CLAY: The CDC just came out about an hour ago — Rochelle Walensky, the director of the CDC — and said even when 5- to 11-year-olds can be vaccinated, they’re not doing away with their recommendation that all kids have to be in masks. I’m gonna play this cut for you in just a sec, but I want you thinking about this in the back of your mind ’cause this is one of the questions Buck and I have been asking.

How does this ever end? If we now can provide vaccinations to 5- to 11-year-old kids so all of those crazy parents out there that haven’t looked at the data and believe their kids are actually at risk can get vaccines, how do we ever stop kids wearing masks in schools again? That’s the question I want you to think about. Here’s Rochelle Walensky saying, “Hey, even when kids 5 to 11 have been vaccinated, we’re not doing away with masks.”

WALENSKY: You know, after we have authorization from the FDA and recommendations from CDC, we will be working to scale out pediatric vaccinations. That said, it will take some time. And as I just noted, as we head into these winter months, we know we cannot be complacent. We also know that from previous data that schools that have had masks in place were three and a half times less likely to have school outbreaks requiring school closures.

CLAY: That’s a lie!

WALENSKY: So right now, we are going to continue to recommend masks in all schools for all people in those schools. And we will look forward to scaling up pediatric vaccinations during this period of time.

CLAY: I don’t know if you could hear me screaming while Rochelle Walensky was talking, ’cause I’m not sure if our mics are on, but, Buck, she just lied to us. The data does not reflect that schools with masks are safer than schools without masks. There is no data to support that. In fact, the data actually supports the opposite, that there is virtually no difference in all large-scale studies. How can you ever trust the CDC again when you hear them, Buck, directly lying to us.

BUCK: Clay, we keep running through this cycle where we see the people that you and I disagree with, to put it mildly, on their approach to this virus, and I mean those in authority, I mean, the Walenskys and Faucis and Biden and this White House — which, obviously, this has all been deeply politicized. Anyone who thinks it’s not politicized, all you have to do is go back and listen to the sound bites in 2020 in the summer — exactly a year ago, in fact — where you had Biden and Kamala, “Oh, I can’t trust the vaccine if it’s from this guy.”

CLAY: “I won’t take the Trump Vaccine.” Yeah.

BUCK: That’s all crap. That’s an untenable, intellectually dishonest position to say, “It wasn’t politicized.” Yeah, it was politicized. Okay. But take a step back from that for a second. They keep telling us that they agree at a certain point, they’ve gone too far, and they won’t do something because it would be out of balance with the risk-reward or with the benefit drawback, and so we say, “Okay.”

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: And then they do that thing that they said they agreed with us was too far, and we are the crazy ones. This keeps playing out. They keep doing this incrementalism, slow boiling of the frog in the pot, and then they act like, “How could you have any issue with this?”