CLAY: We are joined now by another man who has dealt with the ridiculous spice — I don’t know if that’s the right word — of cancellation, our guy, Alex Berenson. Alex, you saw what happened with us with YouTube. I bet this will also get flagged by YouTube because we are now all enemies of the state.

BERENSON: (laughing)

CLAY: How dare we! But I want to start — first of all, thanks for joining us — with this headline that just came out. The Wall Street Journal just put out a headline saying — and I’m reading directly from this headline — “Covid-19 Deaths Top 2,100 a Day, Highest in Nearly a Year.” How is that possible?

BERENSON: How is that possible? Well, there’s a ton of Omicron around, and some of those deaths are gonna be sort of coincidental. There’s also some Delta left over, by the way, although not very much. But there are people who’ve been lagging in the hospitals who died. So there’s some of that. So some of those deaths are gonna be just essentially incidental deaths, are gonna be deaths with covid — and I do believe that Omicron is less dangerous than Delta.

There’s evidence of that. But when you have a million new infections a day or more — and we likely have a lot more than that, given that given that the posted number of 700,000 and a lot of people weren’t getting tested — people are gonna die. People are gonna die even if this is less dangerous — and it’s interesting. Like, months ago I was saying to you we’re not through with this. All these people who said, “Oh it’s gonna be over by the winter.” I mean, these people who believed in efficacy of the vaccines have been calling for the end of this for a year, and they’ve been completely wrong.

And they’re more wrong now relatively because the vaccines don’t work at all against Omicron, and so it’s out there, and it’s killing people. And not just in the United States. I mean, this lie that this is somehow — that the United States is — exceptional in this way is a lie. All over Europe people are dying from Omicron, even though those are incredibly highly vaccinated countries because the vaccine doesn’t work very well against Omicron.

BUCK: So Alex we have from your Substack and everyone should check out Alex’s book, Pandemia, which has been selling very well despite all the pressure on people, of course, to not support Alex’s work, which we recommend you do support it. Go get Pandemia. Alex, you put out on your Substack: “An urgent warning. The world’s most mRNA vaccinated countries now have shockingly high covid infection rates. Hospitalizations and deaths are rising fast too. The mRNA experiment needs to stop immediately.” Expand.

BERENSON: Okay. So we talked last month, right, in December, about Omicron, and it looked like Omicron’s very mild, right, based on the data out of South Africa. But South Africa isn’t very heavily vaccinated, and something disturbing that should really concern us all is happening in these countries that have really high vaccination rates. There’s a lot of them. There’s Denmark, there’s Australia, there’s Israel especially — especially, notably — where basically the entire adult population has received two doses, and most people have received three.

As I say on the Substack, the infectious rates in Israel are unimaginably high right now. More people were infected with covid in the last week in Israel than in the entire basically first year of the epidemic, in all of 2020, before the vaccinations. It looks very much like vaccines have negative efficacy against Omicron. Now, what that means is people who’ve been vaccinated with two doses are more likely to be infected with it.

BUCK: How could that be possible, Alex? Can you explain that? We’re saying in the theoretical. How could that be the case?

BERENSON: Sure. It’s entirely biologically plausible. The reason it’s plausible is that the spike on Omicron is different than the spike on the original covid, the original SARS-CoV-2. And the vaccines were optimized to help your body produce antibodies to the spike of the original SARS-CoV-2. So what you have after being vaccinated is a mix of antibodies that don’t exactly fit the original, or that don’t exactly fit the spike — Omicron spike — as well. Okay?

So that can mean two things. The less dangerous version of this is it just sort of hinders your overall response, and so you’re producing antibodies and some of them work against the spike and some of them don’t. But the mix is not as optimal as it would be if you were just naturally infected and had no vaccination. Okay. So it takes your body longer, so you’re more likely to get infected, but ultimately you’re gonna clear it. The worst version of this is what’s called antibody-dependent enhancement.

And that means that the antibodies your body is producing actually hook onto the spike in a way that helps the spike evade your cell, okay? That is the true terror. That would mean that you’re more likely not to get sick, but to get sicker if you’ve been vaccinated. And we know this can happen with vaccines because it has happened with other vaccines in the past. Most notably, a vaccine about Dengue Fever and also many years ago a vaccine for a virus that kids get a lot called RSV.

So this can happen. What we don’t know and what I make clear in my Substack post which came out yesterday — which a lot of people have been asking about — is we don’t know yet that overall incidence of severe disease is worse in vaccinated people for Omicron. It’s very complicated epidemiologically because so many people are getting it, and it’s hard to sort out who’s winding up in the hospital incidentally, who’s actually getting sick from the disease, and then it takes awhile for people to die.

So it’s complicated. But I would say at this point — I will go on the record saying it — it is abundantly clear that being vaccinated increases your risk of being infected with Omicron. And I think everybody knows this (laughs) because everybody knows a ton of people who’ve been vaccinated — and, in some cases, boosted — and have gotten this in the last month! We all know this.

CLAY: All right. First of all, this is crazy, and obviously we’ve been talking about this for months, and you’ve been ahead of where the data is going to lead us. And you’ve also said, Alex, that trying to predict covid has made fools of us at all at some point or another.

BERENSON: Yeah.

CLAY: So, I’m asking you for a difficult scenario here. But as we come up on the end of January, what we saw last year was an overall decline, substantially, of covid as we moved into the summer before Delta came up and before Omicron came up.

BERENSON: Yeah.

CLAY: What do you foresee the next couple of months looking like based on the data from Europe and Israel and what you are seeing around the world in the United States as it pertains to covid? Are we going to see a similar decline as we move into spring and summer as naturally occurs with these viruses? What does the next couple of months look like in your mind?

BERENSON: I really do not know. The reason I don’t know anymore, is that it’s also not clear whether being vaccinated is gonna hinder the development of natural immunity post-infection, okay? So if you’re infected and you haven’t been vaccinated, you develop a broad range of antibodies. Not just to the spike, but to other parts of the coronavirus. It is not clear that people who are vaccinated and then infected and then recover get the same broad protection, and so (laughing) — and there’s something else.

There’s another subvariant of Omicron out there. This has not really been well understood in the U.S., but it’s clear in Europe. I am hearing… Okay, I don’t know that this is true, and we need to get data on this, that people who have been infected with Omicron and recovered are in some cases getting reinfected very quickly, possibly with the other subvariant of Omicron. If that’s true, then (laughing) this thing is just gonna go around and around and around.

And I don’t know what stops it because seasonality didn’t stop it in Australia. In Australia, it’s summer there right now. They shouldn’t have any cases. They had a tremendous number of cases last week; then it came down. In Denmark and Israel and France, the caseloads are off the charts right now. And again, it doesn’t seem like it’s as dangerous overall, but they’re still seeing a lot of hospitalizations and deaths just because the number of cases is so high.

So I don’t really want to project what the next few months are gonna look like. What I said — and this is the most important part of this — is this experiment has to stop. It has to stop now! These vaccines have failed. They have failed, okay? Look at the case numbers in the highly vaccinated countries. They have failed, and we need to stop vaccinating and boosting, and we need to figure out what we’re gonna do next, because —

CLAY: Alex, sorry to cut you off there, but when Joe Biden keeps saying, “We have a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” is he totally clueless? It’s clearly a lie at this point.

BERENSON: Yeah.

CLAY: What is going on with that messaging at this point in your mind?

BERENSON: I don’t… I don’t know. I don’t actually care about the politics right now, because this is more important than the politics, because what’s clear is in the very short term, after you get through with the two doses, you’re temporarily protected. And then after you boost, you’re temporarily protected again. But it’s like a boomerang, okay? The protection goes away, and now it’s worse than just going away, it’s clearly wrong-footing people in terms of their immune system, in terms of the new variant.

And fortunately, overall Omicron seems less dangerous. But if another variant rolls around in the spring that’s more dangerous and people are wrong-footed, it will be catastrophic. And I don’t know — and this is a question for virologists and immunologists — how long will it take to undo this or even if it’s even possible to undo it, okay? But what I know is we need to stop making the same mistake. We need to stop giving people mRNA for a spike that doesn’t even exist anymore. We have to stop.

BUCK: Alex, are you…? When you run this by, as I’m sure you do, some of the epidemiologists and particularly worthwhile MDs, people that work in this area and have real expertise, are they…? I mean, I’ve never heard you sound this level of concerned before about what you are finding out based on the data. Are some others sharing this with you? Is this growing…?

BERENSON: (interruption)

BUCK: Go ahead.

BERENSON: People are just shaking their heads! They just don’t understand. So the Israelis said, “We’re not gonna boost anymore,” a week ago, and then this morning they said they’re going to, or at least that they’re gonna offer to. I’m talking about a second booster. Okay? Everyone in Israel has already gotten a booster, and again, they have the worst infection rates any country has ever seen this week, and now they think… I mean, I don’t know what the…

Again, I don’t know what the politics are. If the politics are, “We’re just gonna kick this down the road another three months and hope that Pfizer gives us an Omicron-specific vaccine by the spring,” but you know what? By the spring there will probably be another variant. So, when I talk with people who understand this and are looking at data, they are just shaking their heads. And they know that the CDC is lying when it says that these vaccines offer really good protection against severe disease and death.

They know it’s an artifact, and I’ll keep saying this and explaining this to people. You can’t compare vaccinated and unvaccinated populations in countries where a lot of people are vaccinated because the only elderly people or a lot of elderly people who are not vaccinated are not being vaccinated, not ’cause they’re Trump voters, certainly not in a country like Denmark or Israel. They’re just too old and sick to be vaccinated. So then they get covid; they’re at high risk of death.

That’s when you see these gaps. You have to look at the overall population total. And when you do, again, you see off-the-charts levels of infections. And in a country like Denmark they’re now seeing a lot of hospitalizations in the vaccinated population. So again, when I talk to people who understand this — and believe me, there are people out there who understand this and are helping me understand it — none of us can figure out why push for another booster at this point? It doesn’t make any sense.

CLAY: Or kids, which is even scarier, right, Alex?

BERENSON: Right!

CLAY: Now there’s a lot of people saying, “Hey, a 5-year-old needs to get vaccinated.”

BERENSON: Right, and maybe, Clay, the politics are just gonna try to blame the unvaccinated. Maybe that’s the only Democratic strategy left, just like I’m gonna say that the voting… You know, if you vote not to have 24/7 election booths for six months before an election, you’re Bull Connor. Maybe I’m just gonna play the base, blame the unvaccinated. I don’t know what the politics are, but I know that medically and scientifically anybody looking at the data, these vaccines should be pulled from the market worldwide on the basis of efficacy. Forget side-effects. Just look at the efficacy. They’re not working right now.

BUCK: Alex, how do we get the final data necessary to make this point that you’re talking about here that they don’t work as well, even against… The last holdout here has been against hospitalization and death. Why don’t we have that data right now? Why don’t we know whether it works against hospitalization and death in the U.S.?

BERENSON: Because the CDC is not releasing the raw numbers! You can get raw numbers from the U.K. You can get raw numbers from Israel. They won’t release the numbers. They’ll only release the adjusted-rate ratios which they claim make the vaccines show that the vaccines work. And again, I want to be clear: If you look back last year, there was evidence that they reduced infection for a matter of months, and they reduced severe disease and death.

Because if you stop people from getting infected, it’s definitely gonna stop them from getting severe disease and death. That’s… But this idea that there’s this huge protection against severe disease and death but no protection against infections, look, you can spin a case for why that might be. But it doesn’t that I can ma much sent biologically especially because the main impact is on antibodies, not on T-cells, which is whole different conversation.

CLAY: Can you come back? I want to ask you a couple more questions, Alex. Do you have a couple more minutes?

BERENSON: Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

BUCK: We’ll get to it. Alex Berenson will be with us.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: Alex Berenson, we got a quick segment here. I want to hit you with two quick questions, give you a chance to respond. Alex, based on your last segment I don’t know if you’ve watched Don’t Look Up, the Netflix show about an asteroid coming to earth, I feel like even though that’s a climate change allegory, that you are like the scientist here telling people, “Hey, these vaccines don’t work,” do you feel like that? Second part of this: Covid Zero is still the policy in China. Wouldn’t that theoretically make China maybe the most vulnerable country in the entire world to covid?

BERENSON: So it’s funny, right, ’cause Don’t Look Up, those are all Hollywood lefties. They hate me.

CLAY: Yes.

BERENSON: They try to get me banned from Twitter. They’d ban me from my Substack if they could. It’s ironic that they’re the ones completely ignoring this. There’s something about the word “vaccine,” as I wrote in Pandemia, that has this magic has this magic effect on people where they don’t look at the data. If this had been called a drug — and it obviously works more like a drug, it has a limited duration of effect, and then you have to get treated again — it couldn’t possibly pass FDA muster.

So I don’t understand. Again, I try not to think that much, and I certainly try not to head down these conspiracy ratholes about Bill Gates or whatever. I don’t understand what’s happening. I think that there’s some… It takes a little while in some cases to process the data. I think there’s hope that these vaccines had worked better than they have. But once you see the Israeli…

You know, once you see that the most vaccinated, boosted country in the world had 1% of its population infected with Omicron in a single day, what do I have to do? What do I have to do? What does anybody have to do? The data is on the Substack and you can go and get it on the Israeli site. So I don’t know what’s going on. As for China, no one knows what to make of what’s happening in China. All we know they have no covid, and they have no mRNA vaccine.

CLAY: Alex Berenson, phenomenal stuff. I mean phenomenal.