BUCK: Remember when Alex Berenson was saying — I don’t know — about a year ago, give or take, 11 months ago, to be exact, about how vaccines don’t last very long and you’re gonna need boosters for sure and no one knows how effective those boosters would be, and also how effective are the vaccines even really when you’re judging it based upon a population that’s at very low risk anyway? All that stuff, that we were having him talk to us about 11 months ago.

How does that look now in retrospect, everybody? How does it look now that we actually have the numbers? And for so many people who were on booster number two, shot number four? I know people personally who have gotten four shots and have gotten covid twice, which you would think… I mean, you could call me crazy. I don’t think that’s a particularly successful vaccination program when we were told in April of last year that you won’t get it; you won’t spread it.

That’s what we were told. And then the last thing they were saying was, you look at the death numbers and you won’t die if you get the shot. That was what they dug in on in November and December of this past year, into January and February. “It’s a pandemic of the unvaccinated!” Biden was shouting that. Turns out actually a lot of people, unfortunately, who are vaccinated, particularly in the last six months, fully vaccinated and even boosted, died.

CLAY: Over half of all deaths in recent time is people who were double vaxxed.

BUCK: And now people start to think. Hold on. What does this sound a lot like? It does sound a lot like our ability to combat the flu —

CLAY: It’s a flu shot.

BUCK: — which was about 50 to 60% effective at best, recommended for seniors, people with immune system issues, right? And that was… As a society we didn’t mask up, we didn’t have vaccination management, we didn’t do any of this stuff. And yet here we are, the left, the Democrats, Biden, have not admitted that they were wrong on basically all of this. They just stopped talking about it.

It’s like Clay and I always say: The biggest editorial decision you make isn’t even how you say something it’s what you talk about and what you don’t. And they’re not even discussing these things. You see, where’s CNN with all the, “Yeah, vaccine count. Look, we gotta get more vaccines, more shots in arms. Come on. Where are those evil Republicans who are standing athwart our amazing vaccination program?” And some of you might be thinking, “Well, Buck, at least it’s over.” It ain’t over. They’re not done with it. This should put you on edge a little bit. The covid adviser for the White House, or covid czar, adviser, at the White House was asked, “Will all schools be open this fall?”, and here is what he said.

OMG. Lockdown partisan and White House Covid advisor @AshishKJha46 is asked about schools staying open next Fall. Before he can answer Press Sec. whooshes him off the stage! 😱 pic.twitter.com/o3bhM2b6Ot

— Justin Hart (@justin_hart) June 2, 2022

BUCK: Can just say, even the press is kind of like, “Hey, um, I haven’t heard the term ‘breakthrough cases’ in a long time.” The press has had to reckon with the fact, Clay, that everything that this White House said about covid basically turned out to be either partially or entirely untrue.

CLAY: There’s a couple of fun questions that you could just ask. And I think sometimes you have to take it out of covid because people are so dug in on their political lines. So, if you’ve got somebody who is all-in on the booster and they’re arguing you need to get your fifth booster, if you said to them, “Hey, if you get five shots for something and you still got it…?” Let’s say measles required you to get five shots.

You got five shots and you still got the measles. Would you be like, “I’m so glad I got those five shots to protect me,” or would you think, “This is the biggest rig job of all time: I got five freaking shots, and I still got the measles”? That audio that we just played, Buck, is a little bit hard to hear. That was being asked directly, can you basically agree that all schools are going to be open this fall, that they must be open? And he didn’t say yes.

They shunted him off the stage without letting him answer. How are we sitting here in June of 2022… Buck, coming up on 18 months since the lockdowns, since “15 days to slow the spread,” and we still can’t get the head of whatever the covid task force is now called in the White House to say, “Yes, every school must be open in August and September of 2022,” and we should mention Oakland.

We probably got listeners in the Bay Area. I know we do. They are bringing back masks. L.A. came out yesterday and said that they expect that masks are going to be required again soon. Does Philadelphia still have them I think in schools? Two-to 4-year-olds are still required to wear ’em in New York City. This ain’t going away, right? This is going to continue. We got five times the rate… Remember it was gonna be a hot vax summer. Everybody was celebrating, “Oh, there are no more covid issues!” There are five times as many covid cases — and a lot of people are testing at home or have said, “Screw it, I’m not getting tested anymore” — right now as there was this time last year.

BUCK: I also think on the mental health side of things that people are starting to put together — Biden, for example, speaking about the gun violence issue, says we need to address mental health. Well, that’s interesting. Because I agree that for gun violence issues mental health is certainly a component and serious discussions about that are necessary, but it also reminds I think a lot of people, Clay, that what the Democrats, Fauci, Biden, Dr. Walensky — where did she go, by the way? Has she been, like, you know, on vacation the Bahamas for the last six months?

CLAY: That’s a great question.

BUCK: The head of the CDC vanished, everybody. Where is she? Why isn’t she out there answering questions about the super successful vaccine program? To your point about the measles, by the way, Clay, imagine how people should feel if their position was, “You must get four shots, and if you won’t, you deserve to be fired from your job.” And then people got fired, thousands of them, people listening to this show probably got fired from their jobs. We talked to people who were getting fired from their jobs.

CLAY: Oh, yeah.

BUCK: And none of the people that pushed that feel badly about what they did. What they did was monstrous. Tt was horrible. They ended people’s careers for what? Every time I’ve forced to walk into a doctor’s office with a mask on, I want to walk around and say, “Can any of the fancy MDs around here read, can any of you look at numbers, can you do math? Do you really think that making me wear a mask for the five minutes I’m in your office makes any difference to anyone whatsoever?”

But this has become a cult. And the damage that has been done — and this is on the mental health side — is so catastrophic and widespread to people’s mental health that I think there’s a huge wave of denialism that is in there now. Democrats did more to damage with these lockdown policies and just everything with the demonization of those who didn’t want to get the shot, the firing of people, the federal heavy-handed — the Supreme Court had to step in and say, “What are you lunatics doing? Stop.”

The damage they did to children’s mental health specifically is a generational, a generational theft, or a multigenerational destruction of people’s peace of mind, well-being, development. It’s appalling what these Democrats did to kids with their ideas. By the way, there was no upside to this. They didn’t stop anyone’s kids from getting covid. They didn’t save anybody from the wave. Just the learning loss issue was horrible. But the emotional destruction, the psychological destruction. The kids engaging in self-harm. The kids who were locked away, couldn’t go to school, couldn’t see their friends. Clay, it’s an atrocity, what the Democrats have done.

CLAY: There’s an amazing piece, Buck, and I shared it yesterday, I think. The guy named Alex Gutentag — which is an interesting name. Isn’t “guten tag,” hello in German?

BUCK: Hello, auf Deutschland, ja.

CLAY: Alex Hello, which would be… Anyway, he wrote a phenomenal piece, “The Covid Cult Did Lasting Damage to Our Kids,” and I just want to hit you with a couple of stats. And, by the way, they did a phenomenal job here, and these are all doctors who said basically, hey, we didn’t feel comfortable being able to speak out. This is crazy. In terms of the kids who have just vanished, right? Like, the number of kids that are not showing up, millions of kids not showing up in schools.

And the ones that are going, in Maryland, in Michigan, in Washington, in L.A., these data points of loss of learning are off the charts. And we’re still not having… when I read this article, and this may be aggressive, Buck, but I want some of these public health experts to face real, significant consequences, potentially even criminal charges. Like, I think Dr. Fauci is, in my opinion, the most destructive person in our lives in America, in terms of a bureaucrat or an elected official, in terms of what he’s done to the people in this country.

BUCK: I think there’s no question. I think there’s no question.

CLAY: And he’s going to, Buck, skate off in 2024. He now says he’s gonna retire. The highest paid public employee in the country. And there are gonna be zero consequences for him during his life. Zero. That’s not right. There have to be… When you consider the damage that he has done to children — and this is, like, point-blank, you have to vote Republican because I want this — and there’s a lot of words I want to use — guy to have to sit in front of Congress under oath and the Senate under oath.

And I want to him to be grilled because I think his gain-of-function research actually created covid. I think he has covered up for his partners in China, probably in a criminal degree. I believe that his negligence in analyzing basic data is almost criminal in terms of what he did keeping kids out of school. I want everything thrown at him. I want him to have to bear the consequences of everything that he got wrong.

And if you read this Tablet article, Buck, there are so many doctors out there that are now finally being willing to speak publicly. They felt like they couldn’t say anything. And it’s a big discussion here about how that so many doctors work at big public companies now and so they’re constrained in what they feel they can say — and I know this happened when I spoke out against masks back in August. One of the speakers was a doctor who spoke and said there’s no basis for masks. When she spoke out, she was investigated by the state medical board over complaints, and they tried to pull her medical license. That’s what doctors were dealing with if they weren’t willing to accept this covid cult.

BUCK: Anthony Fauci was too much of a coward to admit that they were wrong about essentially everything in the first 90 days when the pandemic hit. And there were a lot of young people, lot of kids, lot of the adolescents who if only Fauci had said schools should be open, adults need to calm down, everyone needs to stop panicking, go about your life, if he had started that — and I mean him as an individual.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: I don’t just mean even the movement. If Fauci had spoken out, I truly believe there would be children and lots of them alive today who are not because they committed suicide, because of the depression that was —

CLAY: I think you’re right.

BUCK: — hugely, hugely attributable to the lockdowns, the anxiety, the misery, and the mental health destruction. And the fact that the little cowards at the top of the CDC and these other public health bureaucracies all across the country, Fauci at NIAID, the fact that they didn’t see what was going on and speak out at whatever the professional consequences would have been to them, whatever it would have meant to their standing among the NPR listeners across the country, is a total indictment of our public health apparatus as it stands and at the lack of character and decency and courage that people who took an oath to “do no harm” completely, completely betrayed that oath.

CLAY: And how about the teachers’ unions, too, Buck, who were working hand in hand with the CDC — look —

BUCK: Well, they’ve always been horrible, but —

CLAY: Yeah. But it was stupid to shut down schools. The idea that every single kid in America wasn’t in school when we got to August and September of 2020 is criminal public health negligence, in my opinion.