BUCK: Here’s the New York Times David Leonhardt, who started to be one of these — he’s kind of a lib covid whisperer in the sense that he’s like, “Hey, guys, maybe you should start to live in reality a little bit instead of this other Fauci crazy place?”

Here’s what he said.

LEONHARDT: There are all kinds of things that liberal America is doing at a very good instinct that make very little difference. And that the vaccines really work and save lives and by not taking them conservatives are damaging themselves and damaging the country. And the word you use “balance” I think is perfect. I think conservatives haven’t taken covid nearly seriously enough. And I think liberals, if we’re being honest about this, have some performative aspects of the covid response.

Wearing masks because it feels like a badge of “I’m a progressive,” even though a lot of those masks, particularly with Omicron which was so contagious, are doing very little to protect people. I’m not anti-mask. Wear one if you go into a nursing home, if you go into a hospital. Wear a KN95 or an N95. But don’t think that these mask mandates where you wear some cloth mask into a restaurant and then you take it off so you can eat is doing anything.

BUCK: So can I just say that — I mean, obviously some of our audience is sitting here saying, actually, there’s a lot that I would critici. And I would too. But this is the only — he’s a New York Times — he’s from the high temple of leftism, folks, and he’s saying cloth masks are stupid and do he says very little. It’s actually nothing. The answer is actually zero. It’s not 20% or 10%. It’s zero reduction, that they can actually show statistically. But that’s about as strong as you’re gonna get from the New York Times to admit, yeah, it was silly.

CLAY: And, by the way, I would say that we have been, first of all, pointing out all of the absurdities of left-wing but also recognizing — I want to continue to emphasize this, Buck, you and I told our dads and our moms and our elderly relatives that they should get the covid shot, right? Because if you’re over the age of 70, if you’re a senior citizen, the data reflects that you are under particular danger from covid. My kids are not going to get the covid shot. Right? They’re just not.

BUCK: We are in the balance that they were talking about is the point. We are —

CLAY: Exactly right. That’s exactly right. And I think our audience recognizes that. And we treat them intelligently enough to say, hey, if you’re a healthy 22-year-old listening to us right now, or you’ve got a 6-year-old, you don’t treat that 6-year-old the same way that you would grandpa, who’s 79 years old or 86 or whatever your mom and dad and grandma and grandpa might be.

Everybody has different health care needs. And what we totally mussed throughout this entire process is that fact. And it’s the essence of the way that we treat medicine for virtually everything else, right? Six-year-olds don’t take blood pressure medication ’cause they don’t need it. But your 85-year-old may well need it. Everybody’s biochemistry and body is different, and that’s why I think you have to look at the data and make rational decisions based on your own health choices. And we totally missed that for the past two years.

BUCK: And I will say my biggest — ’cause I think it’s so important that we’re always honest every. My biggest fail during covid in terms of believing something that was turned out to not be true was in March, April a year ago when they were saying the vaccine is 97% effective.

I largely believed that against that strain it would be 97% effective and durable. Now, the entire medical establishment seemed to go along with that, whatever. That turned out not to be true, as we well know, and it wasn’t preventative against infection. It lowered your risk of severe disease.

But I did — I thought that it was gonna be, you know, super protective in the initial phases, then we started to have Alex on June and July together on this show and said, hold on a second. What’s really going on here? I changed. I won’t speak for you. I changed the data in terms of how protective it is to me.

But I have psycholibs coming after me online, you know, why do you tell everybody not to get the vaccine? I’m like — they have no idea what they’re talking about. They don’t know what I think, what I say, they obviously don’t listen to this show. My dad was freezing his butt off in the cold, in the middle of Staten Island to be online to get the shot in March of 2020. And I remember I called him, I looked him my show at the time, and I said, “I think you’re doing the right thing, I think this is worth it for you to get.” Not anti-vaccine.

CLAY: I said the same thing. I said the same thing to my parents, Buck. In fact, when Florida was distributing the first days of the vaccine, remember when Ron DeSantis was getting criticized because he said, no, no, we’re distributing the vaccine to the elderly first. And you had to be over 65 or whatever it was —

BUCK: Hundred percent correct.

CLAY: A hundred percent right.

BUCK: This is really important, folks. There was a big fight — and I knew about this — in the White House in the very end of the Trump presidency. There was a fight going on because Fauci and the bureaucrats wanted to go to front-line health care workers first actually.

And what we found out is it’s not effective against transmission preventing. Front line health care workers are overwhelmingly not in their late sixties, seventies, and eighties; so they did the wrong thing even with who should get the vaccine first. And, by the way, front line health care workers have almost all been exposed to covid already.

CLAY: That’s a hundred percent right.

So what I said was they were giving it out to anybody. It turned into kind of an issue where people were traveling to Florida who were over 65 to get this thing, we’ve got a place in Florida; and so I was like, well, I don’t know how long it’s gonna take you to get the shot in Tennessee, ended up not taking very long but I was like if you guys want to use our place down in Florida, stay there for a couple of months, you can go over to Publix and they’re giving the shot out to anybody over the age of  65 and that was a hundred percent the right thing to do and, by the way, it’s the right thing to do if you’re over 65 and certainly you have health related concerns, you should be concerned about covid. Anybody under 65, the data doesn’t reflect that that’s very true.

BUCK: Yup. Just looking at the reality, folks.