CLAY: We’re joined now by our friend Alex Berenson. You can read Alex’s work at his Substack. Basically, if you just type in Alex Berenson on Google; you can find his Substack. It’s easy to find him there. You can’t find him on Twitter because he has been banned for sharing inconvenient truths surrounding the covid debacle. Alex, thanks for joining us, and I want to start with just an overall, overarching analysis of where you think we are right now as February begins in the United States based on the data that you are seeing relating to covid.
BERENSON: So, it’s a great question. I’ve been running so much on the Substack, which, yeah, you can type in my name, or you can type in Unreported Truths which is what it’s called. And I feel like I’m kind of overwhelming people and I need to cut back a little bit, ’cause I’m writing two, three, four times a day. But there’s so much information both, you know, politically and medically and about the vaccines, about what’s going on. I mean, I think politically, I think a lot of the country is really done.
I mean, they’re not sort of done anymore. They’re really done. And, you know, and there was a poll that came out Monday from Monmouth University showing that 70% of Americans believe essentially — I can’t remember the exact wording, but it was something like — the coronavirus is here, and we need to live with it. And 70% of Americans agree with that, including 90% of Republicans and about 80% of independents.
And, you know, that leaves Joe Biden and the White House with a terrible problem because their base, you know, they’ve managed to terrify themselves and they can’t seem to get out of it and how they’re — and so, you know, you read things like these things in The Atlantic or Politico, you know, these sort of elite news organizations where they’re all talking to each other about how, you know, we need to move forward a little bit incrementally and can we drop the mask mandates for indoor stuff and, you know, what’s it gonna be like when we get, you know, another booster shot?
And then you go out into the real world ’cause, you know, I live in the Hudson Valley of New York which is, you know, basically not… It’s not really… You know, it’s not Westchester. It’s not particularly Democratic. It’s, you know, sort of purple and parts of it are, you know, red in terms of the politics. And everybody’s done. I mean, I don’t wear a mask anywhere. Nobody says boo to me about it.
You know, other people choose to wear their mask. Like, nobody says anything about it. You know, most children under 12 are not vaccinated and they’re not going to be vaccinated, it seems pretty clear, against covid, I mean, not other stuff, but against covid, and, if you look even at boosters, the booster uptake has fallen off a cliff in the last couple of weeks.
The hospitals are not gonna be able to function. So they’re gonna have to back off that. So, politically, we’re done. And, you know, unless things get really terrible medically, that’s not gonna change. It doesn’t matter whether the death count is 300 a day or 500 a day, or even as it is right now in the United States, 3,000 a day. People don’t… I mean, I hate to say it so bluntly, but people do not seem to care about that number anymore.
They know who’s dying. They know who’s really at risk here. Everybody knows now. They know it’s overwhelmingly, you know, very elderly people and very sick people, and they know that, you know, most of the country, most adults in the country got vaccinated. They did their part. They masked up. They locked down and they know that none of it worked. And whatever the Biden administration says, we all know it, and so I think we’re moving forward politically.
BUCK: Alex? Alex, let me jump in for a second, ’cause I promised everybody you’d break down the situation, ’cause I’m seeing some folks — including you — talking about Israel right now.
BERENSON: Yes.
BUCK: What the heck is going on in Israel?
BERENSON: Okay. So, that… Okay. So now we got a different question, okay, and the question is — and you know I came on last week and I was on with you, I was on with Tucker, and I was on the Substack and, you know, Greg, your screener, actually said to me — or your producer, I should say. He said to me, “You were so passionate last week and I could really tell,” and the reason I’m passionate is because the vaccine experiment needs to stop immediately.
Okay? Israel. There is something happening that’s not good in Israel. Deaths now… When I talked to you last week, they were having 30 or 40 deaths a week, which is — sorry, a day. Now there are over 60 deaths a day on average, which is more than they had at any point in this epidemic, and as I wrote on the Substack last week — and, as I think you know, let’s sort of walk through with your listeners again.
And it is not good, and you can — and this is the point I’m making it over and over. I’m gonna keep making it ’til somebody listens: Those charts you see from the CDC — those charts you see in the New York Times or CNN that pretend there’s a huge gap in deaths between vaccinated and unvaccinated people — those charts are essentially a lie. The reason they’re a lie is that they’re based on a small number of unvaccinated people, a lot of whom — are just too elderly and frail to be vaccinated. What matters is the absolute numbers, and those numbers are bad right now in Israel.
BUCK: What is happening? What do you think are…? We’ll preface this by saying theories, okay, ’cause we don’t know. I say that to people, by the way. I’ve told people who are kind of on board Team Reality, and they’re like, “Come on, man. You can’t have a worse covid situation in Israel now than you did 12 months ago,” but you’re telling us, no, it actually is.
CLAY: The data makes it clear that that is the case. What we don’t know, to Buck’s point here, is exactly why that is. So these are theories. We’re not saying it’s definitely because of X or Y, but the data is clear that Israel’s cases are skyrocketing.
BUCK: So what are the possible whys, Alex?
BERENSON: So, okay. So, yeah, you’re right. Unequivocally. They have more people in the hospital than they ever had, more people dying. The best case is that — and this is — I think this is not true. But the best case is that it’s just because Omicron spreads. Omicron spreads so fast that a lot of those deaths and hospitalizations are essentially incidental. The problem with that theory is that basically Israelis are reporting that’s not correct.
You know, it’s a lot of deaths “from” covid, not “with” covid. So put that one aside. The second sort of least scary version of the theory is Omicron just spread really fast and even though it is, you know, less dangerous than Delta, less dangerous than the original strain or the original variant, just ’cause it spreads so fast, you’re gonna get this bump in cases and deaths, and it’s not gonna last.
And then hopefully, you know, sort of the positive spin on this is, everybody has now gotten it and then we can move on. So it looks — it’s gonna look — bad for a couple of weeks and then we’re done. Okay. The problem with that theory is in the U.K. and Denmark, countries that got hit with Omicron before Israel and are also very heavily vaccinated, cases remain very high.
In fact, Africa, which is not heavily vaccinated, they’ve come way down. In India, actually, which had a pretty big spike for a couple weeks, they’ve come way down. But in the highly vaccinated countries, they’re not down. Okay, so now we get to the next, sort of the third of the four scenarios, and this one is scarier. In this scenario, Omicron is interacting — well, basically, the vaccines are doing nothing to prevent illness, which we know.
And they’re not doing very much to prevent serious disease, either, and they’re kind of wrong footing you in terms of immunity going forward. So, in other words, the numbers are staying high in the U.K. and they are still so high in Israel because people are getting this and they’re having… Even if they clear it, they’re not sort of building up any lasting immunity to it and so they can get it again. Okay.
That’s sort of a version of something called “original antigenic sin,” which is essentially we’ve exposed people through the vaccines to wrong version of the virus. So, their bodies are making antibodies that don’t really fit the virus as well as they could, and they don’t work that well to prevent infection and transmission or they don’t work really at all to prevent infection and transmission.
I don’t think we have real evidence for that one. I think it’s probably three. I think you’re just not getting very good, if any, protection from the vaccines and we need to stop giving them, period. They don’t work against this variant — it’s very, very clear — and we need to stop using them. But, you know, the worse the numbers in Israel get, the more we have to consider that ADE possibility.
CLAY: Okay, Alex. That’s sobering. Let’s talk about where the rubber meets the road here. They’re talking about trying to get kids from 6 months old to 5 years old vaccinated. You have young kids, and I always think this is important to mention because you — like me and like most parents — are basically your focus is protecting your kids. I’m not getting my kids vaccinated for this, right?
BERENSON: No.
CLAY: I’m not saying I’m antivax. I want to make that clear, ’cause somebody will grab a headline. My kids have been vaccinated for measles, mumps, rubella. I believe yours have as well, Alex.
BERENSON: Yep.
CLAY: You see someone arguing, “Hey, we need to have 6-month-olds to be vaccinated against covid.” Based on the data that you are seeing, what are you doing with your own kids and how would you respond to what I’m doing with mine, and what would you say to our audience they should be looking at considering and discussing with their doctors as it pertains to young kids and covid shots?
BERENSON: So, my kids — our kids — are not getting the covid vaccine. They have gotten their standard childhood vaccines, just like yours, and they will continue to get those shots, whatever they’re supposed to get. They’re not getting this. Look, all the stuff that I just said to you (chuckling) about why we should stop vaccinating —
BERENSON: It is absolute madness! Kids… Look, if you’re 85, okay, and you’re at high risk from covid and there’s some chance a vaccine is gonna benefit you… This is why I said for close to a year, I said, “You know, older people, go get vaccinated. I don’t know if it’s gonna do you much good, but it might, and you’re at risk.” But now I don’t believe that anymore because, again, ’cause the vaccines do not work against Omicron, and their efficacy just clearly fades so quickly.
But at least those people, there was a legitimate sort of cost-benefit, what’s called “equipoise” in medicine. There was a legitimate question. There’s no legitimate question here. No one under 18 and really much older should be going anywhere near these. They are not at any significant risk from covid unless they are so obese and so sick with other stuff that the vaccine is gonna be a risk to them too.
They’re not. I think I said this to you a month ago. If not, about maybe a month ago a paper came out of Germany looking at covid deaths in children and teenagers in the first 18 months of the epidemic. Not one, zero, healthy German children died from the age of 5 to 18 in the first 18 months, okay. Covid isn’t a risk to them. They should not be vaccinated. This needs to stop.
BUCK: Alex Berenson, everybody, go check out his Substack. We subscribe to it. Check out also his book, Pandemia. Alex, always good, my friend, thanks for being with us here.
BERENSON: Thanks. I hope next week we’ll have good news medically.
BUCK: Absolutely. Thank you so much.
From pistachio Crème Brûlée to Brussels Sprouts, is this man ever happy?
Watch Clay and Buck analyze what's different about this Trump transition.
Eric Hovde speaks out over concerns about his race against Tammy Baldwin.
Clay's loving Trump's cabinet picks so far.
The former New York Times reporter explains his transformation.