Despite Vaccine, Covid Surges in Northeast, Midwest

CLAY: We have got all sorts of different issues with covid cases now surging all over the Northeast, all over the Midwest. You’ll recall that during the summer we told you covid was seasonal in the South. Everybody was piling on the red states. Everybody was piling on Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott and all the big state governors in the South.

And now that the blue states are surging — if you look at the numbers honestly — at an unbelievable rate; suddenly, nobody is blaming any of the governors at all, and it’s totally vanishing as a political related story at all. When you can’t blame the red states, everybody runs in the opposite direction. But what’s going on right now? Michigan, covid cases up 83%, blue state governor. Minnesota, covid cases up 62%, blue state governor.

New Mexico, covid cases up 43%, blue state governor. New Hampshire up 78%, blue state governor. Wisconsin up 53%, blue state governor, and Vermont. The six states that are growing the fastest right now, according to the New York Times database, have blue state governors. And this is big deal, Buck, because Joe Biden ran his basement campaign selling everybody the idea of “I’ll fix covid. I’ll trust the science.

“Donald Trump isn’t handling covid right; I will,” and as covid isn’t disappearing, Joe Biden’s overall approval ratings are tanking at a level, frankly, combined with Kamala Harris that we’ve never seen before. Quinnipiac came out with a new poll, Buck: 36% Joe Biden approval (a new low), 53% disapproval, and listen to this: 29% approval from independent voters, 56% of them disapprove. This is crazy.

BUCK: So remember Biden was… I think that’s a critical point. He was supposed to fix covid with the hundred days of masking. Remember when people were clapping like trained seals? “Yay! A hundred days of masking!”

CLAY: That can solve it.

BUCK: (impression) “It’s mask! Mask! No joke. Here I am! Mask a hundred days, hundred days.”

CLAY: He said it would go away. He said covid would disappear.

BUCK: Look, there’s what was said — and I think this is fair across the board. There’s kind of what was said in the first 30 to 60 days of covid when we’re all, “Oh, my gosh,” and it was crazy, and then there’s what you say. Six months, a year, 18 months into covid, right? These are different things, much broader data sets, much more actual experience.

Biden was supposed to get all this under control. Here we are now with OSHA saying they’re not going to implement, as it stands right now — could change, the legality of it, but they’re not gonna implement — the mandate. I think there was just a… Yes. Here we go. In Forbes there was a study that nearly a third of health care workers in U.S. hospitals, Clay, are still not vaccinated. Health care workers! They must be so anti-science. They’re not vaccinated.

CLAY: They all had it, by the way.

BUCK: Of course! They’ve been exposed. We’re not tracking natural immunity the way that we should. The CDC doesn’t seem to care about natural immunity for quite — I think at this point — manifestly obvious reasons. But it’s amazing that they can’t even really explain what’s going on. You’re starting to see the, like, “Well, we don’t really know what’s going on.” Vermont. You’ve been bringing up Vermont a lot. I dug into the numbers on Vermont. Right now, they want to tell you, “Oh, the narrative is two-thirds of patients in the hospital and hospitalizations are rising.”

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Vermont’s a small state, but it’s a little bit like… What was that? What was it, the Princess Cruise or…? It was that cruise ship that was almost like a floating petri dish of “How dangerous is covid? How quickly does it spread?” all of that. Vermont — if you’re looking at a case study for vaccination — is very interesting because it’s a state that actually had a low in connection with rate overall compared to other states.

So not a lot of natural immunity relatively speaking but a very high — I believe the highest in the country — per capita vaccination rate, right? You’ve seen that too. Right. So what they’re telling you right now is, “Whoa, two-thirds of hospitalized covid-19 patients in Vermont…” By the way, it’s from ABC and New York Times. This isn’t Buck’s RightWingCrazyBlog.com, so Media Matters can stuff it.

But here you go. Two-thirds of hospitalized covid patients are unvaccinated. That means a third of the people in the hospital right now, let’s call it 30 to 35%, are fully vaccinated. That is not insignificant. That is far higher than what we were led to believe for POS most. Now, I know they’ll say, “Oh, but it’s better! It’s better!”

This is the mentality of, “Okay, if six feet of distancing doesn’t work, let’s try 10! If one mask doesn’t work, let’s try two.” There are limits to what we should put ourselves through for limited efficacy in battling this virus with these different measures and mitigation tools that are out there.

CLAY: No doubt. And also, did you see Fauci came out and said that the CDC is going to have to potentially change their definition of what “fully vaccinated” means to take into account the boosters, so that people out there listening who went and got their covid vaccine and just said, “Okay, I got my vaccine. Leave me alone,” you now — in some locations — are not going to classify as fully vaccinated unless you got your vaccine and then you’ve also gotten your boosters. Where does this ever end?

BUCK: They’re going to mandate boosters. When I say “they,” it may not be everywhere. It may not be possible for them to do it through OSHA and the federal government. They’re gonna do it in California. They’re gonna do it in New York. The definition of “fully vaccinated” is gonna change, and they have to change the definition because otherwise if people realize is there is no other rolling vaccination campaign like this we’ve ever, ever been subjected to — certainly not that’s mandatory. We do call it the flu shot because we understand why… You know, when was the last time you got the flu, Clay? Have you had it recently? I had it like six years ago.

CLAY: A good question.

BUCK: I was rest for like 10 days.

CLAY: I haven’t had it in a long time.

BUCK: Yeah, I actually had it like six years ago and I remember I felt like… I actually was on Fox & Friends, and it was super early in the morning. I think it was on like 6 a.m., and I thought maybe I didn’t get enough sleep, maybe I was a little hung over. I can’t tell anybody that, but I was like, “I don’t feel so good. I started dripping with sweat and started to shake,” and said, “Gosh, I don’t get nervous about TV. I’m really sick,” and finished the hit.

It just came on me so fast. But the point I’m making is if you could avoid the flu every year by getting a flu shot, trust me, you would want to do it. A lot of people know that… It’s like a 50, 60% shot, maybe some years 70%, and they miss and they have to guess and there’s different strains, different immunity. It’s super complicated, and that’s the way we’ve organized society around this for how many decades now. That’s the only way we should be organizing against covid too.

CLAY: I agree. And, by the way, as bad as getting the flu is — when it runs through your family, when you’ve got kids — you have that awful feeling where, like, one kid gets it, and then you’re like, “Okay, I got take care of this kid. They’re throwing up. They’re pooping everywhere,” and you’re like, “I’m definitely gonna get it.” But you have that hanging over your head, and it just, like, is like a slow-moving disaster through the household, right, where every single…

BUCK: Is this your, like, advertisement for why I need to get married and have kids, too, by the way?

CLAY: I will tell you. I will tell you there is nothing worse than kid gets sick and you know you’re gonna get it and your wife might get it and the other kids get it. So the reason I was asking — and in your head, the whole family got the flu. It’s probably been about five or six years ago. But the flu that hits a household is such a slow moving disaster for, like, two weeks everybody feels like crap and then somebody gets it, somebody else gets it. But, yeah, you’re right. I mean, that is where we are headed with covid is you’re gonna have to make a decision, “Do you get the flu shot or not?”

BUCK: And when you see the data in Vermont.. I want to pull it ’cause I hate ever giving the wrong number. Oh, by the way, correction. We talk getting right. I said Bruce Ratner wrote the op-ed yesterday. I meant Steven Rattner, who was Obama’s… I don’t even know who Bruce Ratner is. I don’t know why that name was even in my head. Isn’t there a Ratner who’s a movie director?

CLAY: I was gonna say, I think Bruce Rattner, ’cause I was like, “Oh, yeah, I know that guy.” But I feel like there’s a Bruce Ratner who does, is involved in, like, in entertainment.

BUCK: Neither here nor there. Just a correcting ’cause we like to get things right. It was Steve Rattner who wrote the op-ed and who is a private equity guy. Point being, though, over 90% of senior citizens in Vermont are vaccinated — fully vaccinated — and they’re rushing to get the boosters as fast as they possibly can. There we go. Thank you.

CLAY: Over 98% are fully vaccinated, 65 and up in Vermont.

BUCK: And so what this is showing us, though, their whole premise is, “Well, you have to protect them from even being exposed to the virus as much as possible because even if they’re vaccinated, they could still be at risk.” Well, 30% of the hospital folks — not 3%, 30%. Does any…? And can I just take a step back on this for a second, Clay. If I had told somebody three months…

If you had sat down with Fauci three months ago and said, “Sir, what percentage of people do you think will be hospitalized in a state like Vermont who are vaccinated versus…?” He would have said, “You know, 95%, 98% of the people who are in the hospital would be the unvaccinated.” That’s not the case at all. So now we look at this and we say it can’t stop you from getting it, it doesn’t stop you from spreading it.

Yes, it reduces, but we are talking about reductions when we were promised effective control. And that was the illusion of Fauci and the rest of them. “We can control this virus with the vaccine. We can do some mitigation of the spread of it and some mitigation of death and hospitalization.” But that’s only if you keep the shots going as it stands right now for every six months?

CLAY: We don’t know. That’s the thing. You can set an over-under and say, “You’re gonna have get eight shots between now and two years from now in order to be protected in some way against covid.” It’s wild.