Articles In This Issue

• Senator Johnson’s Full Roundtable Discussion: COVID-19 Hospital Protocols: Real Stories from Real People - U.S. Senator Ron Johnson

• Competition Made America Great - David Blaska

• We Are Distancing Ourselves… - Gary Varvel

Senator Johnson’s Full Roundtable Discussion: COVID-19 Hospital Protocols: Real Stories from Real People

U.S. Senator Ron Johnson - September 30, 2026

On Monday [Sept. 28, 2026], U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) held a roundtable discussion titled “COVID-19 Hospital Protocols: Real Stories from Real People” with patients, families, doctors, and nurses. The 21 panelists shared firsthand accounts of mistreatment and other experiences they witnessed at hospitals across the country. In their remarks, panelists detailed how treatments such as remdesivir and ventilation were often forced on patients as the only viable options. Patients were denied alternative treatments and drugs, even when rigid hospital protocols were failing.

“Rigid adherence to hospital protocols – rarely questioned – became the norm, which many doctors saw as violating the Hippocratic Oath’s core duty: patients first, not protocols. Far too often, the stories of COVID-19 hospitalizations were horrific … Patients lost their freedom. Family members could not visit and comfort their dying loved ones … In many of the testimonies received for this event, the callous comments by doctors and nurses to unvaccinated patients and their families are almost unbelievable,” Sen. Johnson said.

“The stories you are about to hear didn’t occur within only one or two hospitals, but in hospitals across America. To date, we [have] received 583 testimonies from 46 states. The fact that these attitudes were widespread is indisputable. Today, I am providing a platform for these stories to be told so that this kind of cruelty will not be repeated,” Sen. Johnson continued.

“The other underlying reality is these stories are real … [The] medical establishment – those doctors, those nurses – has to acknowledge the fact [that] these things are real so, once again, it can never be repeated,” Sen. Johnson concluded.

Competition Made America Great

David Blaska, Blaska Policy Werkes - September 28, 2026

If the Brewers can compete why can’t our schools?

State school boss Jill Underly in her annual State of Education address last week asked Wisconsin voters to cough up more tax dollars and while we’re at it, stamp out competition to the government school monopoly. Because (the part she didn’t say), public schools can’t compete. Not on education results, not on price, not on parent satisfaction. At least, not all of them, all of the time.

Speaking in the Capitol Rotunda 09-24-26, Underly blamed “decades of below-inflation funding,” and attacked school choice as a diversion of public dollars into “unaccountable, private systems,” according to the Heartland Post.

Unaccountable? Except to the parents who CHOOSE those schools. As more parents are doing, especially in David Crowley’s Milwaukee. More money? The Wisconsin Policy Forum finds public school enrollment has plummeted 9.2 percent since 2011 even as overall staffing rose 7 percent.

Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce puts current statewide average funding per student at $18,592. That’s double the amount 25 years ago and 50 percent higher than a year of tuition at UW-Madison.

We quote again the Reforming Government Institute:

“Madison’s district is squandering immense financial advantages. … middle-class Madison ranks in the 89th percentile among big districts nationally in school funding. They pay 1 adult for every 6 students, relying on local taxpayers to fund the lowest ratio [students to staff] of Wisconsin’s 15 biggest districts.

“[While] Madison’s test scores are near the state’s bottom.”

We Are Distancing Ourselves…

Gary Varvel, Creators Syndicate - October 2, 2026