BUCK: For many listeners, Rush was the friend they never knew. While we’ll never be able to replace him, we’d like the remind everyone that there are many friends in this movement individuals who share your values and beliefs who want to keep fighting the good fight alongside us. So we want to introduce to you Friday Friends, a new segment we’re gonna do every Friday. Alex Berenson, author of Pandemia, is our first Friday Friend. Alex, thanks for being with us.

BERENSON: I did not know I was a Friday Friend.

BUCK: Yeah, you’re a Friday Friend, buddy! Congrats. It’s a high honor. I’ll tell you this, Alex. The one thing I keep looking at is they have all this data on the New York Times front page website, NewYorkTimes.com. Clay and I keep seeing it’s roughly now, they’re saying, 800 to 1900 deaths a day from covid. They have all this breakdown by state and by all this stuff. How many of the people who are dying from covid, as it stands right now in the last month, were fully vaccinated? Do they know? Do we know?

BERENSON: So, the CDC is now putting out data that claims to show a rate of death by vaccination status not actually through October, but through early September. There are two big problems. One is that’s a rate; so, they’re not showing the raw numbers because the rate may be actually quite a bit higher in people who are over 80 who are unvaccinated.

But the raw numbers will show a lot of deaths in vaccinated people. And I think — as we’ve talked about before and I warned listeners before — you have to look at that differential with caution, because it’s very likely that in a population that is mostly vaccinated or nearly entirely vaccinated like the elderly population both in the U.S. and elsewhere, unvaccinated people are materially different, and the likelihood is that they’re sicker.

So, you really can’t compare the two, and the other thing — and I’ve heard this increasingly from people, and I want to write something up; I’ve not been able to nail it down yet — is people are complaining to me that the data coming out of the hospitals, at the hospital level, is not good. In other words, that hospitals will go out of their way to call you unvaccinated unless you can provide, not just a vaccine card, but the exact dates and ideally then they want to check that against the state immunization records. So, they are sort of going out of their way to classify people as unvaccinated when they don’t know. And that would obviously drive up the rates of people who are listed as unvaccinated and sick. I want to be clear: I have not nailed that down.

But it has come to me now from three or four different people working at different hospitals in different parts of the country, which suggests that it’s real. The other thing that suggests that it’s real is that in other countries — especially the U.K. and Israel, where we have much better data — we know that the rates, the numbers numerically, the number of people who are vaccinated who are dying and getting very sick were quite high.

And those countries weren’t playing the same kind of data. Now, in Israel it’s changed again in the last couple weeks, because they’ve administered boosters to a lot of us elderly people and it is clear that in the short run the booster drives up your antibodies and will protect you briefly. How long that protection lasts, we do not know.

CLAY: Alex, thanks for hopping on. We ask you this question because I think it’s so significant. We’re here in the middle of October now. What is the data suggesting that the next couple of months might look at so far as you can get a read on it right now? I know predictions are hard and everybody’s been made to look a fool trying to look ahead. But as we move into the edges of winter, what are you seeing in are you optimistic in are you pessimistic? What is the data suggesting to you?

BERENSON: Well, the data is suggesting that in the Upper Midwest… Here’s a story. I will read it to you from two days ago in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which is the biggest paper in Minnesota: “Rising covid-19 numbers returning to pre-vaccine levels in Minnesota. Hospitals reach a high for the year.” So that’s from Wednesday. You’re seeing a similar trend in the Northeast.

So in sort of the upper/northern parts of the country, you’re seeing seasonal trends that are just like last year. And I have a very strong suspicion… Cases have come down as the surge in Florida and elsewhere has ended, and interestingly you’re not hearing about Florida anymore.

CLAY: Of course not.

BERENSON: You know why you’re not hearing about Florida? Because cases are down almost 90% in Florida. And so, they’re done in Florida again. The seasonal surge came and went. Now, I strongly suspect that there will be a seasonal surge in the North just as there was last year. I think the Biden administration knows that. I think that’s why they’re so desperate to get boosters into people — whatever the long-term effects are — because they realize that in the short term, it’s the only way they’re gonna be able to claim victory.

And they also know that they’ve been screaming, “Pandemic of the unvaccinated, pandemic of the unvaccinated,” and there have been too many many breakthrough cases. Too many people know people who’ve become infected again. And and some people know people have become sick. And there’s enough cases of people becoming sick or even dying after vaccination that this argument just does not hold water anymore.

BUCK: Alex, I’m actually going to a friend’s wedding this weekend that was entirely moved because he was fully vaccinated and got sick with covid right before the wedding and was actually sick. And now they moved it. So, yes, people do know people who have had breakthrough cases who’ve gotten pretty sick with breakthrough cases who were fully vaccinated.

So that’s why the rhetoric doesn’t seem to be adding up all across the board. We’ve got Alex Berenson with us now. If you haven’t, you can get a pre-order of his book Pandemia; also subscribe to his Substack. So the boosters, it seems today — more boosters — are being approved by the FDA, Alex. That’s some of the breaking news we’ve got. Moderna and J&J boosters, right, now the FDA panels saying that they’re good to go. Shouldn’t the expectation for anybody who gets the booster be that they’re gonna have to get another booster in about April-May timeframe?

BERENSON: We don’t have evidence either way! That’s the short answer to that. You would reasonably assume that given that these vaccine-created antibodies fade so quickly, that they would tend to fade after this booster, but we don’t know. I think even the companies have no idea. We are engaging in the largest uncontrolled clinical trial in human history — and it is not a surprise that these boosters were approved.

This was baked in after last month when the Pfizer booster was approved. The CDC advisers and the FDA advisers did sort of wave their tiny little hands in the air and say, “We don’t think this is a good idea for people under 65 since we have no data on what the long-term impacts are.” And then Rochelle Walensky went out and basically said, “Well I’m the boss, and my boss told you all that you were gonna be able to get boosters. So that’s good enough for me.”

I don’t understand what part of that is science driven. But that’s where we are, and now you’re starting to see organized resistance, right? Or quasi-organized resistance. You’re starting to see places have to back down off these mandates whether it’s the Chicago public schools, whether it’s what happened at Southwest last weekend. And now all of a sudden Southwest is telling its employees, “Hey, if you don’t want to get vaccinated, please apply for an exemption. We don’t want you to get fired,” and last week it was, “If you’re not vaccinated, you’re gonna be terminated.”

So you are seeing pushback that is starting to make a difference. Whether it will make a difference quickly enough and whether or not the courts will be willing to step in and say, “This is just unprecedented in U.S. history where people are gonna be forced between taking an essentially unproven medical…” Forget whether or not it’s proven. You’re being forced to take this treatment or lose your job. We’ve never had a situation like that before.

CLAY: I want to hit on, build on what you just said, Alex, because one answer, as you said, is for companies to create expansive exemptions by which I mean, “Hey, we’re not really gonna probe whether or not your religious exemption really applies. If you’ve got a medical excuse, you can use it.” That’s what they’ve done, for instance, at my local public school. If you are a parent and you don’t want your kid to wear a mask, you can get a religious or health exemption, no questions asked, right?

BERENSON: An exemption for a mask! (laughing) Wow.

CLAY: You just fill out a form and hand it in.

BERENSON: Wow. On my Substack I reported sort of extensively on Southwest. There’s been tremendous interest in this both from pilots and from fliers and from everyone else. But I would say people have objected to this idea of using the exemption as a backdoor way around the mandate. And the objections will sort of twofold. One is, you’re creating a database of people who are not vaccinated who you know are not vaccinated.

So that’s problematic if the company changed its mind later. The other argument is, “Why should the burden be on me? The burden should be on the company to prove that this is needed, and given that we know that the vaccines don’t stop infection — and given that we know anybody of working age, essentially, who is healthy enough to work is at very low risk from this — why should the burden be on me?”

And I think those are both very reasonable points to make. Again, you see one of the fascinating things to me that’s happening my Substack has sort of take a break the place of Twitter for people who are what we’ve been calling Team Reality for more than a year now, where you get these very interesting and detailed debates and discussions about what’s going on.

BUCK: What are you looking at next, Alex? What’s big question you want to answer in the next few weeks based on the data you’re seeing about covid and how it’s affecting the country?

BERENSON: Sure. I think there are three. First, what will happen? Will covid come back in the Northeast and in the industrial Midwest? Will there be a fall wave, A? Again, covid makes fools out of people who try to predict, but I do think we’ll see a significant wave. B, how far is the Biden administration gonna go? How low is he willing to let his approval rating go to shove this vaccine into people’s arms?

I think the Democrats may have taken the wrong lesson from Newsom’s win. So Newsom was reelected. California’s a very blue state. There was this notion of Larry Elder, “He’s anti-vaccine and he’s anti-mask,” and their base turned out for that, and the lesson they may have taken is, “Our base really wants vaccines and they’re not done with covid on MSNBC and so we’re gonna push.”

But I think there’s a fair number of people in the middle who got vaccinated who don’t want a booster, who want their kids to be vaccinated, and who think it’s right to make people choose between their jobs and the vaccine. And the Biden administration’s pushing all of those things. So it will be interesting to see if there are more job actions.

If cops walk off the job. If more hospitals have to close wards, as has happened, because nurses don’t want to be vaccinated. So far there’s only been around the edges, but we will see what happens. And then the third and the most frightening thing to me… (laughing) This is, once again, something that basically it’s me and a handful of or people talking about, and I don’t even really like to talk about it that much because it feels so conspiratorial.

But it is real. In the U.K. and now in Germany last month, all-cause mortality — meaning deaths of everyone in the country for any reason — are running well above normal. And that’s not because of covid. Covid deaths in Germany are quite low right now. They’re probably gonna head up in the next couple months but they’re quite low right now. In the U.K., covid deaths are sort of moderate.

But they don’t come close to explaining the extra mortality, and that has been going on in the U.K., which is the first big western country to do mass vaccinations for three months now. And we do not know why. And there’s theories that possibly people delayed medical care, and so that’s why they’ve had more heart attacks than they, quote-unquote, “should have had.”

BUCK: The cost of the lockdowns, identifying cancer. Things that, Alex, you, me, Clay have been talking about now for over a year when we’ve finally been seeing data.

BERENSON: Yeah, but — but —

BUCK: We gotta leave it there Alex for this time but we’ll have you back again soon. Go check out Alex Berenson’s Substack, become a subscriber, and Pandemia for pre-order. Alex, thanks so much.

BERENSON: Thanks for having me guys.