Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson is dismissing the need for Ebola vaccines — even as public health officials scramble to contain a real Ebola outbreak ahead of the FIFA World Cup being held across the United States, Canada and Mexico this summer.
In an interview with LindellTV’s Cara Castronuova, Johnson argued that federal health agencies are laying the groundwork for another mass vaccination campaign — this time targeting diseases like Hantavirus and Ebola.
“They’re setting us up for it,” Johnson said. “Hantavirus. Ebola.”
But when it came to Ebola specifically, Johnson downplayed the threat — and the need for vaccines.
“Ebola is something that is just so aggressive, it generally snuffs itself out,” he said. “If you just handle basic procedures — quarantines, that kind of stuff — you can snuff out an Ebola deal.”
The science tells a different story. The FDA-approved Ebola vaccine Ervebo demonstrated 100% efficacy in clinical trials during the catastrophic 2014–2016 West Africa outbreak — which killed more than 11,000 people, according to the CDC. Ebola case fatality rates range from 25% to as high as 90%, per the WHO.
Johnson also warned that FIFA tourists could bring Ebola into the country — even as he dismissed the need for vaccines to guard against it.
“We ought to be a little careful here with FIFA bringing all these people from — we ought to be pretty careful when we do that, right?”
That concern is not unfounded — but the response he dismisses is exactly what officials are deploying.
The WHO declared an Ebola public health emergency on May 17, tied to an outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. The U.S., Mexico, and Canada have since coordinated travel screening measures for World Cup visitors from affected regions. The current Ebola strain, however, has no approved vaccine, per the CDC — precisely the scenario Johnson claims is unnecessary to prepare for.
Johnson also reprised familiar attacks on COVID-era treatment decisions, arguing that effective treatments were suppressed to preserve emergency use authorization for vaccines.
“That’s why they sabotaged things like ivermectin, why hospitals won’t administer it. It wasn’t profitable. Remdesivir is highly profitable to them. But if there would have been effective treatment for COVID, they never would have gotten emergency use authorization.”
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