Many in Black community in Pa. hesitant to get COVID-19 vaccine - WFMZ Allentown

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Of all Pennsylvanians vaccinated against COVID-19, only 2 percent are Black.

"There is fear, hesitation," said Calvin Riddick. "At first I was like, 'no I'm not taking it, I'm not gonna do it.'"

Ultimately, Riddick got vaccinated, but that came after lots of research and education about the vaccine's safety and efficacy, and learning that a Black woman was behind the Moderna vaccine.

"That put my mind at ease," Riddick said.

His hesitation deserves historical context.

"It's what has been served to us on a plate down through the generations, we can't trust the white man because of their past history," said Esther Lee, president of the Bethlehem chapter of the NAACP. "The Tuskegee issue comes up mostly."

The Tuskegee Project started in 1932 and lasted 40 years.

Nearly 600 Black men were studied to see what happened when syphilis went untreated within the Black community. Participants were compensated with meals and exams, but those who had the disease weren't told about their diagnosis and were unaware they weren't being treated, even when treatments were available.

A class action lawsuit was filed on the matter in the 70s, and in the late 90s President Clinton apologized on the nation's behalf.

"It's enough to deter people of color from getting the vaccine," Lee said.

Lee says barriers, including access to technology and proximity to clinics, are other factors.

She's also vaccinated, and like Riddick believes education is key in inoculating more African Americans.

"If they're more informed I believe they would get the vaccination," Riddick said.

Dr. Harold Kreithen is chairman of the Allentown NAACP Medical Committee. He's organized a Zoom seminar for later this month.

"To try to reach out to the African American community in particular to give them factual information about the vaccination program," Kreithen said.

It's scheduled for March 24 at 7:30 p.m. To register, email naacpallentown@gmail.com.

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Virus Variant in Brazil Infected Many Who Had Already Recovered From Covid-19 - The New York Times

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The first detailed studies of the so-called P.1 variant show how it devastated a Brazilian city. Now scientists want to know what it will do elsewhere.

In just a matter of weeks, two variants of the coronavirus have become so familiar that you can hear their inscrutable alphanumeric names regularly uttered on television news.

B.1.1.7, first identified in Britain, has demonstrated the power to spread far and fast. In South Africa, a mutant called B.1.351 can dodge human antibodies, blunting the effectiveness of some vaccines.

Scientists have also had their eye on a third concerning variant that arose in Brazil, called P.1. Research had been slower on P.1 since its discovery in late December, leaving scientists unsure of just how much to worry about it.

“I’ve been holding my breath,” said Bronwyn MacInnis, an epidemiologist at the Broad Institute.

Now three studies offer a sobering history of P.1’s meteoric rise in the Amazonian city of Manaus. It likely arose there in November and then fueled a record-breaking spike of coronavirus cases. It came to dominate the city due in part to an increased contagiousness, the research found.

But it also gained the ability to infect some people who had immunity from previous bouts of Covid-19. And laboratory experiments suggest that P.1 could weaken the protective effect of a Chinese vaccine now in use in Brazil.

The new studies have yet to be published in scientific journals. Their authors caution that findings on cells in laboratories do not always translate to the real world, and they’ve only begun to understand P.1’s behavior.

“The findings apply to Manaus, but I don’t know if they apply to other places,” said Nuno Faria, a virologist at Imperial College London who helped lead much of the new research.

But even with the mysteries that remain around P.1, experts said it is a variant to take seriously. “It’s right to be worried about P.1, and this data gives us the reason why,” said William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

P.1 is now spreading across the rest of Brazil and has been found in 24 other countries. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recorded six cases in five states: Alaska, Florida, Maryland, Minnesota and Oklahoma.

To reduce the risks of P.1 outbreaks and reinfections, Dr. Faria said it was important to double down on every measure we have to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Masks and social distancing can work against P.1. And vaccination can help drive down its transmission and protect those who do get infected from severe disease.

“The ultimate message is that you need to step up all the vaccination efforts as soon as possible,” he said. “You need to be one step ahead of the virus.”

Dr. Faria and his colleagues started tracking the coronavirus when it exploded in Brazil last spring. Manaus, a city of two million in the Brazilian Amazon, was hit particularly hard. At its springtime peak, the cemeteries of Manaus were overwhelmed by the bodies of the dead.

But after a peak in late April, Manaus seemed to have gotten past the worst of the pandemic. Some scientists thought that the drop meant Manaus had gained herd immunity.

Dr. Faria and his colleagues looked for coronavirus antibodies in samples from a Manaus blood bank in June and October. They determined that roughly three-quarters of the residents of Manaus had been infected.

But near the end of 2020, new cases began surging again. “There were actually far more cases than in the previous peak of cases, which had been in late April,” Dr. Faria said. “And that was very puzzling to us.”

The intensive care unit for Covid patients in the Gilberto Novaes Hospital in Manaus in May.Michael Dantas/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Dr. Faria and his colleagues wondered if new variants might be partly to blame for the resurgence. In Britain, researchers were finding that B.1.1.7 was surging across the country.

To search for variants, Dr. Faria and his colleagues started a new genome sequencing effort in the city. While B.1.1.7 had arrived in other parts of Brazil, they didn’t find it in Manaus. Instead, they found a variant no one had seen before.

Many variants in their samples shared a set of 21 mutations not seen in other viruses circulating in Brazil. Dr. Faria sent a text message to a colleague: “I think I’m looking at something really strange, and I’m quite worried about this.”

A few mutations in particular worried him, because scientists had already found them in either B.1.1.7 or B.1.351. Experiments suggested that some of the mutations might make the variants better able to infect cells. Other mutations let them evade antibodies from previous infections or produced by vaccines.

As Dr. Faria and his colleagues analyzed their results, researchers in Japan were making a similar discovery. Four tourists returning home from a trip to the Amazon on Jan. 4 tested positive for the coronavirus. Genome sequencing revealed the same set of mutations Dr. Faria and his colleagues were seeing in Brazil.

Dr. Faria and his colleagues posted a description of P.1 on an online virology forum on Jan. 12. They then investigated why P.1 was so common. Its mutations may have made it more contagious, or it might have been lucky. By sheer chance, the variant might have shown up in Manaus just as the city was getting more relaxed about public health measures.

It was also possible that P.1 became common because it could reinfect people. Normally, coronavirus reinfections are rare, because the antibodies produced by the body after infection are potent for months. But it was possible that P.1 carried mutations that made it harder for those antibodies to latch onto it, allowing it to slip into cells and cause new infections.

The researchers tested these possibilities by tracking P.1 from its earliest samples in December. By early January, it made up 87 percent of samples. By February it had taken over completely.

Combining the data from genomes, antibodies and medical records in Manaus, the researchers concluded that P.1 conquered the city thanks not to luck but biology: Its mutations helped it spread. Like B.1.1.7, it can infect more people, on average, than other variants can. They estimate it is somewhere between 1.4 and 2.2 times more transmissible than other lineages of coronaviruses.

But it also gets an edge from mutations that let it escape antibodies from other coronaviruses. They estimate that in 100 people who were infected in Manaus last year, somewhere between 25 and 61 of them may have been reinfected by P.1.

The researchers found support for this conclusion in an experiment in which they mixed P.1 viruses with antibodies from Brazilians who had Covid-19 last year. They found that the effectiveness of their antibodies dropped sixfold against P.1 compared with other coronaviruses. That drop might mean that at least some people would be vulnerable to new infections from P.1.

“There seems to be an increasing body of evidence that suggests that most of the cases associated with the second wave are indeed sort of reinfections,” Dr. Faria said.

Health workers with a box of the Sinovac Covid vaccine for inoculating indigenous people in Itacoatiara, Amazonas State, Brazil, last month.Bruno Kelly/Reuters

Dr. Faria and other researchers are now looking across Brazil to observe P.1’s spread. Dr. Ester Sabino, an infectious disease expert at the University of São Paulo School of Medicine, said that one of the new outbreaks arose in Araraquara, a Brazilian city of 223,000 people that did not have high rates of Covid-19 before P.1 arrived.

If people in Araraquara did not have high levels of antibodies before P.1’s arrivals, she said, that suggests that the variant may be able to spread in places without Manaus’s extreme history. “This might happen in any other place,” she said.

Michael Worobey, a virologist at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the research, said it was time to pay attention to P.1 in the United States. He expected it would become more common in the United States, although it would have to compete with B.1.1.7, which may soon become the predominant variant in much of the nation.

“At the very least, it’s going to be one of the contenders,” Dr. Worobey said.

In their experiments, Dr. Faria and his colleagues also tested antibodies from eight people who received CoronaVac, a Chinese-made vaccine that has been used in Brazil. They found that the vaccine-generated antibodies were less effective at stopping the P.1 variant than other types.

Dr. Faria cautioned that these results, derived from cells in test tubes, don’t necessarily mean that vaccines will be less effective at protecting real people from P.1. Vaccines may very well provide strong protection from P.1 even if the antibodies they generate aren’t quite as potent. And even if the variant manages to infect vaccinated people, they will likely remain shielded from a severe bout of Covid-19.

For Dr. Sabino, the ultimate importance of P.1 is the threat that concerning variants pose when they can pop up anywhere in the world.

“It’s just a matter of time and chance,” she said.

Coronavirus Variants and Mutations

Tracking recent mutations, variants and lineages.

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Member of adventure racing community says bicyclists face constant danger in sport - WJXT News4JAX

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Many people aren’t familiar with adventure racing, but the close community of participants are grieving after a man who was participating in a race was struck by a car and died in St. Johns County.

Investigators said two women were also seriously injured.

Ron Eaglin is with Florida Xtreme Adventures, and he said there’s a constant danger associated with the sport.

“Adventure racing is one that combines the components of things like bike racing and running and trekking through the woods and paddling canoes,” he explained. “Many people think of it as a triathlon except that it is done with a map and a compass.”

After what happened Sunday, Eaglin said it’s a tough time for the close-knit community.

“The community of adventurers is a very bonded community. So losing one of our own -- we’re not a huge community. Losing one of our own is horrible because at some point we are all connected,” he said.

Eaglin said the racers take precautions. He said race organizers work hard to protect the safety of their participants, but dangers from drunk or distracted or even harassing drivers is the biggest threat.

“It doesn’t matter whether it’s day or night,” Eaglin said. “This accident occurred with three people who were literally lit up like a Christmas tree. They were very visible.”

The organizers of the Sea to Sea 72 hour competition, Adventure Races Georgia, canceled the race shortly after the deadly crash in St. Johns County.

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Lightning poses unpredictable danger during thunderstorms - WLS-TV

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CHICAGO (WLS) -- You may know the slogan, "when thunder roars, go indoors." That's what you should do when a thunderstorm is nearby. Lightning is one of the most dangerous aspects of storms. It is unpredictable, happens fast and often without any warning.

Lightning is one of the most fascinating weather phenomena our planet. There are about 100 bolts of lightning every second on Earth, a patchwork of thunderstorms discharging electricity.

For millennia, people have been trying to understand lightning. The Greeks both marveled and feared lightning as it was hurled by Zues. For the Vikings, lightning was produced by Thor as his hammer struck an anvil while he was riding his chariot across the clouds. Statues of Buddha show him carrying a thunderbolt with arrows at each end. And in North America, tribes believed lightning was due to the flashing feathers of a mystical bird, a thunderbird, whose flapping wings produced the sound of thunder.

Today, we know that there are more than 2,000 thunderstorms active throughout the world at any given moment, and every second there are 100 flashes of lightning on Earth. Each year, lightning is responsible for about 24,000 deaths, about 240,000 injuries and millions of dollars in property damage around the world.

South America, Africa and Pakistan have the most lightning strikes per year compared to any other places on Earth. The no. 1 spot, is Venezuela, followed closely by the Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa. In the United States, Central Florida has the most lightning strikes.

HOW TO STAY SAFE

So, what are some ways to stay safe during lightning? There is no safe place to be outside during a thunderstorm. If you can, head inside. But if there are no options for shelter here are some actions to take to slightly reduce your risk.

If Outside:
- Avoid open fields, the tops of a hill or a ridge top
- Stay away from tall, isolated trees or other tall objects
- Stay away from water, wet items, and metal objects
- Picnic shelter will not protect you

30 Minute Rule:
You should wait 30 minutes after you hear the last rumble of thunder before you resume your outdoor activity.

If In A Car:
You are safe from lightning inside a hardtop car as long as you close all the windows, and don't touch metal objects inside the car.

If Inside:
- Don't touch electrical equipment or electronics plugged into the wall
- Stay off corded phones and avoid taking a shower and other plumbing
- Stay away from windows and doors, and stay off porches

Over a 12 year period, fishing is the most dangerous activity to be caught doing during a thunderstorm. And of those victims of lightning, 80% were men.

HOW DOES LIGHTNING FORM?

There is still much we don't know about how it forms. But most lightning forms like this. Electrons begin zigzagging downward known as a "step leader." As the leader nears the ground, it draws a positive charge upward. As the leader and streamer merge, a powerful electrical current flows. The return stroke is what we see, traveling at 60,000 miles per second. The Process may repeat several times along the same path causing a flicker. All of this happens in less than a second.

There are different types of lightning. Most common is intracloud lightning where lightning stays in the same thunderstorm. The next most common is cloud to ground; this the most dangerous as it impacts objects and potentially people on the ground.

MYTH AND TRUTH

Myth: Cars are safe because the rubber tires insulate them from the ground.
Truth: Rubber tires provide no protection from lightning. Cars are safe because of their metal shell and steel frame. Convertibles are not safe.
Myth: Lightning-strike victims are electrified and should not be touched.
Truth: Lightning-strike victims carry no residual electrical charge. It is perfectly safe to touch a lightning victim to give them first aid.
Myth: If it is not raining, then there is no danger from lightning.

Truth: Lightning often strikes outside of the rain area to as much as 10 miles (even greater distances in exceptional situations).
Myth: Heat lightning occurs after very hot summer days and poses no hazard.
Truth: Heat lightning is a term used to describe lightning from a thunderstorm too far away for the thunder to be heard. The lightning hazard increases as you move toward the storm and eventually the thunder will also be heard.
Courtesy of NOAA NWS office in Melbourne, Fla.

SOME LIGHTNING FACTS

- The air in a lightning strike is heated to 50,000 degrees F. It is this rapid heating of the air that produces the shock wave that results in thunder.
- A ground stroke can produce somewhere between 100 million to a 1 billion volts of electricity.
- The average peak current in a cloud-to-ground lightning stroke is 100,000 amperes.
- The estimated diameter of a lightning channel is about 1 inch.
- The length of an average cloud-to-ground channel can range from 2 to 10 miles.
- You can tell how far away a lightning stroke is by counting the seconds between seeing the lightning flash and hearing the thunder.
- Five (5) seconds approximates one (1) mile of distance.
- If you see a flash and instantly hear the thunder, the lightning stroke was very close. Take shelter immediately.

Copyright © 2021 WLS-TV. All Rights Reserved.

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In St. Louis, Voters Will Get To Vote For As Many Candidates As They Want - FiveThirtyEight

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When voters head to the polls Tuesday to pick St. Louis’s next mayor,¹ they’ll be faced with four names on the ballot. But unlike in most other elections, they won’t have to choose just one candidate to vote for. Instead, St. Louisans will experiment with a new form of voting that allows them to vote for as many candidates as they like.

In November, St. Louis voters passed Proposition D, which switched the city’s municipal elections to a nonpartisan “approval voting” system. The way it works is that voters can vote for as many candidates as they think would make a good mayor (or whatever office is up for election) and the two candidates with the most votes advance to a head-to-head general election. (In other variants of approval voting, the person with the most votes is simply named the winner after one round of voting.)

Like its better-known cousin, ranked-choice voting, approval voting is a popular proposal among election reformers looking to fix the flaws of our first-past-the-post electoral system (i.e., the election system you’re probably most used to: voters pick only one candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins, regardless of whether they get a majority). By allowing people to vote for multiple candidates, approval voting aims to remove the often zero-sum game of our politics, no longer forcing people to choose between a candidate they love who has little chance of winning and a more viable candidate about whom they are less enthusiastic. For this reason, proponents argue that approval voting gives a fairer shot to third parties. It also theoretically eliminates the problem of vote-splitting. For instance, St. Louis is a plurality-Black city, but it has had a white mayor for the last 20 years in part because Black candidates have split the vote in the city’s predominantly Black north side. But under approval voting, Black voters will be able to vote for as many Black (and non-Black) candidates as they want.

Approval voting’s boosters also prefer it to ranked-choice voting because it’s simpler. Election officials can use the same ballots and machines they currently do, whereas ranked-choice ballots need to be redesigned to accommodate voters’ second, third, fourth, etc. choices. Ranked-choice voting can also lead to voter confusion and may lower turnout (although this is disputed), while approval voting actually produces fewer spoiled ballots — because a common reason ballots are currently disqualified is that voters vote for too many candidates. Approval voting also spits out results a lot faster than ranked-choice ballots, which can take days to tabulate.

Unlike ranked-choice voting, which is used by more than two dozen municipalities and now two states as well (Alaska and Maine), approval voting is just starting to catch on in American elections. The first jurisdiction to employ approval voting as its default voting method was Fargo, North Dakota, in its June 2020 municipal elections. Tomorrow, St. Louis becomes only the second member of the club, and also the one with the biggest population.

So far at least, the transition seems to be going smoothly. “For us as election officials, it really didn’t make any difference,” Cass County Finance Director Mike Montplaisir, who runs Fargo’s elections, told FiveThirtyEight. “We’re still counting the number of votes each candidate gets; that’s not any different. It’s just a change in the wording on the ballot and in the programming” of the voting machines. And Rosetta Okohson-Reb, the campaign manager for St. Louis Treasurer Tishaura Jones (one of the front-runners for mayor), said it hasn’t changed her campaign’s strategy very much — apart from doing a bit more voter education than normal. “We’ve been fielding a lot of questions from voters,” she acknowledged.

At the same time, though, approval voting hasn’t quite lived up to its supporters’ lofty promises either. In the St. Louis mayoral election, it’s not going to benefit third-party candidates, for instance; although the race is nominally nonpartisan, three candidates identify as Democrats and the fourth is a Republican. (Getting rid of the signature requirement for making the ballot would probably be a bigger deal to third parties.) Nor does it look like approval voting “fights big money in politics,” as supporters of Proposition D argued it would. The four candidates and their political action committees have raised more than $1.4 million, and the candidates who are leading in fundraising were also leading in a recent poll of the race.

Candidate	Party ID	Money Raised	Vote Share in Poll
Lewis Reed	D	$531,000	59%
Tishaura Jones	D	456,000	51
Cara Spencer	D	433,000	40
Andrew Jones	R	19,400	19

Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch

And while there’s a good chance that St. Louis will finally get a Black mayor this year, that’s due more to the runoff provision than approval voting itself. With just one white candidate, Alderwoman Cara Spencer, in the race, the general election will either feature two Black candidates (thus guaranteeing the election of a Black mayor) or one Black candidate and one white candidate (thus avoiding vote-splitting by race).

What’s more, approval voting may not change voters’ behavior in practice; even though they have the option to vote for multiple candidates, they might just do what they’ve always done and vote for only one — either by choice or because they aren’t aware of the new rules. Fargo provides some grist for this theory: In its inaugural approval-voting election last June, 18,805 voters cast 42,855 total votes for city commissioner, for an average of 2.28 votes per person. But two seats on the commission were up for grabs in that election, meaning that even in the pre-approval-voting days, voters would have been allowed to vote for up to two candidates. So not too many people actually took full advantage of approval voting, and accordingly, Montplaisir told us he didn’t think it made any difference in who won.

In fact, it may actually be in voters’ best interests not to vote for multiple candidates. Although approval voting eliminates certain kinds of tactical voting and zero-sum thinking, it encourages others. For example, in the Fargo City Commission race, Montplaisir said that he himself “voted for only one candidate — the candidate I wanted to win — because voting for anyone else is like taking a vote away from [my first choice].” And, he added, “if there were a candidate I didn’t want to win, I’d vote for all the candidates except that one. You can game the system.”

We obviously don’t know the end of the story in St. Louis yet, but we do know that approval voting is injecting extra uncertainty into what was already an intriguing and unpredictable mayor’s race. Will Spencer snag one of the two general-election slots because voters continue to vote for just one candidate and voting remains polarized along racial lines? Will the city’s few Republicans use their extra votes to boost Board of Aldermen President Lewis Reed over the more progressive Tishaura Jones? Will Black voters use their clout to power both Reed and Jones into the general?

These are all important questions for the next four years of governance in St. Louis, but tomorrow’s broader legacy will be the success or failure of approval voting in its highest-stakes test yet. “I’m curious to see how engaged voters are, if it increases turnout here in the city,” Okohson-Reb mused. “I don’t know what people are going to do, and I’m very much looking forward to [seeing].”

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'Many' US Capitol Police officers want to retire or leave after Jan. 6 insurrection, union says - ABC News

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The federal law enforcement agency is already understaffed.

March 1, 2021, 10:46 AM

• 6 min read

The union representing United States Capitol Police officers said "many" members of the force are looking to retire or leave the federal law enforcement agency after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

"Many officers that are retirement eligible are seriously looking at turning in their retirement papers. Since January 6th, several Officers have retired as a result," Gus Papathanasiou, chairman of the United States Capitol Police Labor Committee, said in a statement Friday. "Additionally, I cannot tell you the number of younger officers who have confided in me since the insurrection who are actively looking at other police agencies or even new careers."

Papathanasiou said the two main drivers are "a lack of trust in our leadership who clearly failed us on January 6th" and the fact that many other agencies "offer better working conditions and better retirement benefits" than the U.S. Capitol Police.

"If Congress wants to recruit and retain officers to meet the heightened security threat," he added, "they are going to have address both the leadership and quality of life issues driving officers to leave this department."

The United States Capitol Police seal appears on the side of a bus parked near the federal law enforcement agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 19, 2021.

The events of Jan. 6 occurred after then-President Donald Trump and his allies held a rally in Washington, D.C., urging Congress not to certify the results of the November presidential election, in which Trump lost to Democratic candidate Joe Biden. Trump vowed to "never concede" and urged his supporters "to fight," as he continued to push baseless claims of election fraud.

Crowds of people then made their way to the steps of the U.S. Capitol, pushing through barricades, officers in riot gear and other security measures that were put in place in anticipation of the protest. An angry mob breached the Capitol building, forcing a lockdown with members of Congress and their staff holed up inside. It took hours for law enforcement to clear the building and establish a perimeter around the area. Five people, including U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, died during the rampage and dozens more were injured.

So far, more than 300 people have been charged in connection to the Jan. 6 siege, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund resigned amid criticism over the department's handling of the attack. Meanwhile, six U.S. Capitol Police officers have been suspended with pay and 29 others have been placed under investigation for their actions during the insurrection.

Rioters try to break through a police barrier at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.

In his statement Friday, Papathanasiou referenced reports that a draft review by retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who was appointed to examine security on Capitol Hill following the insurrection, calls for the hiring of an additional 1,000 officers, of which approximately 350 would be detailed to provide personal security to members of Congress. The U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) "made it clear" in its budget submission to the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Appropriations in February 2020 that it "did not have enough officers to meet mission requirements," according to Papathanasiou.

"The fact we were understaffed was no secret," he said. "Recruiting, hiring, and training these additional officers is going to take years. As the USCP'S mission has increased drastically over the last few years, our manpower hasn't and we need more manpower, but my biggest concern right now is retaining the officers we already have. I have warned USCP leadership and Members of Congress that many USCP officers are on the fence about whether to stay with this department."

In addition to inadequate staffing, Papathanasiou said "one of the primary challenges on January 6th is that we did not have a fixed perimeter that we could easily defend."

"The bicycle racks that were put in place did not stop anyone and they were actually used as a weapons against the officers by the insurrectionists," he added. "We need to be able to establish a fixed perimeter for future protests. Whether it's a permanent fence or temporary that can quickly be deployed is open for discussion. However, we definitely need a solution so that January 6th never happens again."

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Ron Johnson Says He Still Has Many Unanswered Questions - The New York Times

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The Republican senator from Wisconsin is known for regularly promoting fringe theories favored by the right, most recently questioning the fact that pro-Trump rioters attacked the Capitol.

Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has been on the forefront of elevating fringe theories about President Biden’s son Hunter, the coronavirus and the results of the 2020 election.

In recent weeks he has come under renewed scrutiny for claiming in a series of radio interviews in his home state that the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was not an “armed insurrection” and for using his time during a Senate hearing to read a first-person account that posited “provocateurs” and “fake Trump supporters” were behind the attack.

Mr. Johnson has a reputation for being among the most accessible, high-profile Republicans in Washington, regularly defending his views to the mainstream news media — something many of his G.O.P. colleagues do not do.

He spoke with The New York Times on Thursday about his theories of who was responsible for the attack on the Capitol and what he would like to see included in the congressional investigation of it. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

You were on the radio recently talking about how it wasn’t an armed insurrection. I was curious what the origin of that perspective was for you.

When I think armed, I think firearms. And yeah, we don’t know. I have no idea. That’s one of the questions I’ve got is, how many firearms were seen, were confiscated? How many shots were fired? I believe the only ones that were fired were from law enforcement. And I’ve said I’ll defend law enforcement for taking action. I don’t understand what the uproar is. But apparently, there’s uproar somewhere. Somebody takes offense to it.

And I would say, if it’s properly termed an “armed insurrection,” it was a pretty ragtag one. And again, I don’t dispute the destruction, or destructive capability of things like flagpoles and bats and that type of thing, but again, words have meaning.

Well, what’s your feeling about who made up the group that stormed the Capitol?

I don’t know, and I’m asking the question. I’m making no assumptions.

There are just so many unanswered questions, which seems to be kind of the basic situation in so many things I’m trying to get to the bottom of. But here we are almost two months later, and there are just basic pieces of information that are missing here.

In the Senate hearing the other day, you read the piece from The Federalist that suggested there were sort of provocateurs and “fake Trump supporters” that had designs on generating trouble from the crowd. And I wondered, do you share that analysis?

I think it’s important, if we’re going to really get the whole truth, to understand exactly what happened, we need to look at different vantage points, different perspectives.

I read that article, I think, as soon as it was published, which was shortly after Jan. 6. And I was intrigued by it. Because here was an individual that, again, I didn’t know him at the time. I actually spoke to him yesterday for the first time. But I didn’t know who he was. It just looks like he had a pretty good background. This is an instructor, focusing on this type of psychological type of warfare and that type of thing. So he seemed to be a knowledgeable observer.

And I was just fascinated by the fact that he wrote down his thoughts, about 14, 15 pages, without looking at any news. So it’s kind of an unblemished accounting. And that’s really kind of the eyewitness accounts you want to examine. I’m not saying you accept everything. You don’t necessarily accept his conclusions. I think you kind of have to take at face value what he said he saw.

Do you believe that, as the Federalist author Michael Waller wrote, that there were fake Trump protesters in the crowd?

That’s what he said he thought he saw. I think later in the article, he didn’t see any who he would have thought were fake Trump protesters, he didn’t see them engage in any violence. I think he writes that in his article. Yeah. I’m letting his testimony stand on its own. I wasn’t there.

Again, I’m drawing no conclusions whatsoever. Again, a lot of press reports are assuming, imputing all kinds of conclusions. They’re saying I’m saying things that I’m not saying at all. All I’m saying at this point in time is we need to ask a lot of questions.

I wonder why you think there is merit to giving an audience to Mr. Waller’s assertions that there were either provocateurs or fake Trump supporters in the crowd, given the lack of evidence.

I’m not questioning his veracity. I believe he’s probably telling the truth. That’s what he saw. I’m not agreeing with any conclusions. I’m not sure he’s really making too many conclusions, other than he concluded he saw four individual types of groups that stood out from the crowd.

It might be a flawed part of the evidence, but why exclude it? Just because it doesn’t necessarily tie into whatever narrative somebody else wants to tell about the day? I’m not interested in the narratives, I’m interested in the truth.

There’s been a lot of talk among some of your Republican colleagues in Congress about antifa or Black Lives Matter being involved in instigating what happened. Do you share that belief?

It doesn’t really seem like that was the issue. It appears, again, this is all early, I haven’t drawn any conclusions, but it appears if there was any preplanning by groups, it was white supremacist groups, like the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers, that type of thing. That’s what it appears.

I’ve seen videos of other people claiming to be antifa in their hotel rooms. I don’t know if any of that’s been verified. But no, again, I am drawing no conclusions at all. But right now, it appears that there were provocateurs or agitators. It would appear it would probably be from the white supremacist groups that have already been named. But I haven’t talked to the F.B.I.

You were on with Maria Bartiromo and talked about being against violent extremists from the left or the right. And it sounds like you’ve sort of landed on the position that these were right-wing groups that were involved in organizing what happened on Jan. 6. Is that right?

It seems like those white supremacist groups seem to be responsible for this. I really condemn it. I mean, I’m not happy with it.

I’ve attended a lot of Trump rallies. You talk to a lot of people. You see the mood in those crowds. And it is festive. It is joyful. You’re loving America. And it’s definitely pro-law enforcement and anti-breaking the law. Which is, again, why I certainly do not suspect, even a large pro-Trump crowd, I did not expect any violence from them.

You said you want what you say to be accurate. And you read Mr. Waller’s piece, but without necessarily doing any due diligence to see whether what he was saying checked out.

What do you mean, checked out? It’s his eyewitness account. What else is there to check out about it? I read what his credentials were, where he was teaching, at Fort Bragg. I mean, you can see in the article what his credentials are. He seemed to be pretty solid.

A couple days later The Washington Post wrote an article that was very close to kind of describing things as Mr. Waller did, too. So that added further credence, from my standpoint, that what he saw, other people kind of saw and noticed and drew similar types of conclusions. Again, it’s just one piece of information that needs to be looked at, needs to be considered, needs to be tested, needs to be verified, compared against other things.

Again, I’m not afraid of information. I’m amazed at how many people are. And how quick people are to put the conspiracy theory label on something, or call it disinformation.

You’ve said tens of millions of Americans didn’t trust the election results. I wonder, how much do you think that’s because Republican leaders, from President Trump on down, told them not to trust the election results?

I think that there’s a range of reasons why. But I’d say the main reason is that they saw their TV screens, observers not being able to observe. They see in states where all these other counties can turn in millions of votes, but in a few large counties in swing states, they just can’t get the vote totals in by 10 o’clock at night, for some reason. It just raises a level of suspicion.

Well, in Wisconsin that’s because —

It’s unfortunate the mainstream media’s revealed themselves to be so unbelievably biased that people on the other side of the aisle, the other side of the political spectrum, simply don’t trust them anymore. That’s part of the issue, too.

One last thing. Where are you on running for re-election next year?

Haven’t decided. Don’t need to decide for a while.

Do you have a timeline for that?

Yeah. But I’m not necessarily going to reveal it to you.

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