CLAY: Right now, we got Alex Berenson, one of the most popular guests we have on the program because he tells you the truth in an era when it feels like so many other people are lying. Alex, thanks for making the time with us, my man.

BERENSON: Clay, you’re handling it solo today, huh?

CLAY: Yeah, just sitting up here piloting the plane. So far, we haven’t crashed into any mountains or anything like that. I did a solo show for six years for Fox Sports Radio, so I’m pretty used to it. Buck did a solo show too. Honestly, we have a lot of fun together, but it was more of an adjustment to have a partner on the air than it is to go back to being solo. It’s kind of like riding a bike. Once you’ve done it before, you can always do it again. At least, I would hope so.

BERENSON: Buck better get back to the show soon though, huh? (laughing)

CLAY: Well, he better back tomorrow. We were texting earlier; he wants to be back for President Trump. It’s easier on both of us when we got two voices instead of one. There’s no doubt about that. But okay, so let’s dive in here with the latest covid-related messes. All right. These vaccine mandates are turning into an incredible battleground. Alex, I have said if you thought the war over masks in schools was a significant one, it’s gonna make the battle over vaccinating children and mandates…

In that regard, that’s gonna make the mask battle seem like a water gunfight, right? I mean, we’re headed for an unbelievable civil war, I think, involving mandatory covid vaccination for children. Where are we? What’s the data showing about the efficacy of the vaccine? You’ve been pretty good at looking at the data and sort of forecasting where we’re headed. Where are we right now?

BERENSON: So, there’s the data; there’s the political battles. Look, the vaccine works for children the same way it works for adults. If you inject people with this mRNA product, their bodies produce spike protein and then their bodies produce an antibody to the spike protein. The antibody then goes away pretty rapidly for most people — especially in older people who are at the highest risk from covid — and you then have to give them a booster if you want them to have any additional protection at all against severe disease and death, it looks like.

Now, the vaccine people would say that the way I framed it isn’t necessarily true, that although infection and transmission protection goes away, protection against severe disease and death remains. But, frankly, the Israeli data over the summer didn’t support that, which is why the Israelis freaked out and made everybody get a booster. So it’s the same thing in children, okay? And children actually have an even bigger immune response.

And so they can get less of the dose — or a lower dose — and they do get spike proteins produced and they do get the antibody response. The question is twofold. One is, is there any benefit to this in children? And I would say the answer to that question is unequivocally “no” in healthy children. And I’m defining “healthy” very widely. I mean kids who aren’t sort of chronically ill, who don’t have chromosomal abnormalities.

I mean a wide range of children who aren’t severely ill go through covid, and it’s little more than a cold for almost all of them. There’s always gonna be exemptions. There’s always gonna be exemptions just as with the flu, but covid is not very dangerous to nearly all children. So, in that case, why give them any pharamceutical product that they don’t benefit from? And the second question is, is there a risk in doing this?

And the answer to that question also appears to me, anyway, to be “yes.” And the risk is that because you’re producing only one part of the virion, only one part of the viral molecule, your body focuses intently on that, on the spike protein rather than on all of the SARS-CoV-2, which is what you would respond… Your body would respond to all of SARS-CoV-2 if you were infected with the actual virus.

So for the rest of your life it is possible that you’re gonna — if you ever encounter SARS-CoV-2 in the wild, in nature after having been vaccinated, you’re gonna have a response that is centered almost exclusively on the spiked protein. And that can be dangerous because the spike protein can mutate. And so, to me, even if there were no risk, since there is no benefit to almost all children from being vaccinated, there’s no reason to vaccinate them.

And the idea that they should be vaccinated to protect older people, to me, is immoral. I’m just gonna say it. It’s immoral, it’s wrong, it’s not how we should live our lives. You don’t put children at risk to protect people near the end of their lives. It’s now how we should live in this society. But beyond that, there is a risk, and that risk right now is unquantifiable.

And my children — I’ve said this to you before — they are not gonna be vaccinated against covid with this particular product, with the mRNA vaccine. And they have been vaccinated against other illnesses, all other vaccines they’ve gotten. They are not getting this one.

CLAY: Well, there’s no doubt that you and I are gonna be labeled anti-vaccine because I’m making the same decision that you are with my children, which is, look, my kids are vaccinated for measles, mumps, rubella, all those things. They’re not vaccinated, for instance, for malaria. And if we were going to Africa, I would probably get them malaria treatment, right?

BERENSON: Yep.

CLAY: But living in the United States right now the risk profile of my kids getting malaria is very low, and I don’t want to risk anything by giving them malaria treatment. That’s not because I don’t think malaria is significant, the disease. It clearly is. But it obviously is not a risk factor for my children in America right now much like covid.

And so how much of a battle do you think this is going to be? I’m curious. The reason I’m asking you to looking forward a little bit is as covid cases increase the authoritarianism of the Biden administration and other leaders has increased as well, right? It’s basically in tandem as the cases go down as they did in the summer, suddenly the Biden administration comes out and they say, “Hey, you don’t have to wear masks anymore!”

And then the cases start going back up, and we’re talking about federal vaccine mandates; masks are back. Where are the cases going to go as we move further into the fall and inch closer into the holiday season? And do you agree with me that those two steps are in concert? As cases go up, the authoritarianism rears its ugly head every single time, but as cases go down, suddenly covid fear porn — as I call it — isn’t as significant and so restrictions are not as important. So where are we going with cases seems to dictate how the government’s gonna respond?

BERENSON: I don’t really agree with that because I —

CLAY: Oh, you disagree?

BERENSON: Well, I disagree with part of that. I would say in the last month and a half cases have gone down —

CLAY: Yes.

BERENSON: — as they did last year at this time. And yet the pressure has only increased. The mask mandate pressure has increased, and now the pressure to get children vaccinated has increased. I think that this has become sort of a flywheel that’s spinning on its own that essentially has very, very little to do with public health. It is totally clear at this point that the vaccines are of limited efficacy and that they (crosstalk).

CLAY: How long do they appear…? Sorry to cut you off there, but how long do they appear, based on the data that you see, to work? Let me just say this too. And do you anticipate that basically we are in a flu shot universe where essentially — you starting to see Moderna and Pfizer CEOs even come out and say — there’s going to be a yearly requirement for a covid shot in the same way that there is a flu shot that is available, although most or many people don’t take advantage of it? Is that where we are headed from a treatment perspective, in your opinion?

BERENSON: No, it looks to me like it’s shorter than that, actually. It looks like it’s four-to-six months after the second dose. And remember, the way the companies did the math initially — we’ve continued to do this — is we don’t count the month after the first dose; we only count two weeks following the second dose, and that’s when the vaccines actually appear to work for a little while.

You get maybe four months of protection, and it starts to decline and by six-to-seven months it’s at zero against infection and transmission, it looks like. Now, here’s the thing. People are increasingly aware of this, okay? Most of the country — and I’ve heard from a lot of people, and I can’t remember whether you got vaccinated or not.

CLAY: I have not. I have natural immunity.

BERENSON: Okay.

CLAY: So I got covid; recovered from it. I have not gotten vaccinated myself. I told my parents — who are over 75, I encouraged them — to get vaccinated. They got vaccinated. They’ve gotten their booster shots, right. Looking age stratification of risk, that’s my perspective.

BERENSON: Totally. Totally. So there’s a lot of people 50 years, 60 years old — and I’m even vaccinated right — even 40 or 30, who say, “You know what? I’m gonna get vaccinated. I got all my shots as a kid; I’m gonna get this thing. You know, there’s 83 million ads telling me to get it I can the get it for free; I’m gonna get it. I’ll get the two doses,” and some of those people had a pretty negative reaction after the second dose.

But we’re not talking about — I’m not talking about — people who got really sick. I’m talking about people who got it and got through the 48 hours of the sweats and fever or whatever and got done. Okay. Many of those people don’t want a booster. They’ve had it.

CLAY: Right.

BERENSON: Their view on this is, “You told me if I got the shot, we’d all go back to normal. Let’s get back to normal.” That was the promise in the spring. “Let’s just get it done, and this will be done,” and they’re now saying, “Why do I need a booster? Why aren’t cases going down?” You keep blaming the unvaccinated,” but they know people. A lot…

Everybody, I would say at this point, knows people who have been vaccinated and have gotten sick again, including some people who have gotten pretty sick including people who may have gotten sicker than anybody they knew last year. So people are saying, “Well, I don’t understand. If this thing is so great, why do I have to get it again and why do I know people who are getting sick?”

This is personal experience, right? But it’s over a broad segment of the population. And then they’re saying, “And why does my kid have to do this? I don’t understand. No kids I know have gotten sick from this! You keep telling me that this gets kids sick, but I’ve never seen anybody with a kid who’s getting sick.

“And my kid, if they get this, is going to get boosters for the rest of his or her life,” and they don’t want that. And they don’t want to be mandated, even if they’ve agreed, you know, on pain of losing their jobs, they don’t like the way this has happened. And so, people, I think, with kids are gonna draw a line in the sand.

CLAY: Can you come back and answer a couple more questions for me, you got time?

BERENSON: You know I’d love to.

CLAY: All right. We’ll bring Alex Berenson back. By the way, if you’ve got a question you’d like for me to ask him, @ClayTravis, tweet me right now for those of you who are on Twitter. I’ll pick one of your questions during the break to ask him, have time for a couple more with him.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: We’re talking with Alex Berenson. Alex, deluged with questions @ClayTravis. You can go look at many of these questions rolling in, make Alex yourself and think about it for your Substack which I would encourage people to check out ’cause I know you’re not allowed on Twitter. But my goodness, the number of people that have an absolute ton of questions for you is fantastic. I’m gonna try to get as many of these in as we can so if you can answer a little bit fast, Alex, it would be great.

BERENSON: Yes. Okay.

CLAY: Natural immunity. Do we have any studies on how vaccines…? People who have already had natural immunity know they had covid and recovered from it and are then being forced to get a vaccine as well, how does that impact them? Do we know anything?

BERENSON: Great question. We really don’t know. The vaccine advocates again would say, “Oh, get a vaccine. Even if you’ve had covid and recovered, it will improve your response.” There was actually some data, there was a paper that came out in March from Spanish researchers in Mt. Sinai that suggested two doses was not a good idea if you’d had covid; it would sort of overwhelm your T-cells.

But that one dose would help this is one of these things — this is one of many, many things — that if we were talking about this in a reasonable way and we were transparent there’d be a lot more research being done on this and we could say to people, “Natural immunity is great. It’s great, unless your antibodies fall below this level in that case get a dose or maybe we want everybody to get two doses.”

But we’re not allowed to have those conversations in an honest way and so, you know, Fauci and his acolytes are all just saying natural immunity doesn’t count, which is just bizarre because it’s very, very clear that even without a booster — or even without a single dose of vaccine — your natural immunity is very powerful.

There’s a study out of Israel that came out over the summer that really is the definitive study about this that showed that people who’d gotten vaccinated were 13 times as likely to be infected with covid postvaccine as people who had natural immunity. So, I would not be running out to get vaccinated if I’d had covid and recovered, and I certainly wouldn’t be running out to get a booster.

CLAY: What about…? Two questions, quickly. Do quarantines in schools make any sense at all?

BERENSON: No. No. No.

CLAY: “No.” That’s an easy answer, right? Doesn’t make any sense.

BERENSON: No. Let every kid in the world get this and recover from it and be done with it. That would be the best thing we could do.

CLAY: England has good data on covid deaths. What are the latest numbers out of England showing you as it pertains to who’s dying postvaccination and not vaccinated?

BERENSON: Sure. So older people are dying postvaccination, just like older people die of covid in general. And what’s happening in England right now is very interesting and very worrisome. So, they have a ton of cases. They have a ton of cases and a lot of hospitalizations. Deaths are lower than they were in the winter peak, which is…

Everybody who’s sort of on the Vaccine Fanatic Train says, “Oh, look how well vaccinations work.” Yes, deaths were lower than we were in the winter peak. But for the last now two to three months, England has had this sort of stubbornly rate of death about a thousand covid deaths a week every week and it’s actually going back up again in the last few days. So, England seems to be in a bad place right now. (music) I can hear the music coming up.

CLAY: Yeah, I’ve gotta let you go. You were killing it.