Sen. Ron Johnson says every major media outlet in the country, including Fox News, either declined or ignored his request to publish an op-ed laying out what a Senate investigation found about federal officials allegedly concealing COVID-19 vaccine safety signals. So the Wisconsin Republican posted it himself.
Johnson self-published the piece on his X account and his Senate website on June 18, titling it "The story the media, and the government, don't want you to hear." The op-ed draws on a Majority Staff Interim Report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which Johnson chairs, dated April 29, 2026. That report, as the Daily Caller News Foundation reported, details how Biden-era health officials allegedly "purposely turned a blind eye toward COVID-19 vaccine safety signals."
The senator named names, not just the left-leaning outlets you'd expect, but Fox Digital and The Wall Street Journal alongside The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA TODAY. All five, Johnson stated, "declined or ignored requests to publish this op-ed."
The subcommittee's interim report centers on the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, the FDA division responsible for approving vaccines and monitoring their safety after they reach the public. Johnson alleges the CBER team received data "for over three months" pointing to dangers associated with COVID-19 vaccines, and that officials shut the analysis down.
His account is specific. Johnson claims Peter Marks, the former CBER director, was briefed that an algorithm used to analyze Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System data would "mask" or cover up adverse events. When a data analyst flagged the problem, Johnson alleges, officials "ordered the data analyst to 'cease and desist' and then lied to the American public that 'they weren't seeing safety signals.'"
The report also references cases of "'Death and sudden death' associated with the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines," according to Johnson's characterization of the findings.
None of the outlets that declined the op-ed provided a stated reason, at least not in any public forum. Fox News Media, Johnson's office, and the Department of Health and Human Services all did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller's requests for comment.
Johnson's op-ed cites VAERS data directly. The figures are large and, if nothing else, demand serious public scrutiny rather than silence.
"Currently, VAERS shows 1,676,100 cumulative worldwide adverse events and 39,099 deaths associated with the COVID-19 injection, with 9,332 (24%) of the deaths occurring within 2 days of injection."
VAERS is a passive reporting system, reports submitted to the database do not independently establish that a vaccine caused a given injury or death. Public health officials have long noted that limitation. But the system exists precisely to detect safety signals that warrant further investigation. Johnson's argument is not that VAERS data is the final word. His argument is that federal officials saw the signals, suppressed the analysis, and told the public nothing was wrong.
That distinction matters. The question is not whether every VAERS report represents a confirmed vaccine injury. The question is whether the people charged with protecting public health deliberately looked the other way, and whether the press is now doing the same thing.
The refusal by The New York Times or The Washington Post to run a Republican senator's op-ed on vaccine safety concerns surprises no one. Those outlets spent years treating any skepticism of COVID-19 vaccines as misinformation, often in lockstep with federal health agencies. Their editorial pages have shown little appetite for revisiting that posture.
Fox News is another matter. The network covered Johnson's subcommittee report on May 3, giving it at least some airtime. But when Johnson offered a follow-up op-ed to Fox Digital, the kind of opinion piece that would seem tailor-made for a right-of-center audience, Fox declined. At the time of the Daily Caller's reporting, Fox had not accepted the offer.
The pattern raises a fair question about how far even nominally conservative media institutions are willing to go on the vaccine safety issue. Legacy networks have faced their own internal upheavals over editorial direction in recent months. Fox's decision to pass on Johnson's op-ed suggests the discomfort extends beyond left-leaning newsrooms.
Johnson also named NBC, ABC, PBS, CNN, and what the Daily Caller transcribed as "MS NOW", likely MSNBC, as outlets that refused to cover the subcommittee's report at all. The wall of silence is bipartisan in one sense: it spans outlets across the ideological spectrum.
Johnson framed his decision to self-publish in blunt terms.
"I consider this to be the biggest government scandal in my lifetime, and one that is crying out for full media attention and coverage."
That a sitting U.S. senator, the chairman of a permanent Senate subcommittee with investigative authority, cannot find a single major newspaper or cable news outlet willing to run his op-ed tells its own story. Johnson is not some backbencher floating conspiracy theories on a podcast. He is the chairman of a subcommittee that produced a formal interim report with specific allegations about specific officials at a specific FDA division.
The report names Peter Marks. It describes a timeline. It alleges a deliberate order to stop analyzing safety data. Whether those allegations hold up under further scrutiny is exactly the kind of question a free press is supposed to help the public answer.
Instead, every outlet Johnson approached, from the Times to Fox, decided the public didn't need to hear it. The gap between what powerful institutions claim about transparency and what they actually practice has rarely been wider.
Several questions remain unanswered. The subcommittee's document is labeled an interim report, and no final report has been publicly announced. The specific algorithm Johnson alleges was designed to "mask" adverse events has not been named in public reporting. The identity of the data analyst who was allegedly told to "cease and desist" has not been disclosed. And the precise three-month window during which CBER allegedly received alarming data has not been pinned to specific dates.
These gaps do not discredit the investigation. They underscore why media coverage, not media silence, is the appropriate response. Reporters are supposed to chase open questions, not bury them.
HHS, the department that oversees both the FDA and the broader public health apparatus, offered no comment. Former Fox News figures now serving in the administration have not weighed in publicly on the network's editorial decision.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed deep fractures in public trust, in government health agencies, in pharmaceutical companies, and in the press. Americans were told the vaccines were safe and effective, full stop. Anyone who raised questions was labeled an anti-vaxxer, deplatformed, or dismissed.
Now a Senate subcommittee with subpoena power alleges that federal officials knew about safety problems, ordered analysts to stop looking, and told the public nothing was wrong. And the media's collective response is to refuse to let the senator who led the investigation explain the findings in his own words.
This is not how accountability journalism works. This is how institutional self-protection works. The same outlets that published thousands of stories amplifying federal health guidance during the pandemic now refuse to publish a senator's account of what that guidance may have been hiding. Media gatekeeping decisions carry consequences for public trust that outlast any single news cycle.
Fox News, in particular, faces an uncomfortable position. Its audience is precisely the demographic most likely to demand answers about vaccine safety. Its decision to cover the subcommittee report on-air but refuse the senator's op-ed suggests an editorial line drawn somewhere between acknowledging the story and letting it breathe.
Johnson went around the gatekeepers. His op-ed is live on X and on his Senate website for anyone to read. The Majority Staff Interim Report is publicly available. The VAERS data he cites is a federal database accessible to any journalist willing to look.
The question is no longer whether the information is available. It is whether the institutions Americans once relied on to investigate, verify, and amplify important findings are willing to do their jobs, or whether they've decided that some findings are too inconvenient to touch.
Nearly 40,000 reported deaths in a federal safety database, a Senate investigation alleging a deliberate cover-up, and a sitting chairman who can't buy an op-ed slot at a single major outlet. If the press won't ask the hard questions, the public is entitled to ask why.
When every newsroom in America agrees a story isn't worth printing, that's not editorial judgment. That's a tell.