CLAY: Buck, I know you’re like me that some of these statements that are finally being made by some of the most die-hard masking proponents out there are somewhat enjoyable to watch. We discussed Dr. Leana Wen’s transition from, “You can’t leave your house if you’re not vaccinated; you shouldn’t be able to cross state lines,” to now acknowledging basically that we need to get back to normal.

What about Dr. Osterholm, who was one of the primary — I would say primary — CNN sources for a long time. University of Minnesota-affiliated doctor, I believe. He basically has now come out and said, “Look, everybody’s done with masking.” He’s been tiptoeing up to it for a while. Here’s what he said most recently. Listen.

After judge strikes down mask mandate on mass transit, Dr. Michael Osterholm says issue has become “a philosophical and political issue, not a science issue.”

“The U.S. public is done with the pandemic, even though the virus is not done with us.” https://t.co/HjzaNbEjm1 pic.twitter.com/HSiPROTAzl

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) April 24, 2022

BUCK: I’ve talked about the prophylactic device to try to explain my thinking from the early days on this one.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Cloth masks do functionally — when you think of the aerodynamics and the airflow – nothing if you are in an environment where there is substantial covid aerosolized in the air because it’s the same way you can breathe, right? The air goes up; the air goes along the sides. You’re breathing in; you’re breathing out. It’s getting out there. It doesn’t make a difference. But it’s almost like people who say, “Well, I am judicious.”

CLAY: “I practice safe sex,” and you’re bragging about wearing condoms with holes in it and people say, “Well, you’re really kind of defeating the purpose.” That may be a metaphor or an analogy that people can understand better when it comes to masks because there’s such a political association with masks now. But if you were bragging about wearing condoms ’cause you practice safe sex and the condoms were ripped or defective, we would say, “Yeah, you’re not really doing what you’re claiming you do.” That’s basically a mask.

BUCK: And the, quote, “scientific consensus” on this never actually grapples with just the rational reality that we’re all aware of, that we can all see and understand, right, which is why on the Bill Maher show over the weekend… You should pull up that list of the craziest things that we were made to do. I think you asked for that on Twitter. I saw there’s some great one on there.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Here was on the Bill Maher show, our friend Mary Katharine Ham was on the panel, and they’re talking about some of the dumber things when it comes to masking.

BUCK: Those were… All those things that they were talking about — and, yeah, we should laugh at them insofar as it is a mockery. But it also makes me angry, and I do agree with that sentiment that people have. I mean, we mock it to prove how stupid it is, but it also was really outrageous that this was done.

Clay, none of that ever made sense from an epidemiology perspective. So what are all these blue check epidemiologists on Twitter thinking about themselves now? Those were panic moves, those were panic maneuvers from a society where unfortunately a loop was created, and I’ve been wondering about this. Do you think they would have been less crazy if a Democrat had been in office when the pandemic hit?

Now, you have a to say what about the rest of the world, right? That comes into play as well. But I do think the American response very much informed a lot of the Western European and international response. But would there have been less willingness to completely dial up the panic to 11 — for those who are Spinal Tap fans, to take it to 11 — if a Democrat was in office.

Because with Trump it was clearly, if everyone is completely freaked out, they’ll be scared, they’ll want change, they’ll want normalcy, they’ll vote this guy out. That was the thought process for the libs. Do you think that if Joe Biden had been president, they would have been a little less insane, or just as insane locking down parks and arresting paddleboarders?

CLAY: I think they would have been less insane because Biden would have been on the ballot as the president who’s in charge. Remember what they did to Trump. I don’t think the New York Times has done it since. But Memorial Day in 2020, they put a hundred thousand names on the cover basically of the New York Times, if I remember correctly, trying to say, “Hey, these are all the people that are dead.”

And they tried to hang all of that on Trump: “The reason why these people are dead is because Donald Trump has done a bad job.” As soon as Biden got elected many of those death trackers have disappeared, Buck, and I haven’t seen the New York Times similarly do a 500,000, a 750,000, maybe they’ll do it for “a million covid deaths,” and I’m saying that in quotation marks.

Because many of the covid deaths are people who died of be comorbidities and other things. But I’ve always wondered, what would have happened on masks, Buck, if Trump had been a huge mask guy back in February? Remembered when they said, “Hey, nobody needs to wear masks,” because Dr. Fauci himself said they don’t work, and then they flipped? What if Trump had been a die-hard proponent of masking? What would the country look like then?

BUCK: Remember Fauci said (impression), “It may make people feel better. That was a lie, they may be make you feel better but it’s not gonna do anything.” He was mocking masks in February of 2020, okay? Not 200 years ago, two years ago.

CLAY: I think even in March of 2020 he was mocking masks.

BUCK: Sorry, it was March of 2020. That’s right. I sit here and I say — ’cause people will accuse me. They’ll say, “Masks…” And this is the one part of it that I refuse to let this go. They say, “Oh, masks shouldn’t be political.” Democrats made masks political. I hated masks when Trump was president. I hated mandates when they went along with the CDC advice under Trump.

I thought Fauci and Birks, when they were Trump advisers, were the worst ’cause I thought they were wrong. It was about what was true. And people can go back in my Twitter timeline. They can see what I was saying then, go back in your Twitter timeline. You and I were talking about this in March of 2020, and it wasn’t about what was gonna help the team.

It was, “I don’t want people doing stupid stuff that’s gonna raise everyone’s anxiety and not actually make them safer from a disease,” and that is exactly what the establishment did. I actually was in a hospital yesterday for a little bit, helping a family member with something.

They made me put on a mask on when I walked in and I’m looking at them. I just want to be like, “This is a hospital. I understand there’s a sense of, “Oh, we need to have elevated protection.” But they should know better than anybody else what the actual controlled studies show, which is that this cloth mask doesn’t do anything.

CLAY: Yeah. Look, in May of 2020 I remember the first time I had to put a mask on to get on an airplane. I was flying from Nashville to Panama City Beach — or maybe I was coming back, one way or the other — and Southwest Airlines had implemented a new mask mandate. This Thursday, I will get on an airplane, and it will be the first time in almost two years that I haven’t had to wear a mask while traveling.

That entire time it’s been infuriating, and I understand people out there who say, “Well, I don’t know why you argue about this. I don’t know why masking needs to be political.” If you are as a party making me do something that has no benefit whatsoever to my overall health and lecturing me that I have to do it — and that I can’t fly on an airplane, that I can’t enter a place of business unless I have a mask on — you made it political, not me.

Because from the get-go. If they had said, “Hey…” What Fauci said, “It may make you feel better. If it makes you feel better and you don’t care about the science, you have a right to wear a mask for the rest of your life. But I think you look like a moron, and I think you are the definition of someone who hasn’t used two years’ worth of data when you could have done the barest minimum of research and recognized that you were not providing any benefit at all.

“But if you want to do that, you can do it.” As soon as you make me do it, then you’ve made it political. I don’t understand how you can argue, “Oh, the mask should have never been political.” When for a political reason, you are making me do an action, then you made it political. What, I’m just supposed to acquiesce? I’m just supposed agree to what you are mandating and not fight back against the lunacy?

No, no, no. When you implement a rule and make everyone do it, it isn’t the person who says, “No, this doesn’t make any sense; I’m not gonna do that” that has made it political. It’s you! The initial forcing of people to wear masks was the political act, Buck. And so this idea of it somehow being political and, “Oh, it’s unfortunate this became political.” No, it’s unfortunate that we allowed a bunch of nincompoops who couldn’t read basic data or renewed to look at basic data to dictate two years of our lives. That’s what’s unfortunate.

BUCK: And the people that are bemoaning now the lack of faith in the “public health officials,” it’s as though they expect us to not pay attention to reality. If you had a stockbroker who only lost you money, eventually you would say, “I don’t think this is a great stock picker. I don’t think this is somebody that I should be trusting my money to.”

The public health authorities in this country as they exist, the CDC, the NIH, NIAID — which is Fauci’s little fiefdom under the NIH banner and as well as at the city and state level. Clay, I was just watching this morning there’s some, you know, doctor who works for the New York City department of, you know, health and sanitation (haltingly) said, “The data is very clear. You should probably get a shot for your children ’cause your children will be safer.”

This guy’s reading off of some cue cards. I think he’s like the new health commissioner for something or other. I just want to look at this guy and say, “Why are you still encouraging children to get a vaccine for something that can’t even be shown to statistically have any benefit for them whatsoever, when it also doesn’t stop grandma from getting the virus? We know it doesn’t stop the spread of the virus. So what does it do?” They just don’t care. They just don’t. It’s like we’re all supposed forget about everything we’ve observed, and that is true.