BUCK: Our friend Alex Berenson about to join us. I want to say this comes from his Substack, and I just want to read to you a quote from one of his recent pieces of analysis here. “In the United States, we do not force adults to take medicines or have medical procedures if they’re psychiatrically competent. We do not make them lose weight or stop drinking or exercise.

“We do not make women have abortions or get pregnant. Personal medical decision-making is personal. It does not belong to the state. These covid vaccine mandates and quasi-mandates are fast becoming the greatest infringement on liberty in the United States since slavery was abolished, and I don’t know what is going to stop them.” He’s got a new book, Pandemia, which you can get now. Mr. Alex Berenson, good to have you back.

BERENSON: Good to talk to you, Buck.

BUCK: So let’s just start with the top-level view of what you’re seeing right now as Biden and everyone’s walking around on the Democrat side saying, “Hey, mandates work! Isn’t that great?”

BERENSON: Yeah. Yeah. They work. If you force people to give up their job, even in an economy as tight as this one, a lot of people have mortgages to pay, and they have kids to worry about, and they’re not gonna give their jobs even though if they don’t want to be vaccinated. They will swallow hard and take the shot and hope it’s okay.

What’s clear is that a lot of people are doing this unwillingly at this point, okay? There are still a lot of people who will not take this, okay? Despite the fact, despite all the pressure that’s being put on right now, there’s still a large number of people who are not gonna take this thing no matter what. But what I think the administration is trying to do is…

So maybe 60% of the country, maybe half the working-age population was okay with this. They were so scared of covid and all they did was watch MSNBC and they thought this was a miracle. So, you got about half the country through May that was okay. And then they thought, “Hey, when everybody else sees how well this vaccine works, everyone will sign up and it will be fine because Americans in general actually are not anti-vaccine.”

I think I told you this a few times ago when I was on, something like 90% of children get their recommended vaccines pretty much on schedule. So most Americans are pretty happy to get their kids vaccinated with vaccines that work, with vaccines that have been around a long time, with vaccines that have a mechanism or action that we understand. Okay.

The rest… So half the country didn’t want to get vaccinated. Half who are under 65 didn’t want to get vaccinated and then something terrible happened to Anthony Fauci and Joe Biden and the left, which is the vaccine stopped working, okay? They don’t work. They don’t prevent infection. They don’t prevent transmission.

It looks like they have some efficacy around severe disease and death, but it isn’t clear how long that the lasts, okay? And anybody who was looking at the data could see this by late summer. And in the face of this, the rational response would be, ‘All right, we tried this. We bought ourselves a few months. Guess what? Merck came out with a pretty good drug that looks like it can help people too,” and that’s it.”

“The great vaccine experiment, the great mRNA vaccine experiment for covid is over. We can all go home now.” They won’t do it. They won’t admit the truth. They won’t admit that efficacy has gone away. They’re trying to force… Fauci and Biden, in the face of the CDC and the FDA, want everyone to take boosters. And they want to drag the rest of the country over the line.

So their hope is that they can get to, let’s say, 80% with corporate mandates, which are — you know, and somebody emailed me. A conservative emailed me a couple days ago and said, “This is terrible. The U.S. has basically outsourced its Constitution.” So the U.S. can’t ban me from speaking, but Twitter can.

The U.S. government can lean on Twitter to get it to do that. And then I have to go sue if you want to get back on Twitter. Okay. The U.S. federal government cannot mandate adults to get vaccinated. But it can lean on private companies to do so. And that’s what it’s do. And if they get to 80% then they’ll really try to squeeze those of us who are pushing back. They will say, “You can’t fly,” and that’s what they’re gonna do. And it’s insane, Buck. It’s insane.

CLAY: It’s interesting you mentioned that, Alex. We’ve got 78% of people aged 18 and up who have gotten at least one shot, according to the most recent New York Times data; 95% of people 65 and up have gotten the covid vaccine. Those are pretty monstrous numbers when you look at them in that context. That is the vast majority of people of those ages.

By the way, it’s 76% of those ages 12 and up have gotten at least one shot. So those are pretty monstrous numbers. The question, Alex — and thanks for joining us here on this Friday, and Buck and I have been talking about this. We don’t have a good read. Where are we headed as the fall progresses and we go into the winter? We understand you don’t have a magical ability to prognosticate the future, but you have been pretty outstanding looking at the data and trying to forecast based on that data where are we headed. Where are we headed into the fall and the winter?

BERENSON: So, yeah. You know covid makes fools of people who try to predict it. And also, as we know, you never get points for being right in your predictions. You only get noticed by the people who don’t like you if you’re wrong.

CLAY: That’s right. That’s right.

BERENSON: That said, I think this idea which people, some people sort of in the pro-vaccine community have said — and all the great and good minds at the New York Times — that we’re maybe through the worst of this? I don’t think that’s correct at all. And the reason is in the U.K. and in Israel, which have even higher rates of vaccine coverage than we do, they have not…

They expect they have not come close to eradicating covid, and Britain is really in the third month of another wave. And I think what happens — it seems pretty clear what happens — is that after a few months your vaccine immunity wears off; and so, the only people who really have immunity are those who got infected naturally and recovered.

I think in the U.S. we’re probably… You can argue about this because we’ve never done a proper study. But we’re in the 40 to 50% range for that. And so, everybody else still needs to get infected. You know, and maybe you can sort of like roll that out with vaccines as this vaccine immunity rolls on and off, but in places like Britain, 97% of the country has either vaccine antibodies or natural immunity. They’ve done the studies. They know. And yet the epidemic continues there. So what that tells you is that the vaccine antibodies don’t really work for very long.

BUCK: Alex, it’s Buck, and I want to know what we’re seeing in terms of the data right now. Fauci has been asked some questions recently where he goes, “Yeah, we’re not tracking that.” You start to find out more and more, there are some things like breakthrough infections that they don’t seem to be tracking very closely but you get little snippets here and there.

I think it was earlier this week I saw that, according to the health department of the state of Massachusetts, about 25%, roughly, of people in the hospital with covid were fully vaccinated against covid. And I feel like that’s another thing. They keep saying about the serious disease and death that that’s what it protects you from, but I feel like people would also…

They would think very differently about this if they were being told, “Well maybe a quarter, maybe a third of people that end up in the hospital are gonna be the vaccinated population.” I think that people believe that that’s never gonna happen to them if they’re vaccinated. What do the numbers tell us?

BERENSON: The numbers were much worse than that, Buck! In Vermont, which is the most heavily vaccinated state, 76% of the people who died in September were fully vaccinated. Who died. That’s not me making that up. That is a number you can find in the Vermont health department’s website. Okay. Seventy-six percent of the people who died were fully vaccinated.

That is completely consistent with the British experience where 70 to 75% of people who died in the last couple months were fully vaccinated. The vaccines, again, they may reduce the risk of death. They don’t reduce it… This idea that they reduce it 90 to 95 to 99% is just not borne out by the data. And again, there’s this time element. So for the first couple months after you’re vaccinated, it looks pretty good.

But then your protection against infection and transmission goes away, and then at some point it looks like your protection against serious disease and death also declines. I put out something on my Substack this morning, by the way, because you’re right. You can’t find this data in a good place in the United States. You sort of have to rely on random papers that come out.

But there was a very good paper that came out two days ago — or actually three days ago — on the 5th of October in a peer-reviewed journal from U.S. government and academic researchers showing month by month what has happened to infections in the vaccinated in a large group of people, 550,000 Americans, and it’s an amazing chart. (laughing) It speaks for itself. It’s a true hockey stick. Between July and August, the number of cases per day, your risk went up fivefold between July and August.

BUCK: Are they basically trying to get us to start getting boosters, Alex, before people can realize how much the vaccines were off?

CLAY: Yeah, it’s a good question from Buck, too, and I want to build on what he just asked, Alex. If your data is clear as it appears to be, at some point, there has to be an acknowledgment of what’s going on here, right?

BERENSON: (laughing)

CLAY: When does that acknowledgment occur? How does it happen? What is the Biden administration hoping they’re going to be able to do by not acknowledging that this “vaccine,” in quotation marks, is not the panacea that they’ve been selling to the American public?

BERENSON: I guess what they’re hoping to do is get through the winter. And you say there has been an acknowledgment. But I was banned from Twitter on August 28th, okay? That’s six weeks ago. And nothing has come out except more data showing that I was correct. Okay? All they did was force me to Substack, but they got me off Twitter. So I can talk to you.

I can talk on Joe Rogan. I can talk to Tucker. But they’re forcing this argument to the margins and every day they’re trying to get mother people to get that first shot. I don’t exactly know why. I guess the game is, “Let’s get through the winter,” because the problem they must realize that they’re gonna face is that in the northern half of the country vaccine immunity is rolling off at exactly the wrong time.

BUCK: That’s right.

BERENSON: So there will be another big wave this winter if they don’t get people to get a booster. A booster probably buys them a few months, maybe they get through the winter and then the hope is, “Okay, we’ll be two years into this. People will really be sick of it.

“We’ll have this Merck therapeutic. Maybe we’ll have another couple therapeutics. We can reduce the death rate, and we will stop pretending the vaccines really work and we’ll just move on.” I guess that’s the game. I don’t know the game, because they don’t have a working vaccine.

BUCK: Unbelievable. Alex, by the way, we know you have a new book out, Pandemia. We wanted you to tell folks about it and where they can get it.

BERENSON: Sure. So it’s not out yet. It will be out November 30th. In fact, I gotta get you guys copies, early copies of it. But you can order it on Amazon. You can order it on B&N. Right now, my focus is really on the Stack, on the Substack because that is where I can reach people, and I can prove to Twitter that even though they censored me, I can still speak. But the book will be out November 30th. And it is called Pandemia, which is sort of the pandemic hysteria: Pandemia.

CLAY: Outstanding. We’ll be reading it for sure. Thank you to Alex Berenson. Go read his Substack.