Alex Berenson on Omicron and His Twitter Lawsuit

CLAY: One of the guys who’s been I think the most reliable in all of media, all of just opinion for the last 18 months, he’s Alex Berenson, had him on a lot back in the day when we were doing sports talk radio shows. Now we got the Clay and Buck show here. Sounds like he has gathered around him with multiple children. Is that accurate, Alex?

BERENSON: It is. It is. We’re in Arizona on vacation, and my wife is working too right now so I’ve got the three kids.

CLAY: How old are you are your kids, by the way?

BERENSON: They’re 2, 6, and 9. The two —

CLAY: Oh, yeah. You are in the weeds.

BERENSON: Guys, guys, guys, this is not okay.

CLAY: So I love this. I’ve got 13, 11, and 7. And, Alex, I just went downstairs and had to have a conversation with my 13-year-old, and I said, “Hey. We talk to you about how late you can stay up playing video games right now” and I swear to God, my 13-year-old, Alex, I said, “I told you last night you had to be off the computer at 11, right? Can’t be playing video games after 11.” And he said — I said, you agreed to that, and then he said, and then my wife caught him playing video games at 1 a.m. last night. And he said, “Well, you told me I had to stop at 11. You didn’t tell me I couldn’t start back up after that.” I’m like, first of all, he’s in debate, he’s super smart.

Now I’m gonna have to basically be drafting, you know, 18 itemized contracts or agreements with him. So there’s a lot of people out there listening to us right now that are in incredible parenting stress right now during the holiday season. So tell your kids that I understand and we appreciate it and a lot of people out there listening right now, moms and dads, grandpas know grandmas know exactly what that process is like. So —

BERENSON: Sounds like your son should be a lawyer. We may need him for this Twitter lawsuit.

CLAY: I know. I was gonna say, you might need him to sign on for your Twitter lawsuit. We’ll get to that in a moment. But first, let’s start. The last time we talked, I think, some of the data was not yet readily clear what it was gonna be on Omicron. Now we’ve got a lot of numbers coming out on, and a lot of data reliable, I think, although you’ll know better than me, from San Francisco, from Scotland, and from England. In your mind is it quite clear at this point that Omicron is say a less dangerous version of covid than Delta or the original Alpha universe that we got used to with covid?

BERENSON: Yes. Yes, it is. I mean, I don’t see how this is arguable at this point. You know, South Africa, the cases are, they’re already on the down slope right now of cases. And they have seen essentially no increase in deaths, you know, compared to where they were a month ago. They’ve had, their deaths are running at about one-twelfth the level of previous peak is. And so, and they had more cases, more positive tests, you know — well, last week than they had ever had. So, and at this point we’re now a month in to Omicron in South Africa. So we would have seen it by now.

Now, the panic porners, you know, the people I call team apocalypse have been trying to make excuses, and it is excuses because they want this to be as bad as possible. I mean, there’s sort of no other way to read the way they talk about this and they say, well, South Africa had lots of natural infections before. By the way, if that’s true, then that suggests that natural infection is a lot better than vaccination, right?

CLAY: Yeah, no kidding.

BERENSON: Which suggests, by the way, it’s not clear that South Africa’s had more natural infections let’s say than the United States. The South Africa death, the South Africa death count has been very high by African standards, but it has not been high by U.S. standards or European standards in previous waves. So what that says it’s not clear that South Africa has had a terrible number of infections compared to other places and the other thing I’ll say is you’ll hear, well, oh, South Africa is so much younger the average, you know, the population, yes, the South African population is younger, but it is not so much younger that it would explain this discrepancy. And, again, the proof of that is that the overall South African death count, while low, low to average, I would say, by European standards, is high by African standards.

So this is, I mean, there’s a lot of math to get through here as there often is when we’re talking, but the takeaway is this. Omicron does not seem very dangerous, it seems cold-like. And these are the numbers but what you hear from the South African doctors and what I hear from people in South Africa who email me regularly is this is a cold now. I got it, you know, I didn’t even bother to get tested, you know, ’cause I knew I had it because I got it from somebody else who did get tested, it was a cold, it went away in a few days. And the South Africans are actually changing their requirements, essentially loosening their quarantine and isolation requirements in response because they don’t want to have to lock down again.

You know, they have a tremendous number of extremely poor people, and they don’t want to put the, you know, the economy’s in crisis. They do not want riots over food. So, I mean, I think there’s a very good chance that in a month, you know, this will be close to over. Now, there’s two caveats. The first is we don’t know whether if you’ve been vaccinated somehow, by the way, it’s clear that if you’ve been vaccinated, you’re not protected from Omicron. The question is, if you’re vaccinated and you’re infected and you recover, is it gonna be the case that the vaccination somehow interfered with your natural ability to generate immunity and so you can get this thing over and over and over again. Obviously we hope that’s not the case.

The second question is, you know, is it possible, and we haven’t really seen evidence of this, that somehow Omicron is actually more dangerous to vaccinated people than unvaccinated? And I would say right now the evidence for that is no. But the overall picture here is a good one. This is incredibly transmissible, but it isn’t very lethal or even, you know, it doesn’t even require hospitalization most of the time. It appears to be significantly less dangerous than the earlier variants.

CLAY: So the positive here is if we’re trying to sketch out a really positive storyline, you would have a version of covid that has now mutated into a variant version that is extremely transmissible yet not very dangerous or deadly at all to anyone and that that would, in theory, potentially finally end this covid craziness because you would have a monster number of people that would have natural immunity, and you would get that without the corresponding dangers of mortality which we might have seen with Delta or earlier versions of covid. In an ideal situation that would be the positive, right? If we’re talking about, I know we’ve had very few positives associated with covid. Actually I would say one of them has been, thankfully, that kids are mostly immune and/or safe from it throughout.

That, I think, has kept some of us in our comfortable territory on Team Reality. You have three young kids. I’ve got three young kids. They matter more to me than anything. If this thing had been perilous to kids as opposed to elderly people I think it would have changed the calculus massively in a really dangerous and scary way for many of us. But the positive scenario here as you just laid out is we basically might be able to ride Omicron into this thing is over?

BERENSON: Yes. And I think there’s a real chance of that. Now, the people who’ve been so desperate to control our lives for the last few years aren’t gonna admit this; so they’re gonna talk about, well, there could still be long covid here or, well, we don’t really know yet and, you know, maybe we’re gonna need another month or two to be sure, you know, we’re gonna need to make sure that we have the numbers for the U.S. that sort of back up what we’re seeing in the U.K. and especially in South Africa. But yes, I would say there’s a very real chance that the scenario you just outlined is gonna come to pass.

CLAY: Is this the most optimistic you’ve been with covid since when?

BERENSON: I guess it’s the most optimistic, I thought in the spring of 2020 once I realized what this was and wasn’t, that we would be navigate this way in a much smarter way than we have.

CLAY: You and me both. So we were both optimistic, I should say, in, like, the late spring and summer of 2020 that people were not gonna lose their minds, right? Like, and we obviously were wrong about that.

BERENSON: We were obviously wrong. But this is a case where it’s gonna be, if the scenario that, you know, that you and I are talking about, and again, we don’t know that this is the case. We’re hopeful this is the case, this would be the equivalent of a successful vaccination campaign. Right? This would be the equivalent of what was promised last year with vaccines actually coming to pass, that there would be, you know, a very low risk of side effects and no reinfection for, you know, a long time, you know. Again, one of the, I guess one of the questions, and this is a scientific question that I don’t the answer, people who are infected with Omicron and, you know, recover as almost everybody’s going to, are they going to wind up with lasting immunity against other forms, you know, ’cause there will be more variants.

And if the answer to that question is yes, then we’re truly at the end of this. But we don’t know. Now, I think, you know, hopefully medically this will give the Democrats, you know, if they want, it will give them the desire, you know, the excuse to kind of back off everything that they’ve gone crazy about. But who knows if they want that. I will say that, you know, Biden’s speech on Tuesday, it was, you know, I mean, think about all things he didn’t say. He didn’t say we’re gonna lock down again. He didn’t say we’re gonna mandate vaccinating your kids. He didn’t even talk that much about the vaccine mandates. He said we’re gonna send everybody a test. You know, which as I joke today on my Substack they could have said we’re gonna send everybody a pack of Kleenex and it would be just as important, just as useful.

CLAY: By the way, do we know, and can you come back for one or more segment ’cause I want to ask you about this lawsuit you’ve got against Twitter. But I want to ask you this question before we go to break. Is this virus, based on your understanding, mutating and spreading more rapidly than most viruses have in the past, and what do we attribute that to if it is?

BERENSON: So that’s a great question. The coronavirus doesn’t mutate as much as the flu, which hasn’t sort of variants but new strains every year the flu is very slippery and very quick to mutate. The coronavirus really didn’t mutate very much the first year and one of the very interesting questions is did vaccines sort of increase what’s called selective pressure to mutate, the Omicron strain is also very interesting in that there are many, many different mutations at the genetic level in the genome, and if you actually look at where it came from, it doesn’t appear very closely related to Delta or what they called Beta or Alpha or any of the more recent mutations.

You have to go all the back almost to the beginning to see where its lineage is from, and that has led people to speculate, and I want to be clear, it’s clear speculation that maybe this particular version, you know, also leaked out of a lab and researchers were working on it and that’s why it has this very, you know, so many mutations and why it looks so unrelated to more recent variants. But wherever it came from, whether it came naturally, whether it is also a lab leak, and again, there’s no proof that it’s a lab leak, it appears to have been a good thing from the point of view of the public health and maybe ending this.

CLAY: Good stuff. Alex Berenson will rejoin us here in a moment because he is suing Twitter over his ban and I am fascinated by this lawsuit and I want to talk about that with him in a moment.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: Got a couple more minutes here with Alex Berenson. I appreciate him making time from Arizona, by the way, state where we are number one in the marketplace in Phoenix. Appreciate everybody listening in the city of Phoenix and surrounding communities. All right, Alex. You have filed a lawsuit against Twitter. I read on your Substack the complaint. I’m fascinated by it. Explain in a succinct way for our audience, which obviously is not filled with mostly lawyers, what you are suing Twitter for and what you are attempting to argue.

BERENSON: Sure. So complaint is quite long, and I will try to drill it down as best I can. So Twitter, you know, banned me in August. They said they, although they never told me they banned me. They said publicly that they banned me and I can’t get into my account; so I assume I’m banned. And they said they banned me for covid-19 misinformation. Now, I did not —

CLAY: Let me cut you off here, by the way. Your “covid-19 misinformation” has all been since proven to be true, right? I mean, that’s the irony here.

BERENSON: I would say that’s completely true. So the suite, they banned me for was a tweet that began “it doesn’t stop infection or transmission.” And then went on —

CLAY: You mean the covid vaccine?

BERENSON: Yes. Does not stop.

CLAY: Yeah.

BERENSON: I mean I think that’s just completely inarguable at this point. So they banned me. And so what they’re gonna say, which is what they’ve seen companies have said and successfully so in the past is there’s a section of federal law called the, there’s a federal law called the Communications Decency Act and there’s a section of it called Section 230, and they’re gonna say under Section 230 we have an absolute right to let whoever we want or not want on our platform. And so, and so what I, what I say in this lawsuit, which is correct, is Twitter is a messenger service. Twitter is in California. California law governs Twitter. Under California law, messenger services must accept all messages.

CLAY: It’s a fascinating legal argument, basically that they have an obligation to allow you to share your message with the masses under California law?

BERENSON: That’s right. And what they’re gonna say is Section 230 gives us the right to ignore that California law. Section 230, the word, the legal word is “preempt.” It is a federal law. It preempts state law. So what am I lawyers were gonna say is, well, that causes a First Amendment issue because it’s a federal law that is, that is allowing Twitter to violate my First Amendment rights under California State law. In California, and Twitter is gonna say, well, you know, the federal lawsuit precedes the state law and too bad for him. Okay.

So we’ll see. We’ll see what a court says. I’m aware that, you know, that these lawsuits generally have not succeeded. But I thought this was very important. And I also think when you look at the specifics of my claim, it’s very clear that Twitter didn’t act in good faith in banning me. And there’s an argument that even under Section 230 they must act in good faith, which wouldn’t failed to do. So —

CLAY: This is gonna be fascinating.

BERENSON: I think so. And I have, what I have, so some of the issues are very big, right? And another issue that’s very big is, did Twitter act on behalf of the federal government? Because Twitter allowed me to publish a lot of very controversial stuff until July, and in July, the Surgeon General and, you know, and Anthony Fauci and the president himself started criticizing me to people about, you know, what they were allowing to be published. And Twitter then changed its mind. So did Twitter act on behalf of the federal government? So these are all the issues. If you want to read more about the lawsuit you can go to my Substack and find out more there. And I — look. I hope I win because I think that what’s happening with free speech in this country is terrible, and I think if I can’t win, nobody can win. So —

CLAY: Outstanding stuff from Alex Berenson there. Encourage you to read his Substack.