(T.J. Kirkpatrick/The New York Times via AP, Pool File)

When former President Donald Trump was in office, Sen. Ron Johnson was quick to support developing a COVID-19 vaccine.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel quoted him on his strong support for Operation Warp Speed, the federal program allying private and government resources for the research, development and deployment of COVID-19 treatments, including vaccines, between March 2020 and Feb. 2021.

“I strongly supported Operation Warp Speed and celebrated its astonishingly rapid success,” he told the Journal Sentinel in April of this year.

But Johnson, supportive as he was, isn’t for a vaccine mandate or even encouraging the public to get vaccinated, which he has made clear in a seemingly endless series of interviews.

“So why is this big push to make sure everybody gets a vaccine?” he told Vicki McKenna of WIBA of Madison, Wis., in April. “To the point where you better impose it, you’re going shame people, you’re going to force them to carry a card to prove that they’ve been vaccinated so that they can participate in society. I’m getting highly suspicious of what’s happening here.”

Johnson has no intention of getting this one, even if he gets the other vaccines doctors recommend. Johnson believes his own antibodies are better than those his body would develop from a vaccine.

“The fact of the matter is it looks like natural immunity is as strong, if not stronger than vaccinated immunity,” he told Fox’s Sean Hannity in July. 

Johnson claimed on Andrew Wilkow’s podcast, “The Wilkow Majority,” because he tested positive for asymptomatic COVID-19 in October 2020, he was “probably pretty protected from this strain of COVID as well,” referring to the Delta variant.

The CDC has said the Delta variant is twice as infectious as the original Alpha, variant of COVID-19 and, while rare, reinfections can occur. The CDC continues to recommend everyone gets vaccinated without regard to the previous infection. 

Johnson’s unwillingness to acknowledge the benefits of getting vaccinated is on-brand for the senator. 

Since the early days of the pandemic, he has pushed for a focus on alternative treatments for COVID-19 over developing a vaccine, focusing on hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

“That has been the biggest failure of this administration’s response to COVID, that we didn’t put any resources toward looking at repurposing available generic cheap drugs like hydroxychloroquine, like ivermectin, favipiravir,“ he asked McKenna last December. “And why did we ignore early treatment using repurposed drugs?” 

During a February appearance on The Regular Joe Show on WTAQ, a conservative, rural talk radio station, he told host Joe Giganti that mainstream media and social media were “poisoning” the reputation of those drugs.

Johnson’s misinformation-laden postings eventually resulted in a YouTube suspension in June and another one earlier this month. 

Not only has medicine widely debunked the myth of ivermectin being a viable treatment for COVID-19, but Dr. Wesley Long, a clinical pathologist and the director of diagnostic microbiology at Houston Methodist Hospital, told Business Insider taking the doses meant for large livestock could cause patients to shed parts of their intestinal linings. 

When this shows up in waste, it may be what Facebook posters have referred to as “rope worms.” Long said there was no such medical diagnosis, Business Insider reported. 

While ivermectin was shown in-vitro, in a lab, to kill the virus that causes COVID from replicating in human cells, the dosage required is highly toxic to humans. Doctors answered Johnson’s question, but he regularly pushes Wisconsin citizens to ask it and doubt the vaccines’ efficiency. 

At the end of October, Johnson held a panel for those who claimed the vaccine harmed them or gave them adverse effects. 

During the panel, Johnson said he’d been told by a doctor, “I’ve got a whopping level of antibodies,” NBC15 reported.

“And so there’s no reason for me to get the vaccine.”