BUCK: We’ve been mentioning the covid cases and I want to dive into the school situation with Clay here in a moment. We aren’t just at a high level of covid spread in the United States right now. We are at the highest level of covid spread ever, all right? This is the data from the CDC as listed in the New York Times. It comes directly from the CDC. We’re at 405,000 cases on average as of January 2nd. Over 14 days, over a two-week period, that is a 204% rise.

Cases have doubled in two weeks, on average. Now, deaths, thank heavens, are still at a relatively low level. You have not an increase in the average death rate. It’s about 1,200 a day. In fact, it’s down 3% over the last 14 days, which of course is in line with Omicron is less dangerous. There’s still a lot of Delta out there. There’s still other variants, but Omicron is substantially less dangerous, which is very, very good news.

We may get to a point where we’re at the end of the pandemic here, by and large, because they’re so much natural immunity from so many people getting infected. Particularly with this big surge of Omicron the chance of someone never getting covid at this point given how Omicron variant spreads is small. But, fortunately, it’s less dangerous than some of the other variants. Given all this, there’s still discussion about shutting down schools, and you can hear people talking about the danger to kids still.

Here’s Dr. Scott Gottlieb on Face the Nation on Sunday talking about children dying at 200 times the rate as compared to the flu. Clay and I will break this down for you.

GOTTLIEB: We have to recognize this has not been a benign disease in young children. There’s a perception that young children haven’t been hit hard to date from coronavirus. That’s just not true. We’ve recorded more than 600 pediatric deaths from covid over the last two years. To put that in perspective, we have one death from flu in the pediatric population last year and so far two this year. So over a period of time, we’ve done a very good job protecting children generally from respiratory infections. We’ve recorded more than 600 deaths from covid against three deaths from flu.

It’s amazing how all the “experts” are now acknowledging that cloth masks don’t protect you from covid. Saying this for most of the past 18 months got you threatened with social media bans. Now it’s suddenly acceptable to say: pic.twitter.com/hTnMfSmMNd

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) January 2, 2022

BUCK: Okay. This is bullcrap, and this guy is intentionally misleading people. Let’s start with this, ’cause I actually checked the numbers, Clay. We checked the numbers here on this show. An average flu year… Last year there was apparently no flu which is a whole other conversation to be had, right? In an average flu year, 150 children die from flu. About 150 is the number you see. So it’s not two. It’s 150.

The 600 number he gave you, a lot of that are people who died with covid — children with covid not from covid, and even within the from covid based on the most recent data, 70 of the children who have died from covid had substantial comorbidities, effectively a nonfunctioning immune system, pediatric cancer. They were at serious risk from any disease that could possibly be out there. But he’s making it seem like this needs to happen. Why, Clay? They’ve just approved boosters for kids over 12. Your kid has to get the shot.

CLAY: There are many parts of the covid-response universe that to me are indefensible from a data perspective. Trying to scare parents, to me, is the single worst thing that’s occurred over the past couple of years, and Gottlieb is smart enough to know exactly what he is doing. The same thing is true of Dr. Fauci and everyone else. And I just want to keep hammering this home because I think it’s so significant but because I’m the parent of three young kids.

I’ve got a 13-year-old, an 11-year-old, and a 7-year-old, and they matter more to me than anything in the world. Anything. If I thought they were in substantial danger from covid, I would be taking whatever measure was necessary to protect them. The reality is much of parenting is about analyzing risks and behaving in a rational fashion. That’s a real truth. My kids and your kids are under more danger right now of being murdered, of dying in a car accident, of drowning.

If they are young and you look at the years ahead — as Buck just said — as opposed to the past couple of years when the flu has disappeared, they are under more danger, young kids are, from the seasonal flu, 5- to 11-year-old kids, that is, 11 and younger. Those are all super significant factors, okay? They should be spread far and wide because they undergird the responsibility that we all have that schools remain open.

And Buck, to your point right now, Chicago schoolteachers are threatening to not return to school, arguing that there is a danger from covid that is so substantial that we need to pull all kids out. The failures that we have had as it pertains to children surrounding covid — Buck, you know this — is the data reflects that we never should have shut down schools. But if we were going to shut down schools, the biggest failure of all is that we didn’t reopen every school in the country in the summer and fall of you 2020.

We didn’t do that because Democrats were trying to drag Joe Biden across the finish line, and they made the calculated decision that terrifying parents was going to help them with suburban women and with some suburban men who just didn’t like Trump. They were gonna hang all of the deaths from covid on Trump. That storyline, it’s gone now, right? More people have died with covid under Joe Biden’s presidency than died with covid under Donald Trump’s. As you said we are at an all-time high for the number of covid cases. And what you’re starting to see is a pivot to, “Hey, maybe cases don’t even matter as much.” Did you see what MSNBC said?

BUCK: Of course. Yeah. Chris Hayes said that treat this like the flu which some of us have been saying for almost two years now. They’re returning to the original arguments that were made to try to get us to avoid the lockdowns, the mandates, the mask mania, all of it. But if we’re really going to look at this and not only do an after-action report to assess the damage but to help us to guide us right now, we have to look at the downside.

.@chrislhayes on the weird reality for vaccinated folks amid omicron wave:

The risk went from something we hadn’t really dealt with before in our lifetimes, to something that looks more like the flu. The flu can still be dangerous—but we do not reorient our lives around the flu. pic.twitter.com/4K5qNOplpW

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) December 30, 2021

The upside of all these programs — whether it’s masking, forced vaccination, social distancing, lockdowns — is almost zero for people that are really looking at this. It’s very hard to make a case. The only exception would be the increase in vaccination that you might get in some places for the at-risk population. But as we know, it didn’t stop the spread. All the other stuff? Lockdowns, crazy. Masking, irrelevant. All these things didn’t work.

But the costs are very real, and we’re still just getting a sense of what they are. This is in the New York Times over the Christmas break as Clay and I were out on vacation. I read this, and I wanted to bring it to your attention. This is a quote from it: “The Students Returned, But the Fallout From a Long Disruption Remained.” Here it is: “Nationally, the high school-age group has reported some of the most alarming mental health declines, evidenced by depression and suicide attempts. Adolescents have failed classes critical to their futures at higher rates than in previous years, affecting graduations and college prospects.

“And as elected leaders and public health officials scrambled to bring students back to school last winter and spring, the focus on having the youngest and most vulnerable students return to in-person instruction left many high school students to languish, with large numbers missing most or all of the 2020-21 academic year.” Clay, suicide, depression, academic left-behinds (if you will) are at catastrophic levels.

Kids are killing themselves because of the mental anguish they’ve been put through by being masked up, separated from their friends. Lot of homes can’t really handle having a kid home five days a week instead of being in school, there’s maybe only one parent, there’s difficult family situations. And they don’t even factor this in. You know, Fauci, it’s cruel what they’re doing. I mean, that’s really what Fauci and the teachers unions and Randi Weingarten have done to kids is cruel, and they need to answer for this.

CLAY: It’s inexcusable, and unlike many of the people — and I wish… Look, you always feel like you have to say this because you’ll get clipped and somebody will be like, “Oh, Clay and Buck don’t care about death.” Let me be clear here. I wish we were all immortal, right? I wish that my grandma and your grandpa and me and everyone that I love would never die, right? I wish that I could snap my fingers and make that a reality.

Overdose deaths have doubled since we went with lockdowns. When you average in that the people who were dying of overdose are in their twenties, their thirties, their forties, and then you also factor in all of the kids whose lives are being inalterably ruined in many ways by not having school, we’re taking away the quality of life of young people, and we are on the back end not really preserving very much of a quality of life for old people.

We have had failed. Being unable to live in a nursing home and be around other people is not giving them a quality of life, either. This is — and I want to keep hammering this home because it’s true — the biggest American policy failure since Vietnam, and I think it’s even worse than Vietnam, if you look at our response to covid. I don’t even know how far back in time you have to go — probably outside of the twentieth century, almost — in order to look at how big of a systemic failure this is.

BUCK: It’s the most disastrous, painful, and destructive decision made by any public health apparatus in modern history. I don’t know what you could think of that would even begin to align with this — and they will never admit it, friends. Just know that right now. They will never admit it.