CLAY: I want you to be able to hear somebody who is actually speaking truth to power and sharing facts, which is an important thing to do, particularly as kids — the argument, at least, is out there that kids — should be getting the covid vaccine, which I think is absolutely crazy. Well, Florida’s surgeon general is Dr. Joseph Ladapo.

He was on Tucker last night. And, by the way, we’re going to have Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida — we’re scheduled to have him — on the show next week on Tuesday. And we probably need to, at some point, in the near future, get Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo on as well. He was on Tucker last night, and he shared the fact that data just flat-out doesn’t support masks.

LADAPO: A really good example is this obsession with masking kids in school, and when you look at the evidence for mask mandates in schools it’s actually… It’s very weak. You know, the highest quality evidence we have, in fact, for masks basically shows really no evidence of a health benefit — as in an improvement in a child’s health outcome — by implementing these mask mandates.

And there’s not even any solid evidence for cloth masks. So, you know, where benefit has been shown, it’s primarily been with surgical masks. But, you know, Americans have unfortunately been just slammed constantly with this message that you must mask these children. But, you know, we haven’t asked enough about the high-quality data. It doesn’t support it, and we don’t do it in Florida.

CLAY: So, I think that is fabulously well said. Think about how much different our country would look right now if you had Dr. Ladapo there, the surgeon general of the state of Florida, actually making these arguments in public instead of Dr. Fauci — who is consistently showing up like the bogeyman to try to terrify parents and make them think that their kids are under a severe danger from the covid when the data doesn’t reflect that that’s remotely true.

So, why is this significant? Well, it’s significant because DeSantis and other governors — thank God for federalism — are fighting back against the proposed federal vaccine mask mandate. Now, it’s worth noting that Joe Biden announced his federal vaccine mandate on September 9th, I believe it was. He still has not officially released the regulations drawn up by OSHA that would require that federal mandate to be in place.

As a result, we’re not sure exactly how many religious or health exemptions might be granted and how aggressively this policy is going to be implemented. But what we are sure of is, there are gonna be a lot of people, many of you out there listening right now, that are forced to make a decision — you may well have had covid like I have — about whether or not to follow a mandate issued by your company.

Especially if your company employs over a hundred people, which means that it would be part of this federal vaccine mandate. Are you going to go get the covid vaccine or are you going to make a decision to potentially quit your job, to give up your job? And that’s why I think what Ron DeSantis has crystallized so well is, you think back to March of 2020. What we were all told was something pretty straightforward, transparent, and relatively easy to understand.

Dr. Fauci walked ought in the White House and sold us on the idea of “15 days to stop the spread,” and if you remember, that was all about lessening the overall peak of infection to try to avoid overloading hospitals. Now, by and large, hospitals across this country have not been overloaded. They certainly have been strained at different points of time.

But we haven’t seen what was initially feared, which was, “Oh, my goodness! There are going to be tens of thousands of people that need medical treatment and there will be no way for the hospitals to actually handle all of those people.” We just haven’t seen it. So we had 15 days to stop the spread, and now we have advanced all the way to, “If you don’t get the covid vaccine,” and, by the way, soon if you don’t get the covid vaccine booster, “you’re gonna lose your job.”

And that is an unbelievable and excessive overreach of the federal government. This is me putting my lawyer hat on. I believe that’s unconstitutional. I don’t think that the federal government, given where we are with covid, should have the power — or has the power — under our Constitution to mandate vaccines as expansively as Joe Biden has laid out his vaccine mandate. I suspect that is one reason why the vaccine mandate hasn’t come out yet.

In fact, there are a lot of businesses out there that are reportedly arguing with the Biden administration right now, “Please don’t issue this vaccine mandate before the holidays because if you do, it’s going to be virtually impossible for many different levels of our economy to function. We already have major supply chain disruptions.”

What’s gonna happen if truck drivers, for instance, suddenly decide not to get the covid vaccine and you don’t have the ability to utilize their big rigs to move products across the country when you’ve already got a major supply chain shortage that is underway? What’s going to happen if a lot of people who stock the shelves inside of major retail establishments decide not to get covid vaccine and therefore are not employed?

So right now, you have Big Business begging the Biden administration, “At least wait ’til after the holidays,” and that’s why I floated the idea that the reason Biden administration haven’t released their federal vaccine mandate, is because I think they know that it’s unconstitutional, and they are hoping that the threat will lead to more people getting the covid vaccine.

And then after the first of the year, if we don’t have a major surge in covid cases — and remember, they’re going down for the most part across the country right now — then they can argue, “Hey, we don’t have to implement this federal vaccine mandate anymore because so many people got the vaccines; the vaccines work so well. Look! Joe Biden solved all of the issues surrounding covid!” That’s what I think the Biden administration would like to argue.

That, however, will be in the future.