CLAY: I am down in the great state of Florida. I appreciate all the Floridians that I’ve already met down here who are living in a free republic — “the oasis of freedom,” as Ron DeSantis calls it — and, ironically, Buck, if you look at the data… We were just talking about the data from The Lancet on vaccinated versus unvaccinated spread of covid.

If you look at the data — and I tweeted this out. If there’s people out there who you have friends and family, I know, as we move closer to Halloween and the holidays for Thanksgiving and Christmas, that there are many people that will be surrounded by some who might disagree with them, and I would tell them, “Hey, you can spread the gospel of Clay and Buck.”

You can say, “Look, you may not agree with everything these guys say, but their facts are gonna be pretty right. You might disagree sometimes with the opinion, but you should check ’em out, you should listen. We welcome everyone.” It’s a big tent on this radio program that Rush left us, the biggest radio program anywhere in the country.

And the data right now — and I’m reading from the New York Times. Did you know — probably you didn’t — that Florida has the lowest rate of covid per capita of any state in the entire United States and that Florida is less than half the covid rate of New York? We’ve been talking about the vaccine mandates that are being put in place and also less than half the rate of California. That is stunning, I think, to many people.

BUCK: It’s obviously because Governor Ron DeSantis put in place those really extreme vaccine mandates and mask mandates. Oh, wait. He did none of that.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: He refused to bend the knee and do these things that they said would be necessary to bring down Florida’s caseload all summer while you and I were saying, “We’ve seen this before. It is seasonal, just like so many other viruses. It will move through Florida and it will move north,” and that is currently what it is doing.

But Governor DeSantis is also pointing out, Clay, that there are gonna be a lot of long-term implications to this when it comes to people’s relationship with the health bureaucracy and how they view just the general public health advice where, for example, because of how much there’s a politicization of vaccines for kids with covid.

You and I sit here and talk about measles. It’s stable, does not mutate, and it’s a thousand times statistically more dangerous to children than a covid. But people keep comparing these things and acting like it’s the same. Meanwhile, you got a one-in-a-million chance in terms of kids actually dying when they get covid. Here’s DeSantis saying this is gonna change the discussion for vaccines for kids in a lot of ways.

DESANTIS: I’m really concerned about how this is gonna impact other vaccines — for example, the normal vaccines that kids take, my kids take, most of your kids I’m sure do. I guarantee you, you are gonna see a decline in that because I think you’re creating a lot of distrust. I think you’re creating a lot of people who are looking at these people that have been on TV for a year and a half, and they ain’t told the truth.

CLAY: It’s 100% right. I think he’s right, and I think it’s unfortunate. Covid has been disastrous for our trust going forward in public health officials because they have told us so many falsehoods for 18 months because they have been dishonest with us and because they have very rarely, if ever, leveled with the American public and let them know what was likely to happen and where we were headed.

I think that distrust is going to take decades to rebuild, if ever. And the body blow that science itself has taken as the argument would be that science is not political, right? That’s the strong argument, that we should follow the truth wherever it goes. When you tell me that it’s safe, when everybody else is locked down, that I can have a BLM protest — and when you tell me that there’s something other than boys and girls in this world — I’m sorry. I’m not buying into modern-day science.

BUCK: Clay, imagine if your doctor told you, “You need to take this antibiotic or you’ll die,” and then — after you took it for 10 days or whatever it was — he said, “You weren’t actually gonna die, but I just thought it might make you feel a little better faster so I told you you’d die.” Would you trust that doctor again?

CLAY: No, of course not.

BUCK: Dr. Fauci, admittedly, by his own words, lied to the American people. Now, what’s amazing is he’s actually lying about lying which is even crazier.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: But he admits that he lied about mask effectiveness so that he could then protect the supply of masks for “the people that really needed them” or whatever. Look, don’t trust Fauci when it comes to science. Definitely don’t let him near your puppy. This is a guy that nobody should be trusting or listening to anymore, and yet the left still props him up as the high priest of Fauciism. It’s absurd.

CLAY: It’s because so many people are so invested in the choices that they made that they won’t continue to look at the data and adjust based on those choices. This is not about science in any way. It’s about being right and refusing to admit when you were wrong. And one thing we try to do, Buck, if there were an incredible study that came out that the next couple of studies came out and they showed — I don’t know — that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was way more effective than Moderna or Pfizer, we would come on and say, “Hey, this is a really interesting study. Maybe we need to adjust or our opinion. Buck did take the Spirit Airlines of vaccines.”

BUCK: Maybe some of us know. Yep. Maybe some of us had a feeling, Clay, that the Spirit Airlines long-term would be a better play than your fancy Delta and United vaccines, so to speak. Look, I’ll tell you this, man. I just spoke to my family, my parents early this week. They’re both already scheduled for their boosters.

CLAY: Yeah, mine got theirs.

BUCK: Yeah. They’re getting their boosters, and I’m like, “Go for it,” and we’ve already talked about, you know, if one parent, if one of my parents gets covid we’re gonna try to separate them out and I’m gonna set one of them up so they don’t have to be together, because home spread is such a concern. I take this very seriously, you take this very seriously, based on what is real.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Not based on what you can’t control, not based on hysteria and absurdity. And this is why to call people anti-vaccine because they have these very real concerns that are actually rooted in a more full some understanding, a more honest understanding of not just the data but of human reality day to day. Clay, I can’t tell how many people stand in the elevator — this happened this morning to me — three people, I get on the elevator, all have masks down around their chins. I get on, they pull their masks up.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: Oh, gee, I feel so much safer now.

CLAY: Well, I’ve been traveling all over the country all fall, right? I’m down in Florida, I was in Texas earlier this week. I’ll be back down in Alabama next week, and I gotta say: The way we win is by embracing normalcy in our lives.