Alex Berenson Runs Through the Latest Covid Numbers

BUCK: We have our friend with us right now, as promised, Alex Berenson. He is the author of Pandemia, which is out right now and it’s doing great so far. Pick up your copy. I’ve got mine at hoe. Clay has his copy at home. Pandemia. A man who actually looks at the data and says things that you would get before it the data no matter how much the Fauciites scream at him. Alex, great to have you.

BERENSON: Thanks. Thanks.

BUCK: We always want to start at the 30,000-foot level. We’re at over a hundred thousand cases now, just saw this the New York Times, huge increase nationwide. We have 200 million people, quote, “fully vaccinated” in this country, right, and many more than that at least partially, whatever that even means now, vaccinated. What the heck is going on, Alex? What does the data tell us?

BERENSON: Well, listen you and I and Clay talked about this for months. It was obvious that there was going to be a major winter wave because vaccine protection fades and we saw this in Europe; we saw it in the U.K. We knew there were gonna be a lot of cases this winter. Now, we’ll see what happens with deaths. Hopefully deaths will not hit the level that they hit last winter, and the vaccine fanatics will say, “Well, that’s because vaccines don’t prevent death, even though they don’t do anything else, and that’s all we want them to do anyway,” which we know is a lie.

But I think… Look, therapeutics have improved. Doctors know more about how to treat this. We are seeing somewhat lower death rates in a lot of countries, which is obviously a good thing. But I think we’re gonna see this wave continue. Why wouldn’t we? This is a seasonal virus. The vaccines do very little, if anything, to prevent infection and transmission, and we’re headed into the winter.

CLAY: Alex, I’m looking right now; we’re at around 120,000 new cases a day. If I look at what’s going on, as you mentioned what we have seen in Europe. We got over 200,000 cases last winter, and I’m looking — I was trying to check and see when that peaked. And it seems like it peaked right around Christmas, if I’m not mistaken, last year. Do you think this thing would peak right around Christmas again in terms of overall number of cases? How do you anticipate what the winter is going to look like?

BERENSON: Christmas into early January was the peak last year.

CLAY: Yeah, you’re right, January 10th I think was, like, basically the absolute high — or 12th if I’m looking at this thing correctly.

BERENSON: Yeah, and then death peak a couple of weeks after that, as we know they do. So here’s the thing. Yes. I mean, I don’t know, okay? That would be quite likely, because we know this thing’s highly seasonal. Unfortunately, what we’ve now seen in the U.K. is that when you have a highly vaccinated population, you don’t get this spike and drop, okay.

In a country like Romania or India where the population is not so highly vaccinated, you see the same kind of curve one of his in the U.S. a year ago or two years ago/18 months ago where there’s a big rise but then you get to the peak and things go down. Unfortunately, in the U.K. they are now entering their sixth month of high caseload. Although, again, deaths have not reached the levels of last winter, they’re still seeing the equivalent of seven or eight hundred deaths a day in the U.K.

But here, let me pull back even further, okay — and this is something I talk about in Pandemia, and I want to stick to it. We are too obsessed with all of this, okay? What matters is whether or not the hospital systems can treat you, okay? Infectious diseases come and go, and this one, we know, is gonna be with us probably forever now. Wherever it came from — and we can talk about that too — it’s gonna be with us.

It’s gonna slay some extremely old people, it’s gonna slay some sick people — and if you’re morbidly obese, you don’t want to catch covid, okay? Beyond that, we should all be living our lives. And that’s been true for almost two years we’ve known this. And so I’m like, “This conversation that we’re having is counterproductive.” Like, we should not be that focused on this right now.

BUCK: But, Alex, of course you can understand I’m in New York City (laughing) so I’m being told that I’m gonna be barred from public accommodations in two weeks unless I get another shot of along with all the 5-year-olds who are apparently gonna have to provide paperwork to show that they’ve gotten the shot so they can go to a restaurant, and so we’re still kind of fighting against this madness. We’re speaking to Alex Berenson, for everyone joining us, the author of Pandemia, which is out now.

And we’re trying to get this thing to come to a conclusion where we go back to normal life. It feels like they keep doubling down even when, where is there to go? Well, just more of what they’ve already done. This is the constant refrain we see. We started out the show, Alex, talking about transmission, and you mentioned this too earlier on when we just brought you on. What do we know? I mean, they told us in August and into September that if you were vaccinated, you were still really unlikely to get it and transmit it. I know dozens of people personally now who have been vaccinated and gotten covid. Dozens!

BERENSON: Yeah. Yep.

BUCK: So do we have any real…? I mean, what are the numbers on this?

BERENSON: That appears to be a total lie, and here’s how we know it’s a lie. You can do PCR testing on people who’ve gotten the virus, whether they’re vaccinated or not, and those tests show consistently that people have the same viral load vaccinated or not at the peak, and some of the studies show that people who are vaccinated have hire viral load. So that means you can be walking around shedding infectious virus with or without symptoms — more likely with but possibly without — and that means you can transmit it, and that’s if you’re vaccinated or not.

And this is just something else they won’t admit because it is another sort of nail in the “the vaccines were gonna help us all” coffin. And Buck, you’re right. In some ways, I’m being foolish, too, right? I’m saying, “Let’s get done with this,” but the political powers that be don’t want us be to done with this, at least in the blue states — and de Blasio?

That was crazy what he did yesterday, and I have to believe that he — or at least the people around him who are smarter than he is — know that there’s no chance this is gonna be enforceable and this is just a show to, I guess, make him look better with the people in Brooklyn who are still afraid to leave their homes and might be voting for him for governor next year. I have no idea why he did it.

It doesn’t… It makes no sense medically, and it makes no sense politically. But we’re at a very strange moment here because Europe is going in a completely different direction than United States. Europe is going in a direction of more forced vaccinations, more lockdowns, whereas in much of the U.S. — certainly in the red states — people appear to be really be done with covid, and now federal courts have blocked these mandates, and welcome back and so the world is kind of cleaving now in terms of its response.

CLAY: I want to ask you a couple of questions that could give you an opportunity to give us some good news here, Alex. One — I tweeted this out a little while ago, but it seems increasingly likely and you were just hinting at it — that the data reflects whether you are vaccinated or unvaccinated, your odds of spreading covid are not that much different. Meaning that if you were choosing to be unvaccinated, you are taking a risk that primarily is going to reflect upon you, not upon larger society.

That’s one. I want to get your read on that. And then, two, it appears that Omicron is not going to be this death wave, this plague — this added, definite awfulness — that many people tried to reflect that it was just based on the stock market and also the data coming out. It doesn’t appear to be making things that much more dangerous. Would you agree with both of those things?

BERENSON: I would agree with both of those things, yes. I’d agree with both of them, with the caveats that, frankly, since we don’t know how much the vaccine protects you versus what its side effect profile is even now, yeah, the decision you’re making might be more dangerous for yourself not to be vaccinated. But certainly if you’re young, it might actually be safer if you’re not vaccinated — and then as far as Omicron goes, yeah, I totally agree.

It looks increasingly based on the data you off South Africa like this is very transmissible, but it isn’t very dangerous. Now, it’s still early; it could still change but assuming that’s true what they’re really telling us is this thing is migrating to be more like other non-SARS coronaviruses, more like the common cold — and I think we can agree that’s what we’d all want.

BUCK: Right. That feels how this might actually end. We’re speaking to Alex Berenson, the author of Pandemia, his book out right now about the entire pandemic. We highly recommend you get your copy of it. Alex, did you see this story? I wanted to get your take on it ’cause it just seemed like that can’t be right but it’s reported on the Daily Mail that there was one Omicron-positive person who went out, and now 120 of his colleagues have tested positive for Omicron?

BERENSON: Yeah. No, that’s possible. I mean, you saw this. I mean, people are sort of forgetting because it’s part of this effort to scare people and say this is like nothing else, but you saw, for example, there was a choir service, I believe, in Washington state early on in the pandemic where somebody spread the virus to 50 or a hundred other people. When you get these events where somebody’s speaking or singing and people are in a single room for a long time, even with the original virus, you had super-spreader events. It’s clear that that can happen.

BUCK: So that could happen. To me, it’s just if one person can infect 120 people in one night the notion that masking up between bites is doing anything against this virus is beyond absurd.

BERENSON: Yeah. No, that’s true too. What that tells you is this is airborne. And if it’s airborne, it’s airborne in particles that are too small for a mask to control. And you know, we’ve talked about that, too, for more than a year. And I go into that in Pandemia, of course. But, yeah, no, I would agree. I would agree.

CLAY: Big deal here, I think, Alex — and we haven’t talked about it a ton on the show, although I think I mentioned it on Friday — is the majority of the United States Senate, given the fact that Joe Manchin has come out and said it, is now against Joe Biden’s private vaccine mandates, private company vaccine mandates. Now that you also have the courts striking things down do you feel like we’ve seen, in many ways, the end of Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates?

BERENSON: I do. I think the Supreme Court is not going to stand for it, just based on what they did with the CDC effort to sort of say, “Well, because of covid no one can ever be evicted even if they never pay rent again.” That was tossed by the Supreme Court. I think conservative justices — and obviously the Supreme Court is mostly conservative justices are now — are saying it’s time to step in and stop federal overreach. So, yeah, I think it’s quite likely that the mandates will not go forward. Joe Biden never had any actually that had been formally enacted.

What is very striking to me — I wrote about this on my Substack yesterday, or maybe it was Sunday — was that a number of hospital systems, including the largest hospital system in the country — the largest private hospital system in the world, I believe, HCA — is now saying they’re not gonna enforce the mandates on their own workers. So the Biden administration says this is so dangerous that everybody in the world has to be vaccinated and health care systems whose people are dealing with sick people every day are saying, “You know what? We don’t think that. We’d like our employees to be vaccinated, but we’re not gonna mandate it,” and that is incredibly striking to me.

BUCK: Alex Berenson, everybody. Pandemia is the book, get your copy now. If you haven’t, subscribe to his Substack. Great stuff coming your way in the Alex Berenson Substack. Alex, we looking forward to having you on at some point in the future when we all get to talk about literally anything other than covid ’cause no one cares anymore.

BERENSON: Let’s talk about the Jets’ prospects. Even that is less depressing than this.

BUCK: (laughing) Now Clay’s definitely excited about it.

CLAY: Nobody’s excited about the Jets.

BUCK: (laughing)

CLAY: Gonna be honest with you.

BERENSON: Clay, I want to come down to Nashville and meet you and be in person at your studio down there. There’s a whole bunch people I want to see in Nashville, so if that happens I will text you.

CLAY: Make a trip. I live in the free states of America, Alex, so you don’t have to worry about a mask or anything else down here.

BUCK: Alex Berenson, everybody, Pandemia, Alex, thanks so much, buddy.

BERENSON: Thanks, guys.