National Institutes of Allergy & Infectious Disease Director Anthony Fauci and other high-profile public health officials have been deified by the establishment -- and have not been held to account for flip-flopping, their recommendations' effect on the economy and social norms, or their continued ignoring of alternative treatments, Senator Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told Fox News on Monday.

On "Tucker Carlson Tonight", Johnson commented on the continued reverence given by much of the establishment and the public to Fauci, 80, who is one of President Joe Biden's top COVID-19 advisers and served a similar role for President Donald Trump.

"[H]e has been set up on a pedestal and basically – I refer to them as the COVID gods," Johnson said.

"You (Carlson) laid out the case quite nicely: the lies, the flip-flopping -- but I think the question you have to ask about Tony Fauci – and quite honestly the other people in our health care agencies-- is have their policy prescriptions worked?"

Johnson noted there have been 700,000 deaths from the pandemic, in addition to trillions in new federal spending, "economic devastation" and deepening divisions between the American people in part due to blanket federal mandates crafted by Biden and his advisers.

"We are at each other’s throats now with these divisive mandates are going to destroy our health care system, destroy our military readiness," he said, as the Pentagon is instituting mandatory injections of the coronavirus vaccine for servicemembers. 

Johnson said that the mandates and policy prescriptions continue to become more draconian as more proof comes out that they have been overall a "miserable failure".

He called Fauci and the feds' "biggest blunder" their refusal to consider early treatments, some of which were widely censored by Big Tech and downplayed by the media.

Johnson pointed to the case of ivermectin, an anti-malarial drug that some experts were suggesting to be somewhat potent against coronavirus. However, officials began warning Americans against the equine formulation of the drug because of its dangerous potency for what is a much smaller animal: the human.

CLICK TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

"Now they are all hopping on board this Merck molnupiravir peer review," Johnson said of the establishment experts. "The doctor groups I’m dealing with, they call it money-piravir. [Merck] patented ivermectin. They’ve been trash-talking ivermectin in favor now of this drug that will be like $700 a dose versus ivermectin cost about $0.06 or $0.07 a pill," he said.

"So again, you have to take a look at his record, which of course the mainstream media will never do. These people will never admit they were wrong, and they’ve got the power to make sure they are never proven wrong. There’s something very sinister going on here, tucker. It has cost tens if not hundred of thousands of people their lives."