It’s Alex Berenson Friday!

BUCK: Here’s a headline that might give us a good kickoff to what we’re about to dive into.  Biden administration likely to approve covid boosters at six months.  It is not eight.  That was a few weeks ago.  Oh, so much has been changing since then. Let’s talk to our friend Alex Berenson about this. You should subscribe to his Substack if you want to see some data and factual analysis of what’s really going on in the Willingness to Be Contrarian When it Comes to Fauciism World. Alex is an investigative journalist. He joins Clay and me now. Mr. Berenson, always a pleasure.

BERENSON: Mr. Buck, I have to tell you (laughing), you said six months. That is true, except that today Biden apparently told CNBC five months. (laughing) You can’t make it up!

BUCK: Alex, tell us what the heck is going on here.

BERENSON: Well, what the heck is going on, is the vaccines are failing in Israel and everywhere, but Israel has really good data — and so what they’re desperately trying to do is prop people up. And what that appears to do is you get this bump in antibodies, which should be a good thing, except that it looks like once again the antibodies, all they do is start declining again.

The other problem is it’s pretty clear that the vaccines don’t appear to work as well against the Delta variant as against the what’s called the wild-type variant or the earlier variants of the virus. Wild type being the original. So, it’s not even clear that topping people up this way is gonna produce the effect that they hope it will even in the short term. But it’s a measure of desperation. But I want to say something.

You guys always, the last couple of times I’ve been on, you said, “Give us some good news. Give us some good news. It’s Friday, people don’t want to hear just bad news,” and it’s been a bad week, obviously. So, here’s good news. Okay, since I last spoke to you guys last week — and I actually just wrote a Stack which I just published which people can read for free — you don’t have to subscribe — because it’s so important, about natural immunity.

There’s more and more data showing how powerful natural immunity to the coronavirus is. So, if you get it once, you look very, very well protected going forward. Reinfection rates are very low, that’s true, even of the Delta variant, and it’s not just that the numbers are low. I mean, obviously it’s great that people are not filling hospitals with the second infection or multiple infections.

There’s really good theoretical, scientific work suggesting why this is. And so I wrote this today, and I didn’t even talk about the fact that vaccine immunity seems to be going away and it’s much worse than natural immunity. I said, “This is gonna be a good news story. We’re just gonna talk about why you should feel pretty good if you’ve gotten through this, but you don’t need a vaccine again.” You’re very well protected.

CLAY: Thanks for coming on, Alex, and I just retweeted that article that you put up about natural immunity. That was gonna be the question that I asked you. Why is that story — which is positive, it’s fantastic news. We think there’s probably — Buck and I would be in this category; a lot of you listening to us out there are as well. The CDC itself would say there’s over a hundred million people, I believe, in the United States that they project have had covid and recovered from it.

Why is that never discussed? All we hear is, “If you get the vaccine, you’re a hero. If you don’t get the vaccine, you’re a villain.” And no one ever talks about people — and I put myself squarely in this camp — who feel comfortable that we overcame covid. I’ve got antibodies. Why would I put an additional vaccine in my body? And I’ll give you an example, Alex. I had chicken pox as a kid. I’ve never gotten the chicken pox vaccine because I don’t need it.

BERENSON: Right. That’s a really good question. That’s a political question, right? I think you can throw out a couple potential reasons that make sense in addition to all the reasons that are just lousy. I would say one potential reason is, there’s a lot of people — and I get these emails from people all the time — saying, I didn’t have a positive test, but I’m pretty sure I had covid. Well, you should really know if the logic is “I don’t want to be vaccinated,” I mean, there’s logic you might not want to be vaccinated.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: But if the logic is, “I don’t want to be vaccinated because I had this before,” we’re talking about the people who know they had it. They had a positive PCR test or a positive antibody test. And, you know, there’s people who want to believe they had it who don’t have those things.

So, you know, so that’s one reason. And then another reason is I think a few months ago there was this belief that because the vaccines did produce such what’s called “high titres,” they produce very high levels of antibodies in people; that they might be better than natural immunity and that there was sort of no downside.

Unfortunately, it is increasingly clear — again both from both the real world data and the sort of bench science data — that the opposite is the case, that natural immunity is just far superior to vaccine immunity. And so you know so now we get to the bad reasons, right? The bad reasons are that they’ve locked themselves into this. They’ve locked themselves into, “Vaccines are gonna save us all.

“This is the answer to this, this gets us back to normal,” and they can’t seem to acknowledge that the reality, A, that vaccines can’t do that — at least the vaccines that we have now — and, B, that he should have been have gone back to normal long ago. So they’ve come up with solutions that don’t really work to eye problem that was never there. I’m not saying the coronavirus isn’t real. I’m not saying it doesn’t kill people. What I’m saying is we could always have gone back to normal — and you see this in schools, right?

CLAY: And shouldn’t, if we’re being honest, Alex, shouldn’t you be able to say, “Hey, if you’re gonna require a vaccine passport, if you’re gonna require a negative covid test for many different businesses, shouldn’t you at least be able to take your positive covid antibody test and show that, given that we now it’s modern protective?” If you’re going to require something be shown to be able to get in or even for employees out there who have vaccine mandates — and I saw you tweet that one hospital is at least allowing that — shouldn’t we allow positive antibody tests for someone who’s recovered from covid as being at least the equivalent of what’s going on right now?

BERENSON: It’s so much more perverse than that, though, right? (laughs) Because we know that vaccine immunity fades.

CLAY: Yes.

BERENSON: But they’re not gonna require you to get the booster, at least not at this point, okay. So if you’re eight months out, you can say, “I got vaccinated. I get to go everywhere,” even though you really have no protection.

CLAY: Yeah.

BERENSON: Whereas if you have natural protection eight months out, which is real, you get nothing for it. This is what happens when politics just runs rampant over science and medicine. And when people who are in charge won’t admit they’re wrong, right? This is what happens.

BUCK: Are they just pretending, Alex, that that’s not true or they just ignore it? Are they contesting being the natural immunity protections versus…? When I say “they,” you know who I am talking about. Fauci and the whole crew, or do they just…? Are they just, you know, it’s like CNN when there’s a bad story about Biden, like, is that what’s going on?

BERENSON: That’s a good question. You know, look, Fauci’s not dumb, okay? Fauci understands what’s going on. Do his political betters understand what’s going on? I’m not sure. Okay. But he understands, and there are inside the NIH who clearly understand this. I mean, it’s funny. A couple months the NIH put out a press release saying, “Look! Vaccine immunity is so great. Here’s a paper that shows it.”

The paper showed actually that vaccine immunity, even when you had the antibodies, was much narrower than the antibody spectrum of natural immunity. And the paper showed that. They linked to the paper, and they didn’t acknowledge this reality. So did they just think that nobody’s gonna read the paper?

Most reporters I know will not read the paper. But the paper says what it says, and all you have to do is read it. Look, some of the stuff is technical and complicated and I’m not gonna claim to be an expert on it, but the take-aways are fairly straightforward and you can read them, and you can read the way they conducted the study.

BUCK: Another question. Speaking to Alex Berenson. Everyone, if you want some covid outside-the-box thinking as in outside Fauci’s box —

BERENSON: (laughs)

BUCK: — go to his subStack and he has a lot of great stuff there. I’m a subscriber, just full disclosure, I subscribe to Alex’s Substack myself and read what he’s putting out. Alex, we’re at a point nowhere they’re saying boosters — you said five months maybe. It could be four by the time this all is said and done.

BERENSON: (laughing)

BUCK: It feels like the number keeps going down. But with every round of this, aren’t there all kinds of things, they keep saying, oh, if you don’t get vaccinated there will be variants and you’ll be cause of the new variants. But as we get more boosters, won’t there also be variants that get around those, and won’t there be additional risks of side effect, right? If you tell me to take a shot once and you give me the side-effect profile, that’s one thing. If I got take that every year, isn’t that a different thing?

BERENSON: Well, it’s not even every year. It’s every few months now!

BUCK: Sorry. (laughs)

BERENSON: Now we’re getting to the bad news portion of the talk, right? You know, and this will be a future Stack. There’s a lot to write about this. But there are very, very lean signs around the vaccines, okay? And I don’t want to scare people. Most people have not been vaccinated. But if you look at sort of the global spectrum, countries that are vaccinated are going through a third wave, a fourth wave.

If you look countries of low vaccination rates the opposite is true. And that cannot be attributed to seasonality. It’s serving all geographies, okay? And then it looks like the vaccinates are not very protective against Delta. There’s both theoretical and real work on this, and so to give people a booster that’s gonna — again — prop up their antibodies, but if those antibiotics aren’t actually working against Delta or not working as well, I’m not sure what good that does.

And then there’s another paper that came out again since we spoke last week from Japan, a very good, very worrying paper showing that the virus seems to be mutating in a way to evade the vaccine, because vaccines are so focused on the spike protein. In other words, the vaccines only make you produce antibodies to one part of virus within the spike protein.

And really only one part of that part of the virus. Natural immunity is much broader. So the virus, quote-unquote, “knows.” The virus doesn’t know anything, but it mutates in a way to evade this vaccine-generated immunity, and it can do that relatively easily by changing the way its spike protein looks. Okay. So now we get to very complicated analysis. But the short version of this is vaccines may be driving some of these mutations.

CLAY: All right. I want to bring you back, Alex, we’re gonna bring you back as we often do.

BERENSON: Of course! (laughing)

CLAY: And then we got a couple more questions, including what Twitter has said, if anything, about their strikes that they put against you, which now have all been proven to be true!

BERENSON: Yeah.

CLAY: Everything that they were saying you weren’t allowed to say, the data is now so true that even the Daily Beast is trending and writing stories about the Israeli data that you were sharing with us weeks ago. I want to ask you what you’re seeing there in Israel and in England. We’ll have a bit more with Alex when we come back.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: Alex Berenson, the most honest man who’s been covering the covid mess for the last 18 months. Alex, I wanted to ask you this. I saw you tweet that in the United Kingdom, in England now, over 70% of the deaths that they are having are occurring in vaccinated patients. Certainly, ugly and alarming details coming out of Israel now. You were criticized for sharing this data and calling into question the efficacy of the vaccine.

Now everyone is acknowledging, including the Biden White House, that the vaccines are not as efficacious as they had hoped and that’s why everybody’s gotta get boosters. Has Twitter in any way removed any of the strikes against you? And what are you seeing right now in England and Israel, much more vaccinated countries than the United States, as we go forward that we should expect to see here in the future?

BERENSON: Sure. So the first question is, Twitter has not contacted me to tell me. So Twitter, you get five strikes, and then you’re permanently banned. I am on strike four. My last strike came about three weeks ago when I basically said, “Look at the Israeli data.”

That was one of the strikes. The strikes have all been stuff in the last six weeks. And they’ve essentially all been proven correct, as you say. Now, I have to be honest. I’m much less worried about this than I was let’s say two months ago because thanks to you and to Tucker Carlson, you know, I now have more than a hundred thousand people I can reach directly through the Substack.

There’s more than 100,000 subscribers, or 100,000 sign-ups. Some of those people are paying; most are not. But that’s fine with me. So I can get my message out even if Twitter blocks me at this point. But from my point of view, in saying that I’m putting out misleading information, they’re defaming me.

CLAY: Yeah.

BERENSON: And if they choose to block me, you know, I’m gonna have legal options that I’m gonna explore because I don’t think they should block me. They’re defaming my reputation as a reporter when they say I’m putting out stuff that’s not true, I’m misleading. So long story short, I’m sort of in a standoff with Twitter. I’m still using the service. I have more than 300,000 people. I expect that at some point they will block me — although they haven’t yet — or permanently suspend me, and when that happens we’ll see what happens next. But, meanwhile, sign up for the Stack in case they make me go away. England and Israel.

BUCK: Alex?

BERENSON: Yes.

BUCK: No, England and Israel. Go ahead.

BERENSON: So, yeah, the numbers are not good. They’re worse out of Israel, which actually should be more concerning to the U.S. because Israel used only the Pfizer vaccine and they used it on the same schedule that we did. In the U.K., they used the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is a DNA vaccine like the J&J vaccine and they used a lot of that and they also used a different schedule of dosing than sort of the recommended schedule and that different schedule may have actually worked a little bit better for them.

But long story short, a margin people in those countries who are dying of covid are fully vaccinated — fully, two weeks out from the second dose. And now the people who are defending vaccines will say, “Yes, but they’re not quite dying proportionately to their proportion in the population. So that shows vaccines are still somewhat effective against serious disease and death.” That is true if you look at the top-line numbers.

What I would say the counterargument to that is is that people who aren’t vaccinated who are really old probably couldn’t be vaccinated and so you really can’t compare the two populations. If you look at the overall numbers, the most important numbers, 10 times a smany people last week died of covid in the U.K. as did this week in August 2020. Okay. So that’s gotta worry you. Why is that?

They vaccinated tons of people, and yet deaths are 10 times as high as they were in August 2020. And even more worrying to me, all-cause mortality — meaning deaths from every cause, everybody who dies — are higher now. They’re running higher in the U.K. than they were this time last year, and the gap is increasing. I don’t know why that is. I’m not blaming the vaccine. But I am saying, “We really need to look at this. It should worry people.”

BUCK: All right, Alex, we’ll have you back maybe next Friday —

BERENSON: How did we wind up with bad news again!

BUCK: — or in a couple of weeks for sure. Alex Berenson, everybody.