor who challenged the class on the question of why the offending students deserved to be expelled despite the jurisdictional dispute and apparent lack of due process. There were a lot of deeply thoughtful answers given by a group of young adults out to impress the professor. In the end, the professor rejected our positions and summed up the situation as he saw it in no uncertain terms: in his view, the students should have been expelled because they “were too f**ing stupid to deserve a college degree.”
I relate this story because I feel the same way about Senator Ron Johnson (he plays the role of the guilty students in this story, not the brilliant professor). The past few months have proven that it is time for Johnson to go because he is too f**ing stupid to be a US Senator.
It isn’t hard to get evidence of Senator Johnson’s lack of intellectual prowess, given his penchant for saying outrageous things in media interviews and adherence to conspiracy theories. A Google search of “how stupid is Ron Johnson” returns over 4.3 million responses. The details range from his racist and false screed about the January 6 insurrectionists to his climate denial (including falling for Erik the Red’s 1000-year-old real estate ruse that described the Danish territory in the North Atlantic as Greenland despite the fact that it had been covered in glaciers for at least the last 2.5 million years). Facts do not mean much to Senator Johnson, which is a shame, because his intuition is awful and easily debunked. So let’s select one of the Senator’s recent fake outrages and tear it to shreds by shining the light of reality on the darkness of his ignorance.
For unfathomable reasons, Johnson has been part of a cabal of MAGA adherents that is pushing hydroxychloroquine (HQ) as an effective antiviral treatment for COVID-19. One hypothesis as to why they take this position is that Republicans are convinced that there is a deep state plot to hold back cheap and easy treatments for craven political purposes. Taking such a position is more of a reflection on those who suspect such wanton evil than those they criticize, as these views often reveal the dark inner workings of the craven mind of the creators. Nonetheless, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing in November 2020 to investigate why HQ was not being used more broadly. Senator Johnson was quoted repeatedly criticizing the medical community, suggesting at one point that it had “censored” evidence that hydroxychloroquine could work and that federal scientific agencies may have “turned a blind eye” toward the treatment because of Trump’s promotion of it. [1] To make this claim would require the assumption that the majority of clinicians would rather watch their patients get sick or die for the sake of a hypothetical political gain, and further assumes that the vast majority of the medical community is anti-Trump. One of the hearing participants, Dr. Ashish Jha, Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, followed his testimony before the committee with an Op-Ed in the New York Times lambasting the hearing and the disinformation that it propagated.[2] While the hearing took place in November, Senator Johnson could not leave well-enough alone: last month he entered the fray again blaming the federal government for having “tunnel vision” when the focus was placed on developing a vaccine rather than enabling therapeutics such as HQ. He contended that this strategy cost “tens of thousands of lives.” [3] Never mind the fact that his argument flips the financial case on its head. Never mind the reality that the development of vaccines represents a remarkable feat of science likely to lead to a Nobel Prize. And never mind that there has been a rigorous pursuit of antiviral therapeutics for decades. His comments are just plain ignorant, but let’s spend some time dissecting why. Trump posited the theory that eliminating the virus was possible with light; let’s follow Trump’s lead and shine some light on the body of evidence about the efficacy of HQ.
Since HQ was first proposed as a therapeutic, there have been many studies to investigate the viability of the drug. In fact, there have been enough studies since the pandemic began to perform what is called a meta-analysis. Meta-analysis is a statistically-based way of combining well-controlled individual studies into the equivalent of one large study, thus shedding light on and reducing statistical errors. One such study on the efficacy of HQ was published in early 2021 in the journal Clinical Microbiology and Infection. [4] The authors analyzed the results of 29 investigations measuring the impact of HQ with or without added azithromycin antibiotic treatment (another reputed therapeutic) on hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The authors of the meta-analysis are French, which should mitigate against any deep state bias. In addition, the authors lay out clearly that their motivation is to uncover the potential of HQ to provide an effective treatment to the growing pandemic based on reliable clinical outcomes such as patient mortality, with HQ compared with standard care. The author’s analysis showed clearly that HQ alone had no statistically significant impact on patient mortality, making HQ ineffective for the treatment of people with COVID-19. They further found that the combination of HQ with azithromycin resulted in increased death among treated patients.[5] Let me repeat- a large, statistically significant study shows conclusively that HQ is not an effective therapeutic and in combination with azithromycin, is worse than no treatment at all. A rational person would conclude, if prone to follow science and data, that HQ is dangerously ineffective. Of course, that is not the conclusion drawn by Ron Johnson.
Maybe I misinterpret the problem that prevents the Senator from making the accurate call on this topic. Perhaps the real issue is that Senator Johnson is not just ignorant, but also lazy. It took me less than 5 minutes to find the study. It took an additional 30 minutes to digest the results. I have to assume that Johnson’s staff is at least as competent as I am, and if not, they have access to a range of people who can help them if they had any interest in the facts. But they clearly do not, and they would rather spread misinformation for blatant political purposes than take a few minutes to educate themselves and spread the truth. Learning and understanding are hard work. Moving beyond what we believe in the face of facts to the contrary is a challenge to a weak ego. Ron Johnson seems to have a hard time doing the homework and separating fact from fiction and unfounded prejudice. And that’s a big disappointment. Senators make a good living via our taxpayer contributions- salaries of $174,000/year, expense reimbursement of around $3.3 million/year, and a fairly generous retirement plan. One would hope that this type of compensation would attract the best and the brightest to public service, but apparently some people without the capability or interest slip through.
Amazingly, Johnson has recently continued his string of nonscientific blathering. In a recent TV interview, the Senator stated that he did not need to get a COVID vaccine because he had already gotten the virus, as if that was a badge of MAGA honor. [6] Research, however, teach away from that conclusion. A recent publication in The Lancet studied the prevalence of infection and antibodies in Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the pandemic.[7] The authors found that of the 9,542 participants examined, 532 had antibodies against COVID-19. Furthermore, 82% of the 532 participants who were positive for antibodies were asymptomatic throughout the course of their infection, and only 40% of the 532 had antibodies that were efficacious against further infection. Said another way, Ron Johnson has a 40% chance of being correct. You can judge if that is better than his usual rate of success for his statements.
Meanwhile, last week Senator Johnson contended that “there is no reason to be pushing vaccines on people.”[8] But we just finished showing one of the many data points that demonstrates that vaccination is the only guaranteed way out of this pandemic, because not only are 60% of those previously infected no longer able to fight off the disease in the future, but the longer we let this bug have free transmission through the global population, the greater the probability that it will continue to mutate in insidious ways that get around the existing vaccines.
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Most of what I have written in this post is not particularly hard to understand or predict, even without the scientific references that pound home the points. I started this entry expecting to quote Forrest Gump: “Stupid is as stupid does.” But then I realized a different emotion. It all made me really sad. Truth is easy to find and an important ally to fight the global challenges that we face. Ron Johnson is a person with the ability to drive change and lead. The fact that he does not do so must mean that there is something underlying his desire to maintain ignorance and spread misinformation. And now, unfortunately, I think I understand. In the same interview where Senator Johnson questioned the value of vaccination, he stated that “If you have a vaccine, quite honestly, what do you care if your neighbor has one or not?”[9] Why do I care? Because I care about my neighbor, even if we disagree politically or I don’t know them at all. Because maybe my neighbor, or someone they know, has a condition that puts them at risk but prevents their ability to be vaccinated. Because I understand that if 90% of us get the vaccine, then our society will be safer and financially stronger than if fewer do so. Because I know that sometimes we need to do things that are for the benefit of the greater good rather than always looking out for ourselves. Unfortunately, all of these reasons run afoul of the foundational beliefs (such as they are) of the MAGA nation, where the only things that matter are how to “own the libs” and protecting the tribe. A democracy cannot function without a belief in the value of governing for the greater good; we must continue to call out those who reject the common good in order to preserve what is left of our democracy and our society.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/20/hydroxychloroquine-covid-senate-hearing/
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/opinion/hydroxychloroquine-covid.html
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/21/us/politics/ron-johnson-wisconsin-misinformation.html
[4] T. Fiolet, et. al, Clinical Microbiology and Infection, 27, pg 19 (2021)
[5] Ibid
[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/15/ron-johnsons-unscientific-take-coronavirus-vaccine/
[7] Z. He, et.al., The Lancet, Vol 397, pg 1075 (2021)
[8] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/republican-ron-johnson-tries-to-explain-why-there-is-no-reason-to-be-pushing-vaccines-on-people/ar-BB1fZbPh?ocid=msedgdhp
[9] ibid
