CLAY: One of the reasons why we would love to have had Dr. Fauci on this show, even though his staff says they have no time to do this show, despite the fact that he’s doing every YouTube show under the planet in order to get attention. They found — and I gotta give credit to whoever tracked this down.

But this is from early in the 2000s on C-SPAN. Dr. Fauci was on taking questions, and he was asked about someone who had already had the flu. Listen to this clip.

Dr. Fauci used to talk about the value of natural immunity when it came to infections. Wonder what changed? pic.twitter.com/3Y6mdgWHCV

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) March 31, 2022

CLAY: Wow.

BUCK: What’s funny, Clay, is that that was what any honest doctor said. I mean, many doctors told me that early on in the pandemic. That was the consensus belief of the medical community, that there’s always exceptions to things in medicine, right? You’ll always find stuff that can defy what is generally known to be true.

But usually, natural immunity is better. Not always the case, but usually it’s better than even any vaccinated community you get, and they just lied to us about that. Fauci lied about it the whole time and here he is telling you about the flu. What are the chances that the flu vaccine is not better than natural immunity, as Fauci said there?

But then the new mRNA vaccines that were very rapidly rushed to market and very little testing over the long-term done on them, never mind everything else, that they were gonna suddenly defy what had been known in modern medicine for a long time?

Look, they didn’t want to allow there to be a loophole for people, and they wanted there to be a one-size-fits-all policy. And so that is why they just — in their authoritarian overreach — said, “Everybody, even if you’ve gotten covid before, must get the shot.”

CLAY: And not only that, Buck, arguably, that was a huge failure of American health policy because in the early days, it was hard to get the vaccine. And what we should have done is say, “Hey, if you already had covid, you likely have a durable protection through natural immunity. If you know that you had covid, you should step back out of the line and allow the elderly and the immunocompromised to rush to the front of the line.

“We’ll get them as many shots as we possibly can as quickly as we can. Those are the people that are actually in danger.” Instead, Buck, we ended up with these lies. I’ve never heard Fauci say that, never heard him say anything at all like that. You can also say, “Well, why did things change?” Maybe it had a bit to do with the amount of money that is being poured into Big Pharma.

I saw this survey tying in with this natural immunity discussion from Fauci. I’m not sure if you saw this. This is actually from the CDC, so take it with a grain of salt. But they surveyed, Buck, 7700 high school kids between January and June of 2021. So this is last year, and 40% of teenagers said they persistently felt sad or hopeless during the past a year.

This is the middle of the covid mess: 29% said a parent lost a job during the pandemic, 40% said they’d experienced hunger, 43% said they had consumed alcohol, 30% of them said they drank more during the pandemic, 26% percent said they drank six or more times in the past month and — this is the one that really was just gut-wrenching — more than half, 55%, reported experiencing emotional abuse by a parent or other adult in their home, including being the target of swearing or insult.

Now, that’s an expansive definition of being a target. But the stress levels that we created via lockdown — economic, health — are indefensible. And the people who overwhelmingly bore the brunt of all of these lockdowns were kids. We failed the most helpless of our community — the people who need us to take care of them the most — with lockdowns. That data, again, from the CDC. It’s the staggering how much we failed kids in this country.

BUCK: Some of us were screaming from the rooftops about all of this and saw this, and there has been no accountability whatsoever for those who not only opposed the — now we see — correct point of view that lockdowns are disastrous, that it will punish children unnecessarily, that it will lead to people drinking themselves to death.

It will lead to despair, deaths of despair. It will lead to massive loss of businesses, income, jobs, the inflation that we have. It turns out telling people to stay home and just sending out trillions of dollars over time, that have negative effects on the economy. You just don’t necessarily feel them right away.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: All of that we warned about that, and the people that were shouting everyone down with, “Shut up, Grandma Killer! You don’t care about anything but money” or, you know, some other slander. None of them have been publicly repudiated. None of them have received what honestly should be the humiliation of knowing that they made everything worse and nothing better during covid.

I think that Fauci in many ways is the standard-bearer for that. He made everything worse, nothing better. If there had been no CDC… Think about this, everybody: If the CDC had not existed as a federal agency, it is likely we would have been better off over the last two years than we were with the CDC becoming so politicized, shutting down schools because the teachers unions wanted them to.

And what is really the argument on the other side of this now? When you look at the data, they have no argument. I mean, Clay, it’d be one thing if we were saying, “Hey, look at all these bad things,” and they say, “But look at this chart. We cut covid cases in half where we did X and where they did Y, covid cases continued to skyrocket.”

Nowhere. The number of success stories that they have to point to when it comes to lockdown mentality versus Team Reality is zero. They have success in exactly zero places. Even places that are island, you know, Australia and others, they all eventually got rocked with covid too. It wasn’t masks. It wasn’t lockdowns. We all see the truth, and Anthony Fauci honestly, man… I mean, I joke around about him a lot. I don’t know how the guy sleeps at night. I really don’t.

CLAY: I agree with you, and we’re gonna keep hammering it home for the next six months. November has to be a reckoning. There have to be consequences for the politicians who got so much so wrong. You age-adjust California and you compare it with Florida, virtually no difference in terms of covid issues, right?

Florida has a lot more elderly people than California does; so when you age adjust and consider those populations, Florida got it right. Kids never missed school. Went for the entire year. Didn’t wear masks. Businesses have come roaring back. There are more businesses open, I believe, and more people employed now in Florida than there were before we shut down.

And, by the way, Buck, we still have not regained the jobs that we lost when we decided to shut everything down in March of 2020. There are still millions of people out there that have not gone back to work. The Trump economy — the number of people who were working right before the lockdowns, right before covid came to our shores and we officially lost our minds. We’re still not back to the same employment that we had in late February, early March of 2020.

BUCK: I want every person in November when they go in to cast their votes this fall — and this is why we continue to remind everybody about this. I want them to go back to those feelings of, “My school can’t be open because why? My child has to be masked in school for eight hours a day while adults are drinking at bars and doing whatever they’re doing because why, exactly?

“BLM protests and riots are okay, but me going to a relative’s funeral or having a wedding or going to a graduation is too dangerous, because why?” Those decisions became entirely partisan, were pushed by one political ideology in this country, the Democrat Party, and unless they are made to feel the pain of humiliating loss at the polls, they will have learned no lesson other than they can get away with something on a scale lake this.

CLAY: There has to be a reckoning, absolutely positively has to be consequences for the decisions that were made.