Sen. Ron Johnson brought patients, relatives, physicians and nurses to Capitol Hill Monday to recount their experiences with hospital care during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on treatment decisions, informed consent, visitation restrictions and other practices they believe warrant greater scrutiny.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom.
WASHINGTON — Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., convened patients, family members, doctors and nurses Monday for a Capitol Hill roundtable examining what they said went wrong inside American hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Johnson’s office described the Sept. 28 event as the first event in his years of COVID-related oversight devoted entirely to hospital practices and the experiences of patients and their families.
Titled “COVID-19 Hospital Protocols: Real Stories from Real People,” the roundtable began at 1 p.m. Eastern in the Kennedy Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Office Building.
Johnson’s office said participants would provide firsthand accounts of what they regarded as mistreatment and improper care at hospitals around the country. The senator has previously held hearings and public discussions concerning COVID-19 vaccines, early treatment, federal health agencies and the origins and handling of the pandemic.
Monday’s event shifted the focus specifically to decisions made after COVID patients entered hospitals.
Johnson livestreamed the roundtable Monday afternoon, allowing the public to hear the testimony directly.
The accounts presented at the event were personal testimony from patients, relatives and medical professionals. Individual allegations of improper treatment or misconduct require evaluation based on the particular patient’s records and circumstances and do not, by themselves, establish that the same practices occurred systematically at U.S. hospitals.
Johnson had been collecting such accounts before Monday’s meeting.
In an interview ahead of the roundtable, he said his office and organizers had gathered hundreds of testimonies describing experiences during the pandemic, including allegations involving isolation from relatives, disputes over treatments, informed consent and end-of-life decisions. He characterized some of the accounts as “horrific.”
The senator has repeatedly argued that the nation’s pandemic response deserves additional investigation, including not only decisions made by federal agencies but how government recommendations and institutional policies translated into care at individual hospitals.
Johnson’s official COVID-19 oversight record stretches back to the opening months of the pandemic. He participated in hearings on pandemic preparedness and federal procurement in 2020 and later held events examining outpatient treatment, vaccine mandates, vaccine safety and federal health-agency decision-making.
His views on several pandemic treatments have at times differed sharply from those of federal health agencies and major medical organizations.
Those differences are important context for Monday’s discussion.
Hospital COVID-19 treatment changed substantially as evidence accumulated between 2020 and the later stages of the pandemic. Doctors initially faced a new respiratory disease with no proven therapy, limited clinical evidence and, during major surges, serious shortages of beds, staff and protective equipment.
Remdesivir became one of the treatments used in hospitalized patients.
The Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency-use authorization for remdesivir in May 2020 after an NIH-sponsored trial found that it shortened recovery time in some hospitalized patients. The FDA formally approved the antiviral in October 2020 for certain hospitalized COVID-19 patients, making it the first drug approved in the United States specifically for COVID-19.
Like other medications, remdesivir carried potential adverse effects and was not appropriate for every patient. FDA prescribing information included warnings and monitoring requirements, and treatment recommendations changed as additional studies became available.
Johnson and some of the patients and health professionals associated with Monday’s event have questioned how remdesivir was administered in particular hospitals, including whether patients or relatives were always adequately informed and whether clinicians sufficiently considered alternatives.
Those are separate questions from whether the drug itself had federal authorization or evidence supporting its use in certain patients.
Johnson has also long criticized resistance to prescribing drugs such as ivermectin for COVID-19.
Federal health guidance, however, evolved as randomized clinical-trial evidence accumulated. The final NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines reflected the evidence available at the time and were intended as expert recommendations rather than mandatory treatment orders for individual physicians or hospitals. NIH formally retired the guidelines in 2024 after the public-health emergency had ended and other medical organizations assumed a larger role in maintaining COVID treatment recommendations.
Another major issue raised by patients and families concerns access to loved ones.
Hospitals imposed extensive visitor restrictions during the first years of COVID-19, particularly during periods of high community transmission.
The restrictions were intended to reduce opportunities for SARS-CoV-2 to spread inside medical facilities and, particularly early in the pandemic, to conserve limited supplies of personal protective equipment.
CDC guidance during the pandemic advised health facilities to manage and restrict visitor access during widespread transmission and to limit visitors around patients with confirmed COVID-19. The guidance also recognized circumstances in which caregivers or visitors could be essential.
Those policies created profound consequences for some patients and families, including instances in which severely ill or dying patients had limited direct contact with relatives.
Later CDC guidance placed greater emphasis on balancing infection-control precautions with visitation, including counseling visitors about risks and using protective equipment rather than treating isolation as an automatic requirement in every circumstance.
Monday’s participants sought to examine that experience from the patient and family perspective rather than solely through epidemiological data or institutional policy.
Nurses and other health professionals involved in organizing or promoting the roundtable have said they want a historical record of decisions involving informed consent, patient autonomy, family access and treatment choices. Some have alleged that they witnessed rigid protocols that left doctors and nurses with insufficient flexibility to respond to individual patients.
Those claims remain contested.
Hospitals and health systems were operating under extraordinary conditions during the worst pandemic surges, when COVID-19 hospitalized hundreds of thousands of Americans, intensive-care units in some regions approached or exceeded normal capacity and clinicians were treating a disease whose optimal management was changing rapidly.
At the same time, the existence of an emergency does not eliminate medical standards concerning informed consent, communication with patients and families or individualized clinical judgment.
That tension formed much of the background for Johnson’s roundtable.
His office characterized Monday’s gathering as a “nonpartisan panel discussion about flawed hospital protocols during the COVID-19 pandemic” and said it would feature firsthand testimony rather than exclusively government officials or academic researchers.
The meeting also fits within Johnson’s increasingly prominent role in congressional COVID oversight.
His Senate office maintains an extensive timeline of hearings, letters and investigations dating to 2020. More recently, Johnson has pursued records involving vaccine safety monitoring and communications by former federal health officials.
In May, Johnson held a hearing examining allegations that Biden administration health officials failed to adequately identify or respond to vaccine safety signals. In August, he and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., released additional records from former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci’s government-issued phone as part of their continuing investigations.
Monday’s roundtable differed from those investigations by centering on people who said they directly experienced the hospital system during the pandemic.
For Johnson, the issue is not limited to whether a particular drug worked or whether one hospital made the correct clinical decision. His broader argument is that institutional practices during the emergency should be examined after the fact to determine whether patients retained adequate autonomy and whether families were able to advocate effectively for loved ones.
The testimony, however, must be distinguished from controlled medical research.
An individual patient’s recovery or deterioration after receiving or being denied a particular medication cannot by itself establish whether that treatment caused the outcome. COVID-19 severity varied dramatically according to age, underlying disease, timing of treatment, immune status and numerous other factors.
The same limitation applies when evaluating accounts of patients who became critically ill after receiving a particular hospital treatment.
Such testimony can identify questions worth investigating, but determining whether a protocol improved or worsened outcomes requires systematic comparison of similarly situated patients and consideration of competing medical factors.
Federal COVID treatment recommendations themselves changed repeatedly as stronger evidence became available.
The NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel began issuing recommendations in April 2020 and updated them continuously until February 2024. The panel later said one of the principal lessons of the pandemic was that guidance had to change as evidence evolved and emphasized that its recommendations were intended to advise clinicians, not substitute for their judgment in every individual case.
The FDA’s treatment decisions followed a similar progression.
Remdesivir began under emergency authorization when evidence was limited, then received full approval after the agency reviewed clinical data. Other treatments entered and left use as trials produced clearer evidence of benefits or lack of benefits.
Hospital infection-control policies also shifted as vaccines, treatments, testing and knowledge about airborne transmission improved.
For the people appearing at Johnson’s roundtable, however, Monday’s discussion focused less on how those policies evolved nationally than on what happened to individual patients while those policies were being applied.
Johnson’s office said the event was intended to put those accounts before the public and create a forum specifically addressing what occurred “inside hospitals.”
The senator has said greater transparency is necessary to understand not only the decisions that proved effective but also potential failures that should not be repeated during a future public-health emergency.
The roundtable added another collection of firsthand testimony to that debate while leaving the broader medical and policy questions open for further investigation.
For Johnson, that examination is part of a continuing effort that began during the pandemic and has continued years after the federal public-health emergency ended: determining how government guidance, hospital policies and individual medical decisions affected patients when the country’s health system was under its most severe strain in generations.
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