CLAY: We are joined now by our friend Alex Berenson, who is now no longer banned on Twitter. And he has been firing away many of the different facts, data, and details surrounding covid. And, Alex, I want to start with this ’cause we were just talking about it on the show and we talked about it this week and last week as well. Just 2% of parents of 6-month-old to 5-year-old kids in this country has now been a month where they could get the covid shot. Just 2% of them are getting the covid shot for their young kids.

This is devastating to the covid shot universe. Not a lot of attention being paid to it yet. You talked about it with us I believe the last time you were on. What is this telling us, and why are so few people covering it?

BERENSON: Well, they’re not covering it because they don’t like it, right? This runs contrary to what, you know, the mainstream media, the elite media especially, has been saying for, you know, a year and a half, which is everybody knows the vaccines are great, everybody’s desperate for them. People really want to make sure their kids are protected. You know, people really want boosters.

You know, we’re in a very strange place right now where the narrative has sort of become completely disconnected from reality in terms of what people actually think about the vaccines as opposed to what the media says about them. And this is — I mean, this is just hugely embarrassing. And there’s no way — there’s no way to hide it so, you know, there’s this excuse, oh, this is something parents are gonna get, you know, pediatricians, with their kids, when in fact the reality is what I’ve heard from many, many parents now is that pediatricians who were encouraging this, you know, last year with older kids, you know, when the shots were available for older kids, are not saying a word about it anymore, whether or not, you know, it’s a 5- to 11-year-old or whether it’s a younger kid.

Pediatricians, they don’t want to recommend the covid shot. Parents don’t want to get them. And, you know, if you thought that this was beneficial and you’re a decent parent, you know, or you’re any parent, you’re gonna want this for your child, it’s free, it’s available. The fact that this has been rejected tells you everything you need to know about what people really think about this shot at this point.

On July 2 @nytimes wrote the usual glowing article on how well Country X – Japan, in this case – had handled #Covid.

The Japanese wear masks and believe in science and don’t have Republicans or something, see? If only we were like Japan!

You’ll never BELIEVE what happened next. pic.twitter.com/cTb6wCf3fd

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) July 19, 2022

BUCK: Alex, thanks for being with us. You know, right before you came on we played I think they always say like four-star admiral Rachel Levine, you know, in the HHS or whatever. They always love to talk about an admiral. Well, kind of different admiral. Different in a lot of ways, different admiral. But saying we know what works.

And this is the phrase that libs — I almost think that they do it just to agitate me because I completely lose my mind. They say, “We know what works. Masks, tests, vaccines.” How much more clear does it have to be that those things actually don’t work when it comes to stopping the pandemic, which now is what, exactly? People I know people that are testing positive for covid, they’re saying, ah, feel fine, no one really cares. So what are we doing?

BERENSON: I mean, that’s a fantastic question, what are we doing? We have this sort of unhinged flywheel that’s sort of spinning around. You know, if you look at the countries that, you know, were supposedly the winners of covid — Australia, New Zealand, South Korea. You know, a lot of countries in the Pacific Rim, you know, Australia and New Zealand, for example, right now have serious covid outbreaks okay, they have tons of cases. They actually are getting their hospitals filled up right now and they’ve been vaccinated and masked and tested. Nothing works. Okay, we know what works. Nothing. Nothing works.

This virus is going to do what it’s gonna do. That’s been clear for a long time. It has mutated in a way that has made the vaccines — let’s be clear. It’s not clear the vaccines ever would have had any long-term value. They now have no value.

And the other thing that they say constantly is, well, the vaccines may not stop infection and transmission, but they definitely help, you know, against severe disease and death. And when it comes to Omicron, that is completely unclear whether that he says, either. But I don’t even want to go into that right now because I think people are done, on the one hand, and yet the public health response is sort of continuing.

BUCK: But are people done, Alex? Sorry. Because they’re putting back mask mandates in the San Diego schools, Los Angeles County is like 10 days away from them, I mean, I think New York’s probably gonna follow suit here. I don’t think people are done.

BERENSON: Well, people are done. Whether or not the public health authorities in certain sort of hard blue jurisdictions are done is a different story. But, you know, even the New York Times, you know, for example, wrote yesterday that, you know, they acknowledge that, you know, on the New York City subways where you’re supposed to wear masks, people aren’t wearing masks, right?

So the only place they have leverage, the government authorities, is in places where they have direct control, right? Which is unfortunately the public schools, the military, you know, they have a lot of control over the health care system because Medicare is such a powerful force in health care.

So they’re gonna continue to push, you know, testing and masking. And I don’t know if they’re gonna push vaccines anymore at this point. Actually they have been so rejected. But they’re gonna push testing and masking for a while longer. And in the schools they can actually force, you know, children to comply. So I don’t know what’s gonna happen with that. But that doesn’t mean that anybody outside these very narrow interest groups thinks that this is a good idea.

CLAY: Yeah. And I was gonna build on what Buck just said. I don’t know if you heard the San Diego school director who basically got pushed and said, “Well, if you don’t want to wear a mask, don’t come to school.”

What we have seen, unfortunately, is that we have lost many, many kids who would otherwise be in school because of our covid response. So do you think that any school districts in America are going to mandate the covid shot this fall in order for kids to return? You don’t think that’s gonna happen?

BERENSON: No. The masks they can sort of marginally push because — because masks are sort of — you know, I don’t think masks do much harm to most kids. I mean, I think there’s some kids, especially, you know, if you have trouble hearing, obviously, being in an environment where a lot of kids have masks is not good. You know, if you have autism, it can be bad. For most kids, most kids just walk around with the masks around their chins, anyway. I mean, that’s really what you saw last year.

CLAY: So you don’t think there’s gonna be any covid shot requirements which is encouraging?

BERENSON: There will be no — no. No. Even in California they had dropped that. And I know that Eric Adams sort of hinted at this a couple weeks ago. You’ve heard nothing more. In a democratic country, you can’t force and that 98% of parents don’t want. You just can’t.

CLAY: Okay. So I’m sure you also saw the USC and the UCLA hospital systems in L.A., which I thought was really interesting. Now, they tried to walk back a bit, but they effectively said, hey, of all the people that are being counted right now as covid patients, only 10% of that number are actually hospitalized with covid. The other 90% are testing incidental for covid.

Do we get the sense that that is the case for much of the nation, and if so, how important were those doctors coming out and making the statement that they did?

BERENSON: I mean, 10% seemed low to me and what might be driving that at that — you know, at that particular hospital, I don’t know. They said they did test everyone upon entry; so they are catching a lot of the incidental covid. But, yeah, we’ve known for a long time that tons of covid is incidental, right?

That tons of covid, people don’t know they have or have very mild cases. And that was true before Omicron, and it’s really true now.

So there was a paper out of Italy a couple weeks ago that was actually looking at the persistence of covid antibodies among children who’d been naturally infected, not vaccinated, and showed they have incredible persistence, which is really good. You get it once as a child, you have antibodies for a long time, you are essentially protected going forward for as long as we’ve been able to test right now.

But what that also found, there was a sort of incidental number in the paper that something like that 98% of the people in the study — these are young, healthy Italian, you know, families — had either no symptoms or mild symptoms of covid. So that’s always been true. And with Omicron it’s even more true.

The people who are getting sicker now and appear to be getting reinfected are people — I hate to say this because it sounds horrible, but it is true, who have been vaccinated and boosted. And you know, that’s what we need to be concerned about going forward is that it looks like there’s increasing evidence that once you’re vaccinated, you’ll — if you get infected with Omicron, you wind up with antibodies that are really antibodies to the original strain of covid, which doesn’t exist anymore. And so your immune response is suboptimal right now.

Now, that doesn’t matter that much for most people right now because Omicron is so mild. But my big concern — and I’m not saying this is gonna happen or even likely to happen — my big concern is that if a new variant comes and it is more dangerous, people who’ve been vaccinated and boosted will wind up in this position where their immune response is not what it would be.

BUCK: Have you seen, Alex, by the way, there’s audio of Fauci very, very early on, when they were trying to, you know, before even they were talking about warp speed, where he was saying sometimes vaccines, if you go too quickly, can actually have bad effects.

BERENSON: Yes. Yes.

BUCK: Which now if you’ve talked about that the last two years they’ve basically wanted to exile you to Siberia.

BERENSON: Yeah. And that’s crazy because not talking about it doesn’t mean it’s not a real risk. And so, again, we are at this funny point, right? The pandemic is basically over in many, many people’s minds. I was in Las Vegas over the weekend. And, you know, there wasn’t a person wearing a mask. I mean, I exaggerate slightly, but 95% of people were not wearing a mask.

No one was mentioning covid. It was over. Okay. Ann then I come back to New York and, yes, there’s still idiots in N95s, but most people are done with this, and I think as they should be, because we’ve lived through it. But there is this sort of tail risk with — you know, with antibody dependent enhancement. There’s this risk that the vaccines are gonna come back to bite us in a terrible way. I don’t think it’s a high risk, but I think it’s real.

BUCK: Real quick, Alex, just wondering, you know, they keep saying that high quality masks work. That has been the switch recently ’cause the mask thing I completely just reject. I think this is horrible. They need to stop doing this. Does the data actually support that even N95 masks have done anything substantial to reduce covid spread?

BERENSON: No. No. There’s some evidence, if you wear an N95 properly and you’re in a hospital and you wear it for, you know, three hours and then you switch to a new one and, you know, you do it right, that there’s some evidence that those have some reduction of influenza or coronavirus, you know, infection. But it’s not very good evidence, and it’s not a very high rate. Nobody in the civilian world wears them that way anyway.

So, you know, the mask thing, the reason they wanted masks ’cause masks scare people. When the masks ended, the pandemic ended. And, again, when you walk around a place where people aren’t wearing masks, we just forget that this thing ever happened. So I do think that’s why they’re pushing masks.

BUCK: Yep. We think so too. The Midterm Variant one way or the other. Everybody should go check out Alex’s Substack. And I know he’s working on a book too. So go check out Unreported Truths covid-19 on Substack. Alex Berenson, everybody. Alex, thanks so much.

BERENSON: Always a pleasure, guys.