Alex Berenson: The Pandemic’s Rightest Man

CLAY: We bring in now Alex Berenson. We were scheduled to talk to him on Friday. He joins us now. Alex, appreciate you making the time. Everything good in the family?

BERENSON: Everything is fine. The emergency is over and say no more.

CLAY: Okay. Good deal. All right. Let’s dive into the latest on covid. I want to know what your reaction was from the CDC’s statements on Friday dealing with mask wearing. Then on Sunday, we had the congressional health officials say, “Oh, by the way, you don’t have to wear a mask on Capitol Hill anymore.” We’ve seen certainly cities and states — New York City and New York memorably — of late saying, “Hey, kids don’t have to wear in the state of New York,” starting Wednesday masks anymore. New York City’s done away with outdoor masking, and they say maybe by March 7th it can go away overall. What are we seeing? And is this all an example not of science but political science based on the data?

BERENSON: Well, I mean, it’s science in the sense that, you know, masks do nothing and, you know, and cloth and surgical masks certainly do nothing and N95 probably do close to nothing unless you, you know, wear them properly. We talked about this for years!

CLAY: Yeah.

BERENSON: So, they are finally following… You know, they have cover to do it right now because Omicron, you know, is fading in the United States, fortunately. There will be another variant, almost certainly. Cases will go back up. Whether that’s in the summer in the South, you know, as has happened two years in a row or whether, you know, something else happens in, let’s say, California, you know, which hasn’t been hit as hard, you know.

The West Coast hasn’t been hit as hard as some other places for whatever reason so they’re a little bit more vulnerable, there will be more covid. But the Democrats know, you know, where the country is. They know this is killing them politically, and the zeitgeist has changed. I don’t know. You mentioned Friday and Sunday. But Saturday night there was maybe the most shocking thing of all was the Saturday Night Live skit where —

CLAY: Which we’re gonna play in this hour for everybody out there you didn’t see it.

BERENSON: I will not step on it, then. I mean, but, you know, if Saturday Night Live — which is, you know, as liberal a place and, unfortunately, as unfunny a place these days as they come — you know, feel that they can make jokes about masks and make jokes about… You know, the skit, really, as your listeners will hear, is more about the attitude of these people, then something has changed.

And, you know, I Substacked about this yesterday, and I said, you know, my joke was — two jokes on this. One, thank God I never have to go to dinner with any of these people ever again. You know. They won’t have me, and I don’t want them. You know. And the second joke is, imagine what they would think if they actually knew what the data about vaccines really says.

BUCK: Well, Alex, that’s what I wanted to ask you next. We’re talking to Alex Berenson, author of Pandemia. Subscribe to his Substack. I get it every day. I’m a subscriber, and it’s been fantastic. Alex, the final stronghold, really, of Fauciism — the one that they view as unassailable — is that vaccines were incredibly effective as stopping hospitalization and death.

Clearly not effective as stopping spread, which they said, and we have the receipts and we played that audio many, many times on the show. That was wrong, full stop. Wrong. I think everybody who just witnessed Omicron in America realizes, it did not stop the spread and really, I don’t know if it stopped the spread at all. I don’t know if anyone can make the case that even 30% or 20% or whatever. But put that aside for a moment. The final stronghold is hospitalization and death. We haven’t heard a lot about updates in the data. What is the data telling us now about that final assertion of Fauciism?

BERENSON: So, it is… It is incredibly clear that the vaccines are less effective against hospitalization and death when it comes to Omicron. You know, that’s inarguable. Whether… Here, you know, listen. Here’s the thing. The (garbled) epidemiology is really complicated. My best take on this is that you, once you’re vaccinated — and you saw this last year, okay? You saw it in Israel. You even saw it in the U.S. last spring.

After that second dose hits, you get a couple months of real protection, real protection from infection and then downstream protection from hospitalization and death. The protection from infection, as you just said, goes away. It goes to zero. It probably goes negative for Omicron, because Omicron is… The spike is different, there’s some evidence of, you know, immune imprinting.

Again, it gets complicated, but I would say there’s pretty good evidence that it’s not zero protection but certainly more likely to be infected. And I think everyone in the United States saw this. They saw people where they personally were vaccinated — and in many cases boosted — and then they got Omicron. So, the question is, do you have some protection either, you know, at the antibody level or at the T-cell level that’s gonna provide protection from really negative outcomes?

And the data is just… It’s just messy and muddy. You probably get some protection, again, in that first few months after the second dose. This against Omicron, I’m talking about. Then it goes away. Then if you boost, you get it back very briefly — more briefly, okay? And that’s why they were talking about a second booster in a place like Israel. But they dropped that because it’s clear that there’s diminishing returns. So what I’m saying to you is, when I tell you we really don’t know but the protection is at best very limited, that is the best answer, okay?

And, but there’s a flip side to this, okay? It’s not just protection against covid. You’re vaccinating healthy people! If there are other risks, whether those risks are cardiac or otherwise to a vaccine, those have to be taken into account before you vaccinate. Even pretending that it’s all free and, you know, it doesn’t disrupt people’s lives when they get sick for 24 hours or whatever.

If there’s other risks, you need to net that out — and we’ve never done that and we’re never going to do it. I think the powers that be are too afraid of what the answer would be. Even if we could do it, they’re not gonna do it. And the big clinical trials from 2020 have been completely disrupted because everybody who was in the placebo arm, everybody who didn’t initially get the vaccine, almost all those people wound up getting the vaccine very shortly thereafter.

And the truth is it’s gonna be really hard to get the data. I’m gonna give you one other fact about this. In the last summer and fall, especially in the fall — in Europe especially where the data is quicker and better — there was a significant rise in all-cause mortality, okay? That rise seems to have ended in Germany and U.K. We should all be very happy about that. But to me that raises the question.

I’m talking about noncovid. I’m talking about mainly people dying from heart attacks and heart disease. What happened last summer and fall to drive that? And if you want to tell me that somehow it was disruption in medical care or people — you know, people didn’t get their care or they were afraid to go to the hospital — you have to tell me why it didn’t happen before that and why it hasn’t happened since then.

And yet it happened in the months following these mass vaccination campaigns all over Europe, and it happened in the U.S. too. And I suspect the answer to that is probably that for some people there’s some cardiotoxicity associated with these vaccines. We know that’s true with myocarditis in young people. We don’t know if the, you know, if the risks extend sort of out past that. And that’s the kind of work that we — as “we,” you know, not we but scientists and we as a country — and scientists as researchers should be doing. We’re not really doing it.

CLAY: Alex, do we have any indication what percentage of Americans have now have Omicron? Buck and I have both had it, a huge percentage of our listenership has certainly had it, and many of them may have had it and not even known it. Do we have any kind of reliable data — I bet the answer is “no,” but — on what percentage of people had Omicron now as we come out of the Omicron surge?

BERENSON: We really… We really don’t. The one good number that I’ve seen — and this is sort of it’s a partial data point, but it’s an interesting one. In the U.K., where they weren’t vaccinating kids under 12 until just recently, and they just… They just started a vaccination campaign, but they really… It’s a really weak vaccination campaign. They really don’t want to vaccinate kids under 12.

But they just sort of didn’t want to go against — you know, they didn’t want to annoy — Pfizer, or I shouldn’t say they didn’t want to annoy Pfizer. For whatever reason, they decided to move forward with this incredibly weak vaccination campaign. The reason I mentioned this is kids under 12 were not being vaccinated, so you could see who had antibodies in that population.

And in the U.K., before Omicron, 60% of all the kids in the U.K. had antibodies. So that tells you how widespread it was and how little damage it was doing to those kids. Now it’s like 98%. So that tells you that at least in Britain, basically anybody who wasn’t already infected with SARS-CoV-2 got it during the last surge. And I suspect it’s the same in the U.S.

BUCK: Alex — we’re speaking to Alex Berenson, author of Pandemia — I have this dream that the people who were pushing all this and were so adamant that they were right — and were really vicious to people like you, specifically, and others who even raised alternative points of view in interpretations of data, whether it’s Fauci or people in the media — will have to defend some of this at some point publicly.

I want there to be debates where someone gets to show up, and I want to see Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg on TV try to defend the mask mandate on planes when masks have been dropped everywhere else. Do you have any faith that there will be accountability for some of this stuff? Do you have any vision for how we can make it happen, ’cause I don’t think this stuff is gone for good; I don’t think you do, either.

BERENSON: No, I don’t. I mean, here. In fact, I just put out on my Substack just before you guys called — and I’ve never heard of this person, but there’s someone on Twitter called “Unacceptable CanadianGirl,” and she just tweeted — she tweeted three hours ago, this is only three hours ago — “I guess everyone owes Dr. Robert Malone, Alex Berenson, Dr. Peter McCullough, Jordan Peterson, and Joe Rogan an apology.” That tweet in three hours has been liked now 30,000 times.

Okay? So, they’re never going to admit it, but they know, and we know they know, and the world knows, okay? And, you know, The Atlantic about a year ago, almost a year ago, wrote a piece about me that was headlined: “The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man,” and so every, you know, few days I put something out on my Substack and something that, like, “I was right about six months before,” you know, or sometimes, you know, 12 months before, and is now being said, you know, and agreed. And I call it “The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man,” and occasionally —

CLAY: Yeah. But, so, Alex, to that point, I’ve seen you point out that Twitter actually — in retrospect now — changed the way that they flagged some of the tweets that got you suspended.

BERENSON: Yeah.

CLAY: And we know you’ve got the lawsuit against Twitter. Do you think it’s possible that Twitter could ever allow you to return based on the shifting guidance that they are putting on your tweets that they labeled as not permissible?

BERENSON: It’s possible. I mean, you know, whether or not, you know, I have to, you know, win not necessarily the whole lawsuit but survive what’s called the motion to dismiss to get them to do that. Whether they’ll do that simply on their own because they’ve seen, you know, I don’t want to speak for Twitter. You know, it’s up to them. I think that I have been, you know, essentially proven correct and should be let back on. But, you know, if they don’t want to let me back on, I…

You know, I have this lawsuit, and I am pursuing it. You know, but again, whether or not people are going to admit this, it’s not just you and I know. It’s that the world knows. And, you know, the guy who wrote that piece about me in The Atlantic, wrote this piece a couple weeks before this. This is in February 2020, and I didn’t have time to put it out. But there’s this amazing paragraph in it about how wonderful the vaccines are, and there’s five sentences in it — and four of the sentences are provably wrong, and the fifth one says we need to collect more data. Okay? So, these people are morons.

BUCK: Sounds like me. (chuckles)

BERENSON: Sounds like me talking to my wife. You know, and they’ve been proven wrong, and they can’t take it back. So what we need to do is focus on a couple things, I think. One, you know, make sure this doesn’t happen again. Make sure there’s never this kind of overreaction. And then I think the second thing, you know, when the Republicans presumably they’re gonna take Congress next year, early next year, what they need to do is chase down the lab leak issue and whether or not Fauci — what he knew and why he tried to discourage anyone from investigating those issues, because that is potentially criminal behavior —

CLAY: Can you come back, by the way, Alex, ’cause we didn’t ask you about that lab leak theory and that lab leak theory is getting a wild amount of attention right now. Can you come back and tell us what you’ve written about that?

BERENSON: Sure. Love to.

CLAY: All right. When we come back, we’ll ask him about that story that the New York Times is flagging like crazy saying that it didn’t come out of a lab.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: We are talking to Pandemia author and the man with the best covid Substack out there, Alex Berenson, about all things going on here. Just so you know, breaking news, Alex — and we want to get you on the lab leak theory. We’ve only got about two minutes. But they just ended the mask mandate for schools in California, Washington, and Oregon just in time!

Because the science changes when the politics demands it. These people are a joke. Everyone who… Every mask shamer in the country should be ashamed of themselves. But put that on hold for a second here. The lab leak theory. The New York Times says actually it didn’t come from a lab. You say what?

BERENSON: Real quick — I know I don’t have much time — I actually… I hate to keep talking about the Substack, but I just wrote about this in an extensive piece this morning that that article is a joke. It’s based on a preprint which is a scientific paper that’s been released online that came out this weekend that basically maps cases in Wuhan, early cases and says, “Look, they were all around the seafood market; therefore, the seafood market must have been the source of this.” Here’s the problem.

We’ve known for two years that there were a lot of cases in the seafood market — the seafood — or near it. The seafood market is crowded. It’s in the center of Wuhan. There’s a lot of commerce down there. It’s not very clean. It doesn’t mean that this came out of there! It means that there were cases there. Okay? And the same guys whose names are on this are the people who we know two years ago told Anthony Fauci — including a guy named Kristian Andersen, who was in California at Scripps in Southern California…

He told Tony Fauci privately, “I’m concerned about this. It looks like there’s some features that are not natural,” and six weeks later, he wrote something publicly saying exactly the opposite, which basically made it impossible to investigate the lab leak. This is a guy who needs to be subpoenaed and he and Fauci and all the others who were on a conference call that happened on February 1st, 2020, and they were just trying to fill smoke. They found (garbled) University of Arizona to carry water for them. This guy has written the same paper now basically three times. So, this is a joke — and all it is, is an effort to obscure how much evidence there is in favor of the lab leak theory.

CLAY: Alex, fantastic, as always. Go read his Substack.