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Clay and Buck

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Dr. Fauci Turns Down Our Invitation Again

23 Sep 2021

BUCK: We have an update from Dr. Fauci. It seemed as though yesterday maybe Clay and I had shamed the NIAID comms office into giving us an opportunity. At first it was a “no,” a “no forever,” and then it was we need more details, and now I think the latest is that we’re back at “probably no forever,” but we’re not gonna give up easily, Clay. We are a persistent bunch here on the Clay and Buck show.

CLAY: Can they text us the latest email, ’cause I need to hear “Dr. Buck Fauci” reading the latest correspondence from Fauci. So, as a rehash from what happened yesterday, we requested Fauci, what, like couple weeks ago, probably, and finally got an answer, and it was that he was overwhelmingly busy. Although did you see today –

BUCK: But he’s available for photo shoots.

CLAY: Yeah. Yes.

BUCK: He’s like an underwear model now, Dr. Fauci. I don’t know if you know this.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: He’s got abs. He wants to show his abs.

CLAY: The New York Times… There’s a documentary coming out called simply “Fauci,” which is a hagiography of Dr. Fauci’s career. And the New York Times had him sit for a clear photo shoot. He’s all made up and it’s totally ridiculous, and so we read that he was overwhelmingly busy and we talked about it on the show, and then we got another email where they were like, “Hold on.” After we had ridiculed… ‘Cause look, the truth of the matter is this. Fauci does every possible media source that is friendly to him under the sun. And we legitimately have questions we’d like to ask.

BUCK: This just goes to the whole pretense here, which is that he is not a partisan actor; he has no politics.

CLAY: That’s exactly right.

BUCK: Why is it the case that you don’t see Fauci…? Shouldn’t he be just as quick to go on to conservative outlets — “Republican-leaning” or however you want to describe it — as he is on the others? And we all know the answer is “absolutely not.”

He probably has an honorary chair in the greenroom of MSNBC and CNN. He appears on outlets… Also ask yourself this question, everybody. When was the last time somebody not named Senator Rand Paul or perhaps a few other Republican members of Congress, in the media posed a tough question to Fauci that really, for example, pointed out:

“You said this at this point, and now you’re saying this. Why did you get this so wrong? What should we think about listening to your predictions going forward and into the future?” Clay we also have the beginnings of what we’ve been saying for a while coming up now, which is the BLM protesting of the vaccine mandate here in New York City.

We’ve been saying, “Hey, this narrative that you get from the media of it’s only those anti-science Trump supporters who won’t get the shot…” Well, there are black and Latino Trump supporters, of course. But a large percentage of young black and Latino adults in New York City are Democrats.

And a large percentage of them as well, the largest by demographic group, are unvaccinated. And this is now starting to come with real consequences for people. They’re saying that it’s racist, and we should get into this in a few minutes.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: One guy that doesn’t want to talk to us, Buck, your old high school chum, alum, Dr. Fauci. Dr. Fauci yesterday —

BUCK: I’m not that old, by the way.

CLAY: But high school alum. You’re chums in the sense that you graduated from the same high school. Dr. Fauci came out, his representation yesterday, and said, “No, we’re too busy. Got this documentary, got this photo shoot that I gotta do with the New York Times, gotta go on with Joy Reid eight times this week, gotta go on and talk to my boy Jake Tapper 14 times.”

BUCK: We’re gonna see him on Dancing With the Stars any moment now.

CLAY: Very soon. Too busy to talk to us. We read the email from him yesterday. And then amazing. After we read the email, it’s like somebody at NIH was like, “Hey, they’re making fun of the fact that Fauci says he’s too busy.” So we got a new email. And they were, like, “Hey, when would you like to have him on? Can we get any details on this?”

So we responded. And then they came back and rejected us again. And we have the email that was sent to us. This is a very real email. I’m gonna bring in “Dr. Buck Fauci” here to read the most recent correspondence from the esteemed Dr. Fauci to the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show. Take it away.

BUCK: (impression) “Good afternoon, Clay and Buck show. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to make it work this time. As you know Dr. Fauci’s schedule is packed, and he has to turn down more than 95% of the requests we receive, period. Respectfully, the office of Dr. Fauch. P.S. Clay, you must cease and desist all your superspreader events of college football where the droplets are flying even more than the interceptions. It’s getting to be too much of a public health risk.” Everything except for the P.S., they actually said.

CLAY: So, first of all, that’s such BS, to say they turn down 95% of interview questions. I’m sure they do, and as someone who has done local radio, trust me, I’ve gotten turned down for a ton of interview requests, right? You reach out when you do local radio or smaller market radio for people all the time, and most of the time you don’t get them, right? That’s normal. But I doubt that Fauci is turning down very many people who have an audience in the millions, right? More people —

BUCK: There are millions of people listening to this show.

CLAY: More people listen to this show than watch Jake Tapper or Joy Reid, and he’s on there all the time.

BUCK: And we would ask him real questions, by the way. I want to ask him questions. I don’t want to… I give my word on air that we would be respectful and ask questions and that’s how we would do it if they will have him on.

CLAY: Same thing here, and we would do the same thing for any guest.

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1994: Biden Said “It Wouldn’t Matter” If Haiti Sunk Into Sea

23 Sep 2021

CLAY: How about Joe Biden — who has a comment on everything — now being under fire for the collapse, the chaos at the border? In particular, it appears that most people right now in Del Rio, Texas, are originally from Haiti. And Joe Biden, well, he’s not exactly been the biggest fan of Haiti’s importance to the United States. This is from 1994. Let’s listen to what Joe Biden thinks about Haiti and its impact on the United States.

BIDEN: A leading editor, uh, of a — of a paper in the Delaware Valley, ummm, wrote — asked their reporters to come down and talk to me and said, “Why is Biden so concerned about Bosnia and not about Haiti? Is it because blacks are involved in Haiti, blacks are what are at stake in Haiti, and in Bosnia they are Europeans, whites”?

Um, there is major, uh, arsenal of nuclear weapons, uh, where they have long histories of national wars where ethnicity dominates. Uh, uh, that is a phenomenal potential consequence to the United States. If Haiti… God-awful thing to say: If Haiti just quietly sunk into the Caribbean or rose up 300 feet, it wouldn’t matter a whole lot in terms of our interests.

CLAY: (laughing) That is Joe Biden, by the way, also in control of his mental faculties in 1994. Buck, isn’t it kind of crazy to hear Biden in ’94 compared to Biden in 2021?

BUCK: Not entering senility, but stupid nonetheless. Not a smart man. Never has been.

CLAY: Yes. That’s 27 years ago, now.

BUCK: May I say, any Democrat who disagrees with that will have to contest with the fact that even Democrats until about five minutes ago, would all say, “Joe Biden, nice guy, not that smart.”

CLAY: The consensus.

BUCK: That was actually the assessment. That was the consensus on Joe Biden. And, yeah, what you see going on right now is what always happens when there’s an immigration crisis with Democrats in charge. They find a way to turn it into essentially a human interest and emotion-driven story.

They will focus on certain migrants and say, “Oh, my gosh. Look at the sadness in this person’s eyes,” and you’re supposed to be say, “Oh, wow, okay. So I guess we should forget about what’s actually happening at a macro level, what’s going on with lawlessness.” If it’s just people are sad and want to live in America instead of wherever they’re from, why have an immigration system?

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: You start getting back to very basic questions with all this. Bill Melugin, who is your colleague over at Fox, Clay, had some great reporting from yesterday. And this really… This is what they don’t want is people to know: The numbers. Because the numbers tell a story that’s hard for Psaki to spin.

The biggest set of numbers they don’t want to give are how many have been let into the United States already. That’s… I’ll tell you I think you’ll find out that number Friday at about 4:45 P.M. Eastern Time. I think all of a sudden there are some DHS release, “Oh, you know, no big deal,” right before the weekend.

CLAY: And, by the way, this is just a fraction of the people that are actually getting in, right? These are the people that we’re officially letting in.

BUCK: And this one place on the border.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: I was speaking to a friend who is in Border Patrol in Rio Grande sector down near McAllen, and they still got people showing up —

CLAY: Coming across like crazy.

BUCK: — coming across, got-aways, the whole thing. This is just one area of the border but the visual with what really does — and, by the way, I’ve been in refugee camps. I’ve been in Syrian refugee camps on the Syria-Jordan border, so I know what they’re like. What you’re seeing on your TV screens when you have this Del Rio depiction?

That’s what a refugee camp looks like. It’s makeshift. It’s all thrown together. The numbers, though, are really interesting. And again from Melugin over at Fox, as of yesterday they had 6,722 migrants, 4,742 family units — okay — 1,489 single adult men, 300-plus pregnant women. Now, this really matters because when you break it down by segment what you see are people who are very intentionally trying to game the immigration system, right?

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: You have people who are —

CLAY: Those 300 people, you’re born in America, you’re an American citizen.

BUCK: These are people who have said, “I’m going to make sure that this is an anchor-baby situation where I’m going to just go across the border right away.” And, by the way, other countries don’t have this for a reason.

CLAY: It’s a big deal; we don’t talk about it. Yes.

BUCK: It’s not supposed to be… You know, if you go to visit France and your wife happens to have a baby in France, they have different rules with these things than we do here where it’s, “What are your parents. Are your parents citizens?” For anyone who disagrees with this, there’s a whole industry of birth tourism in California in particular.

Where generally, not entirely, a lot of Chinese nationals will pay to show up, have a baby in America, go back to China, and then as the child gets older, “Oh, here’s my U.S. passport. Now I want to go to ACLU and live in America,” right.

CLAY: Which, by the way, I don’t begrudge anybody for taking advantage of our stupid system, right? Our system needs to change. Buck, if you were in China and you had the resources to get a kid double passports where you’re a Chinese national and also an American national, I don’t blame elites for trying to take advantage of this.

I don’t think we should have birthright citizenship. Right? If you look around the world, this is an extreme outlier that in the United States if you cross over to our border and happen to have a child here, you don’t become a citizen in the vast majority of countries in the world. I don’t think most Americans know that. Birthright citizenship is a pretty radical idea.

BUCK: It is and it actually hasn’t really been… The legal analysis of this you have to get into it pretty deep and subject to the jurisdiction therefore, and it’s never really been directly addressed in a way that —

CLAY: Nobody even wants to talk about it.

BUCK: Nobody wants to talk about it.

CLAY: People just presume that it should… But go to Japan and try to have a baby and become a citizen. It’s impossible.

BUCK: So the 300 pregnant women clearly that’s have a baby in America as soon as possible; it’s all paid for by the American taxpayer, of course, and then you have a U.S. citizen. The chance of you being deported with your new U.S. citizen baby is under any administration quite honestly zero.

So that’s why you have 300-plus pregnant women as of yesterday. But let’s go back to the family units. Because here’s the big thing. They keep saying, Clay, “Oh, the single adult men will be expelled under Title 42 authority,” even though a federal judge has come in and said, “Oh, you can’t do that. You’re not allowed to do that.”

But they pretend that it’s single adult males that will be sent back to country of origin. And this gets complicated, too, ’cause if you’re a Haitian national but you’re coming from Brazil, I guess they’re gonna send you back to Haiti, but you haven’t been in Haiti in years.

Anyway, the family units. The family units are where you’re going to get lots and lots of people into the U.S. according to the existing rules and actually when you talk to Border Patrol, they don’t want to get into what the rules are because they’re being gamed in so many different ways.

They don’t want it to be more clear. But family units, Clay, if you have anybody in that family who claims credible fear, the family unit cannot be separated. As we all know, the family unit is kept together. The whole family is essentially transferred into the United States.

And they say, “You have a notice to appear at some point, maybe.” That’s it. It’s the easiest thing in the world. And that’s why we already had reporting this week that thousands of Haitian migrants and also there’s some Cubans and Venezuelans, but thousands of Haitian migrants have already been let into the United States.

CLAY: And you’re probably right that the numbers will probably come out Friday afternoon right as we roll into the weekend, if they even have a tally of what the numbers actually are.

BUCK: How could they not have…? Could you think about this for a second? How could they not have…?

CLAY: Because they don’t have to have a tally because they don’t want to have to tell it.

BUCK: Senator Ron Johnson we had on earlier this week, ’cause he asked in a hearing and Mayorkas said, “I work such long hours. I work 16 hours a day or something and I don’t have that for you right now.” Isn’t that the most important number you could have? Isn’t that your job?

CLAY: Yeah. If you ask the CEO, “Hey, how are you trending on making or losing money?” and he’s like, “I don’t really know right now.” That’s kind of a scoreboard for what you do.

BUCK: I don’t have a loss statement for you, sir. We do other things here.

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What Would You Pay for a Hunter Biden Painting?

23 Sep 2021

BUCK: I’m still fired up about the Hunter Biden paintings.

CLAY: Yeah, we need to talk about this.

BUCK: Clay, I might need you to loan me a little money, ’cause I need to get in heavy on the Hunter Biden here, and it’s pricey. It’s pricey. These are paintings going for 50 to 500K.

CLAY: Just imagine what the reaction… But Hunter Biden, who has never sold a piece of artwork before, has some of his art being priced at $500,000. It’s unheard of. Those are unbelievable prices.

BUCK: He should just go all out with this and just have it be finger paintings. Just make it look like what your kindergartener would bring home from art class, because it might as well be. We all know what’s really going on here, which is influence peddling and selling of influence.

CLAY: Which he’s already done for decades on behalf of his dad.

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How Did All Those Haitians Get to the Border?

23 Sep 2021

BUCK: Jerry in Ellensburg, Washington. Hey, Jerry, you’re on the Clay and Buck show.

CALLER: Hello. How are you?

BUCK: We’re good, man. What’s going on?

CALLER: Well, I got a question, and I haven’t heard anybody talk about it. And that’s, how did all those Haitians get from Haiti to Mexico?

CLAY: It’s what we’ve been talking about.

BUCK: So there’s a little bit of an update on this. I was speaking to a friend yesterday who is at the border. I have Border Patrol contacts and friends that I talk to, and I have journalists who are actually doing real work down there.

And one contact I have was saying that they’re using social media, WhatsApp in particular, a couple of different social media platforms that are very specific travel instructions with waypoints. And they’re loading up onto trains and buses, and it’s all being coordinated via these different social media platforms.

What I really want to know, Jerry — and this one we don’t have yet — is who started this, right? Because we know how they’re getting the information, and we know the information is being distributed in this way and that people have it. Who started this? What was the inciting group or individual for all of it? And that yet, Jerry, we don’t have. But, yeah, they’re taking mass transit, basically. They’re taking buses and trains all the way up because they’re not coming from Haiti for the most part.


CLAY: Yeah. And what Jerry’s asking is a good question. How did they get from Haiti to Mexico in the first place?

BUCK: They’re not coming from Haiti.

CLAY: Who sent them there?

BUCK: They’re not coming from Haiti. They’re coming from Chile and Brazil and points in South America over land because they already have refugee status in South America — which means they should all immediately be rejected under any asylum claim when they get to the U.S. border with Mexico with, but I have a feeling that’s not happening. But Jerry, excellent question. Thank you for calling in.

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Stalinist ACLU Replaces Word “Woman” in RBG Quote

23 Sep 2021

BUCK: I like to read Soviet history. I find the history of the Soviet Union, of the totalitarianism, of the commies to be fascinating.

CLAY: Are you going to go on your honeymoon to Moscow one day like Bernie?

BUCK: No, I want to know how to defeat them because it feels like they’re running a lot of the playbook these days in the Democrat Party. So I think it’s important to know your adversary and actually have an understanding. ‘Cause, Clay, they do not teach the history of the American Communist Party in schools at all.

They do not teach the connections between the labor movement and communism at all. They do not teach people about the Soviet penetrations which we know about because of the Venona project. They don’t teach it at all, because the left in this country has a lot of sympathy for the Soviets.

I bring it up — and also a lot of ideological crossover — because they were known for actually changing, as a function of government policy, photographs, altering what was on placards in the background of different protests in the October Revolution. This is not really necessarily, I think, as confirmed.

The photograph thing is definite. There are people who believe that they would use razors to cut out the names of individuals from registers and different government documents during liquidation era under Stalin’s great terror. But that’s the kind of stuff you expect in a totalitarian regime, right?

Well, now, this isn’t the government. This is the ACLU. So, I understand there’s a distinction. But, Clay, they have decided to take out the word “woman” from a Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote. So here’s what they change this to. “The decision whether or not to bear a child is center to a [person]’s life, to [their] well-being and dignity when the government controls that decision for [people], they are being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for their own choices.”

That’s the RBG quote except the word “women” and “she” has been replaced with “persons” and “they.” This is truly Soviet-level stuff. They say crazy.

CLAY: Yeah. And again, for anybody out there who studied the Supreme Court at all, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s quest for equality under the law is her hallmark, and for women in particular. So the idea that you would replace and (laughs) change her wording is indicative of the spread of the tear-down-the-monument universe, right?

You have to not only tear down monuments. You have to tear down words that offend you in quotes that are otherwise iconic. The fact… I understand your point about this is not the government that’s do it winning but the ACLU, Buck, used to stand for the First Amendment.

They were the people who defended the rights of Nazis to protest march in Skokie, Illinois, in front of lots of Holocaust survivors. This was the group that was willing to stand up and take the slings and arrows of derision for being on the side of everyone’s right to speak.

BUCK: And now they share the ideology of the MSNBC comment section, and are effectively a tool of the repressive and regressive left. It’s a shame, Clay, but they don’t believe in liberty anymore, that’s for sure.

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Mayorkas: Jan. 6th Selfie Takers Are Biggest Homeland Threat

23 Sep 2021

MAYORKAS: We in the Department of Homeland Security — of course with our partners across the federal government and state and local law enforcement — consider domestic violence, extremism, uh, to be, uh the most prominent terrorism-related threat to the homeland, uh, right now. Uh, I think our response in anticipation of what could have materialized on September 18th demonstrates the lessons learned from the January 6th insurrection.

BUCK: Oh, there you go. So the DHS chief says that the massive overreaction and freak-out and the putting up of fences… Welcome back to the Clay and Buck show, by the way. This is Buck. Mayorkas there is saying, “Whoa, September 18th…” There were more reporters than there were right-wing protesters, whatever.

They act like they’re all domestic terrorists now, right? But people that show up who actually have a very legitimate gripe when they’re talking at least about the holding of people in solitary confinement for months on end because some judges in D.C. — some lib judge in D.C. — decides that it is a threat of continued insurrection to let these people out.

Clay, this narrative is very troubling that we have to keep hearing about the great threat to the homeland is essentially the Trump supporters who at any moment will overthrow the government and we have to be on constant guard, because that mentally manifests itself in all kinds of surveillance expansion, in abuse by the DOJ and by the courts. These narratives have consequences, and it’s really a political weapon. And that’s what Mayorkas is getting at.

CLAY: Well, and it’s also trying to continue to shift the story from the disaster at the border, right? That these videos finally come out of the — as it was just described — “insurrection,” and you see what it actually was, for the most part, inside of the Capitol. It was people who are completely without threat. They look like people who are going to a march, who are going to a protest.

BUCK: They’re literally taking selfies inside Capitol and taking pictures.

CLAY: Walking in and taking pictures of themselves. If this were an insurrection, if this were a coup, it would be the first insurrection of all time that was attempted by a selfie, right? (laughing) I know technology advances, but most coups involve tanks, weapons, guns, military. We’re talking about moms and dads with selfies, live-stream selfies.

BUCK: They were gonna live stream and shame the Capitol Police into submission inside that building? When you see the video — and, Clay, why isn’t all that surveillance footage put online for anyone to see? If it’s so terrible, we should see everything that happened. That’s public record. That should not be held back.

CLAY: No, I agree completely — and it would also allow, in theory, everybody to see what actually did, which is why it needs to come out as a part of these criminal prosecutions because juries, I think, need to see what actually took place there.

 

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Psaki Blames Boris for Calling on Press Without Alerting Her

23 Sep 2021

DOOCY: What is your understanding of what transpired in the Oval Office yesterday when we were all in there trying to hear from the president and the prime minister?

PSAKI: Which aspect?

DOOCY: Well, the British prime minister in the American Oval Office called on British reporters, and then when American reporters tried to call on the American president, we were (pause) “escorted out.” Put it that way.

PSAKI: Well, I think in that circumstance — and I think our relationship with the United Kingdom and with Prime Minister Johnson is so strong and abiding, we will be able to move forward beyond this. But uh, he calls on individuals, uh, from his press corps, uh, without alerting us to that intention in advance.

BUCK: How dare he call on individuals in his press corps without alerting Psaki Bomb in advance! I suppose that we’re supposed to take that as a justification for shouting — not only shouting down reporters asking Joe Biden, the president, a question, Clay. But also interrupting Boris Johnson, who say what you will, the guy does have a fancy accent so at least it’s fun to hear him sort of (impression) “talk about all the things.”

They’re telling us, he had to alert them beforehand? You think they could roll with things a little bit more in this Oval Office except we know what’s really going on here. Especially when there’s a problem, Clay, that they’re dealing with.

When they know this border situation. All it takes is Joe Biden… Remember the comment he made about Haiti sinking into the Caribbean. All it takes is for Joe Biden to say one really stupid thing and Psaki’s got “clean up on aisle five” the rest of the days.

CLAY: I love… What did she say? “Which aspect?” like just such a… We play just the opening one more time about that clip? She knows what the question is. Hey, you shoved the entire White House press corps out during the Boris Johnson and then Joe Biden media availability.

Listen. This is just… I’m trying to think of who it reminds me of. It’s like she reminds me of a really mean teacher who is just totally the kind of person who back in the day — I don’t know if they still paddle kids or not — would just kind of stand up there with the paddle in her hand kind of hitting it.

BUCK: I think you’re not supposed to paddle kids anymore.

CLAY: You know what, I think in the South they still paddle kids.

BUCK: Really?

CLAY: Oh, yeah, I think so. When I was in school kids got paddled all the time down here. But listen — you know what question he’s asking. We just need to hear the open, and she says kind of saucily and like disrespectfully and disdainfully, which aspect? Listen to this.

DOOCY: What is your understanding of what transpired in the Oval Office yesterday when we were all in there trying to hear from the president and the prime minister?

PSAKI: Which aspect?

DOOCY: Well, the British prime minister in the American Oval Office —

CLAY: You can stop it. Which aspect!

BUCK: There’s also a context here. And the context is, this isn’t the only time even last week when reporters whose job it is is to be able to ask the president questions — That’s really the White House press corps’ job.

CLAY: That’s why they get paid.

BUCK: They do that. They ask the president, they ask Jen Psaki, maybe some other officials questions. That’s what they do. And they keep having these handlers that are like, “Okay, okay, okay! Everyone shut up, shut up, shut up! Go, go, go, go, go,” and everyone realizes that’s a very weird thing to do to the press corps.

We have to point this stuff out even though sometimes it feels like we’re broken records on it. Could you imagine if the Trump administration, when Trump was having a bad week about the Russia collusion lies they told about him or something, right? Remember when that was, “Oh, Russia collusion,” and someone asked Trump a question about that and you had White House personnel under that administration shouting down reporters and shoving them out of the room?

CLAY: Shoving them out!

BUCK: CNN had a reporter who lost his hard pass for a day, which meant that he’d have to actually give his ID and get signed like everyone else who goes to the White House and is not given special privileges and access as a reporter. And it was like a national crisis. We were all supposed to be crying our eyes out about it.

CLAY: The First Amendment was under siege when CNN had its credentialing questioned in any way during the Trump White House. When Psaki basically turns into a nose tackle along with the White House communications staff and bulldozes people completely out of the Oval Office ’cause they can’t respond to questions.

And also, it just further elucidates to me the feeble nature of Joe Biden’s leadership, that Boris Johnson is comfortable taking questions inside of the Oval Office from his own media, and our White House press corps is so terrified of Joe Biden taking questions that they bulldoze everybody out of the Oval Office so that Biden can’t respond to any questions.

BUCK: They’re one bad Biden statement away from having to spend a few days convincing any… Look, there are some, as we always talk about — 30%, maybe 35%, maybe even 40 — of the American people who will be happy with the Joe Biden presidency. Although it isn’t 43% overall right now that approve of this. So we’re —

CLAY: In the latest Gallup poll, 43%, support Joe Biden. If I’m right about 40-40, basically you have 40 who are gonna support you no matter what you do, 40 who are gonna hate you no matter what you do, Joe Biden basically has drained down to the only die-hards who are still supporting him.

BUCK: So there’s gonna be this faction that no matter what he says… Joe Biden could walk out to the podium with nothing but a T-shirt on and his socks and his tighty whities and there are members of the Democratic Party, the White House press corps who would say, “It’s just Joe being Joe, everybody. It’s no big deal.” Joe could start…

CLAY: It’s refreshing to see the president without the suit on, what he really looks like.

BUCK: He could wander offstage muttering about how he has to go feed the pigeons or something and they would all be talking about: Tthis is Joe Biden is a great leader who can show his human side. It doesn’t matter what he does. But to people that are paying attention and can be persuaded that this was a really bad idea to foist this guy after the hiding-in-the-basement presidential campaign on the American people.

He’s just one bad statement away from losing even more of them, and I think that that means that Jen Psaki’s got quite job here. You say you’re Neo from The Matrix avoiding all this stuff all the time? Anybody that works in this White House has to be constantly maneuvering around the possibility of a Joe Biden flub.

CLAY: Which aspect, Buck!

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David Zweig Explains Misleading Covid Hospitalization Data

22 Sep 2021

CLAY: We had David Zweig on — I don’t know — probably a month ago or so to talk about masks on children and whether or not they made sense based on the statistical data. And, by the way, his article said that did not make sense. He’s now got a really interesting piece up that I’m encouraging you guys to all go read, looking at the data.

And the data in particular is surrounding hospitalizations and whether or not it’s a reliable metric. And the title of the piece at The Atlantic is, “Our Most Reliable Pandemic Number Losing Meaning,” and the subheading is:

“A new study suggests almost half of those hospitalized with covid have mild or asymptomatic cases.” You hear about this hospitalization number all the time. David Zweig joins us now. David, how could that be true, and what did you uncover as you reported this article that we just referenced?

ZWEIG: Yeah. It’s an interesting thing. During the pandemic, we generally have used three different metrics for kind of tracking what’s happening. There’s cases, but the problem with using cases is it really depends on who is tested and when, and that can greatly affect what we’re seeing — and also, cases doesn’t mean that someone is sick.

It just means that they’re infected. On the flip side, you have tracking mortality, which is finite. (chuckles) But it’s also a really lagging indicator, and it doesn’t count people who perhaps were really ill but recovered ultimately. So hospitalization numbers have been looked at as a really kind of good Goldilocks metric that’s definitive.

Either you’re in the hospital or not, and it tracks people who ostensibly are really ill. However, what I found in my reporting — and I write about this study, which is in preprint, which means it isn’t yet peer reviewed. But the authors of the study have a really strong track record with all their publications, and what they found is that in this year, in 2021, roughly half of all covid hospitalizations are for mild or even incidental or asymptomatic cases.

CLAY: And that’s a really interesting data point. So, roughly… I’m looking at the New York Times board right now. They say that 90,000 people right now are hospitalized with covid. Based on what your data suggests from that preprint article, roughly 45,000 of those people would have legitimate covid cases; the other 45,000 may be incidental, they might be relatively insignificant in terms of how severe they actually are?

ZWEIG: That is correct. That is what these authors found. So your listeners may be wondering, “Well, how is that possible? (chuckles) Why would people be in the hospital if they’re not really sick?” And there’s actually a good reason for it. The first is is that hospitals… It’s not necessarily a nefarious reason. Hospitals have to report to the federal government every patient who tests positive.

And most hospitals in the country are doing a universal screening on anybody who is admitted to the hospital. You are tested. So if you have someone from a car accident, someone with a broken foot or appendicitis, they’re in the hospital for something totally unrelated to covid, but in order to be admitted, they have to be tested.

The test comes back positive? Boom. That gets checked off as a, quote, “covid hospitalization,” and then another category of patients are people who showed up with covid symptoms, but they’re relatively mild and perhaps an emergency room doctor said, “Well, let’s admit this person anyway for observation because they have some underlying conditions.”

Or the patient’s complaining of a subjective feeling of shortness of breath even though their blood oxygen level is very high and seems normal, subjectively. And then their illness never progressed into anything beyond mild illness. So, you have these two large categories, and it’s pretty astonishing, but they found that they comprised approximately half of all covid hospitalizations.

And what’s interesting about this study, I had written a number of months ago about two separate studies on pediatric hospitalizations. And they used a totally different methodology. And they came to very similar conclusions with their findings. I think it was roughly 40 to 45% of the pediatric admissions were also deemed incidental or largely unrelated to covid.

BUCK: David, it’s Buck, and I was about to ask you about the pediatric covid hospitalizations, because we just mentioned this before you came on. There’s a lot of news coverage of that in August, right before the opening of schools and all the talk about what kind of mitigation measures should be in place and should it all be in-person learning. All those things, all these news stories — kind of breathless news stories — about an all-time peak in covid hospitalizations.

And I’m looking at one here from CNBC from just last month where they were saying that they were looking at an absolute peak for the week ending August 22nd when they thought this was the highest — I think it still is the highest — they had seen, of 300 admissions a day. So from what you’re telling us, it really could have been more actually like 150 a day nationwide who are hospitalized with covid as the primary reason for admission?

ZWEIG: Correct, that based on… So we now have, that I’m aware of, three separate studies. The pediatric studies, they did a method where the doctors did what’s called a retrospective chart review. They actually meticulously pored through each chart of the patients one by one. And this is in two different hospital systems in California.

Whereas the researchers on this current study, which was for an adult population, they used sort of data analysis, and they simply looked at the metric of anybody who is a covid hospital admission, and then they cross-referenced that: With those patients, how many of them had a blood oxygen level below 94%, which is NIH’s definition of severe covid.

And then they also included did any of these people get supplemental oxygen. And they deemed that sort of a moderate case of covid. And what they found is that roughly half of these people who are covid hospitalizations did not get supplemental oxygen and did not have an oxygen level below 94%. What they’re saying is, “If you don’t have either of those criteria, you don’t have severe or even moderate covid.”

BUCK: We’re speaking to David Zweig. He’s got a piece in The Atlantic: “Our Most Reliable Pandemic Number Losing Meaning.” I gotta ask David, are you gonna dig into the death data on covid as well? Because from the very beginning there has been a concern, a theory, however you want to frame it that there’s a portion — and I do not pretend to know what it is, but a portion — of the covid mortality that would be people who died “with covid” instead of “from covid.”

Because when we’re talking about hospitalizations, you’ve already found that there’s some major studies that are looking like maybe half of people this year who have been hospitalized with covid, they were hospitalized with, not from, right? Are you gonna look into that same distinction? Have you seen any data about that distinction when it comes to death from covid as it’s coded at hospitals across the country?

ZWEIG: Yeah, obviously that’s a really good question. I’ve talked with a number of researchers about this. And the reason why no one has really come out with something on this is that death certificates are apparently a really kind of noisy, messy, sloppy thing to look at, and obviously… So hospital admissions things are electronic records, there’s charts.

But the way death certificates are written and put together, there’s like an enormous amount of kind of discretion on who’s actually filling the thing out. There’s some people who have looked at this, and there is a pretty wide range of how the certificates are filled out. So it’s something that would be very challenging to come up with a definitive answer in the way that these hospital admissions studies have come up with a more definitive answer.

With that said, of course, this certainly begs the question (chuckles) that if you, you know, are finding this in the hospital admissions, one would assume there’s possibly at least some correlation with what are deemed covid deaths. It’s just that for whatever reason or reasons, people have not wanted to invest the resources for actually really digging into it because, from my understanding, it’s not something that can be done just using a simple sort of data analysis the way these researchers did on this hospitalization study.

CLAY: David, we talked with you about masking school children. If anything, this has just continued to be such a tempestuous and high-temperature-related debate. Have you found any more evidence that supports the idea of masking children in schools since you last talked to us and said, “Hey, there’s no real scientific evidence that this makes sense”?

ZWEIG: I have not seen anything since then that I find particularly compelling. As I probably mentioned with you guys last time, again, what I would urge everyone to do is to look toward Europe and where you see we have basically a real-world experiment taking place. For me, what I find most persuasive, more so than a study that’s done that has all sorts of noise kind of built into it and limitations. Observational evidence is pretty powerful.

And of course, countries are not apples to apples in the same way that, you know, different states or communities aren’t. But when you have a variety of countries that each of them have different vaccination rates, different case rates presently, and different mortality rates per capita — it’s all over the place — and yet there are unifying factors that none of them are masking little kids, to me, that’s compelling.

CLAY: And I just want to reinforce that because what you’re saying I feel like doesn’t get enough attention. Basically, all of the western democracies in Europe — in other words, peer countries of ours — are making the decision that masking kids in schools doesn’t make any sense?

ZWEIG: That’s correct. There are different age cutoffs. Some of them are no one’s wearing a mask, basically, all the way through the end of high school except perhaps in hallways or other certain circumstances. There’s another handful of countries where it’s up to age 12. And then there are a bunch of countries where it’s under age 6.

And that corresponds with the World Health Organization, which what they have repeatedly said, which is, “We do not want kids under age 6 wearing masks ever, period,” and they have stuck by this guidance again and again. So they haven’t wavered from it. So the United States really is an outlier in that. And if I may, it’s good that you brought this up because I think both of these things dovetail with each other.

The idea of risk to children, that some hospitalization numbers, for example, if we’re looking at them specifically for kids, that that drives a lot of the public conversation and ultimately policy. So if we have a misunderstanding as the public about risk to kids, well, that misunderstanding then, to me — you just follow the bouncing ball — then goes towards different mitigation measures that people may feel are necessary.

As a side point of whether they work or not, but just people say, “Hey, we better do anything we can.” So this isn’t to say that there aren’t some masks that do work in some circumstances. But the evidence, to me, is very, very thin that a mask mandate of little kids provides much benefit, if any, at all. And that’s what that large study talked about. So I think that these two issues are very much intertwined when we look at these sort of risk metrics and how they then lead to different mitigation policies.

BUCK: We agree — and, David, we appreciate the data and fact-based analysis and presentation for all of us. David Zweig, folks, writing a piece in The Atlantic on hospitalization metrics, and David please come back. Take a look at the death data if you would, please, and come back and talk to us about it.

ZWEIG: I’ll try.

BUCK: All right. Thanks.

ZWEIG: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

BUCK: Thanks so much. We appreciate it.

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