Good morning. 
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 69. Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 6:45 PM for 11h 58m 42s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 81.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1890, Congress establishes Sequoia National Park.
Molly Beck reports Despite guidance from health officials, Ron Johnson says vaccinating people during a pandemic ‘could be dangerous’:
In a Tuesday appearance on the John Solomon Reports podcast, Johnson suggested vaccinated Americans could be worsening the pandemic though recent data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Wisconsin Department of Health Services show the unvaccinated are more likely to become infected.
It is the latest example of comments from Johnson on COVID-19 that are contrary to advice from health professionals and scientists. His comments have been criticized by some medical professionals and Democrats as undermining efforts to get the pandemic under control.
“If you walk around asymptomatic with 250 times the viral load, are you the super spreader? Is that what’s happening here?” Johnson said, referring to a study on vaccinated Americans that has been misrepresented and used to spread misleading information.
The study found vaccinated health care workers with breakthrough infections caused by the coronavirus delta variant had higher viral loads, or the amount of virus detected in a person, compared to patients infected with earlier strains of the virus, according to an Associated Press analysis.
Johnson said recent data from Israel and the United Kingdom means “this does not look like a pandemic of the unvaxxed, this looks like vaccine failure.”
Patrick Remington, a former epidemiologist for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s preventive medicine residency program, said the opposite is true.
“This has become a pandemic of the unvaccinated, worsened by people taking risks, such as gathering together indoors, without masks,” Remington said. “The vaccine has been very effective in preventing serious illness, and death. The fact that the delta variant is so much more contagious, means that we cannot rely on the vaccine alone, but need to reduce the risks of getting infected and infecting others.”
Johnson is likely a combination of Ambitious, Compromised, and Crackpot, but his latest remarks betray a perversity: Johnson delights, luxuriates, and revels in attacking established truths regardless of the harm it may cause others. ‘Don’t vaccinate widely during a pandemic’ has nothing to it except Johnson’s exaggerated sense of his own abilities. He’s just asking questions, you see, one of many ‘inquiring minds’ seeking the truth.
Why have virologists, after all, when America has a thinly-educated, intellectually-unimpressive senator from Wisconsin? Why have medical schools, or research institutions, when we already have Ron Johnson as a guest on the John Solomon podcast?
And who’s podcaster John Solomon? He’s this serial failure: Fox News Parts Ways With John Solomon, Architect of Trump’s Ukraine Conspiracies, The Hill finds John Solomon ‘failed’ to identify key details of sources (‘John Solomon, the former opinion writer at The Hill whose columns were seen as a central part of a smear campaign against former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, failed to identify “important details” about his sources — including that they were under investigation or indictment and were even his attorneys, according to a review of his work by his former colleagues. In its review of 14 columns, The Hill’s news team said serious doubts about the credibility of Solomon’s Ukrainian sources were evident even before his interviews with them’).
And so, and so… U.S. Senator Ron Johnson descends to his natural level, as a guest on a bottom-feeder’s podcast.