CLAY: We bring in now Alex Berenson, who I think has been one of the biggest truth-tellers, as you guys well know who listen to this program. We’ve been talking to him for a year and a half now and he’s been telling us everything covid-related. He’s now banned from Twitter and one reason I am so excited to have this outlet, to have this program to be able to talk with you guys every single weekday is because I don’t know how long Twitter is gonna allow me to still be there or anybody else that has opinions that go against the prevailing narrative.
And I want to start here, Alex. First of all, thanks for spending part of your Labor Day with me.
BERENSON: Sure.
CLAY: But did you see the Rolling Stone story and the way it spread information about Ivermectin, which is 100% false.
BERENSON: Yeah.
CLAY: There’s no truth to it at all. Twitter has aggressively policed your sharing of factual data. That story’s 100% false and they’ve done nothing to try and bring that story down.
BERENSON: Yes. If you say negative things about covid or about people dying, you can basically make things up on Twitter and they will not police you. This was very clear last year, and now we’re talking about Ivermectin. And to be clear, I think there are a lot of questions about Ivermectin, and I don’t think people (chuckling) should be using it randomly or buying it from feed stores and using it. I think… I mean, you know, it’s a promising drug, but that’s all it is, and lots of promising treatments don’t work out in the long run and that’s why we have clinical trials. But to go to your point, Twitter will let you — and I’m just gonna say lie — lie about —
CLAY: It’s 100% a lie, the story that Rolling Stone ran is a lie.
BERENSON: Yeah. Just last year there was story after story about young doctors — this is back in March and April and May of last year dying of covid. There are residents dropping dead of covid. Somebody — a doctor in I believe it was Texas claimed that three doctors that she knew, she phrased it artfully, but if you read it quickly it sounded like she knew three doctors who died of covid.
And it turns out (chuckles) it was completely untrue. And it was retweeted I believe hundreds of thousands of times, certainly tens of thousands of times. Twitter takes no action to police any of this stuff. But I’m banned. And so, you know, when we talk — which I believe we last talked Friday a week ago, 10 days ago — this was, and I told you that I thought they might ban me. I said people really to need sign up for the Substack.
They really need to get on there because this could happen. It was Saturday night that they banned me, and they banned me because I said the vaccine doesn’t stop infection, which is true; that it doesn’t stop transmission, which is true. The CDC acknowledges these things now. I mean, it may do that in short term, but it certainly doesn’t do it for more than a few months.
And is certainly, you know, which is why they’re talking about boosters. And I said don’t think of it as a vaccine. You know, it’s not a vaccine in the traditional sense. It’s basically a therapeutic, meaning they’re giving it to you hoping it will reduce your symptoms. That’s much more like a traditional drug than a vaccine. Except it has real side effects! So that got me banned. So, you know, I’m not on Twitter right now, which is at the moment, you know, it’s problematic.
I will move when the time is right. And I think I have some very good claims, and we will see, you know, what a court of law has to say. But for the moment, I can’t talk about, you know, that Bangladesh study that came out last week about masks and the problems with it on Twitter. I can’t talk about, you know, the fact that the Israeli data is still terrible on Twitter, and so it is a problem for me.
CLAY: Okay. Positive is, you’re talking to millions of people all over the country right now through us, and I also have told you — and I’ll say it publicly — at OutKick, the site that I run, we will also be happy to run your articles if Substack becomes an issue for you as I know what happens is, none of these people who try to get people canceled are ever happen when they get ’em canceled from one place.
They gotta try to get ’em canceled everywhere. And to me, OutKick has always represented, you know, the faster reaches of the First Amendment. And I think what you’re saying is important in the marketplace of ideas in a massive way. And also, by the way, the very foundation of science is to debate issues in a public sphere in an effort to try to find out what the truth is.
So let’s go in to that Israeli data. What is the latest that Israel…? I saw where they’re now going to require — to your point, on the difference between a vaccine and a booster, a therapeutic booster. They’re now saying in Israel — correct me if I’m wrong — that they’re gonna require a fourth different shot. We initially were told double covid vaccine shots, then they said they were gonna give a third booster in Israel. Now they’re talking about a fourth booster?
BERENSON: They haven’t said that they’re going to require that. The health minister said he thought that was likely.
CLAY: Yeah.
BERENSON: It is clear that you will need a third booster in Israel to be considered fully vaccinated. That’s not even an argument anymore. They are requiring a third… I should say a second booster, third shot —
CLAY: Yes.
BERENSON: — to be considered fully vaccinated. So here’s the thing. They started giving out these third shots, these boosters, more than a month ago now. This is not new at this point. You know, we’re going on five weeks. And Israel’s having its worst days ever for infections, okay, for new cases. So, again, the idea that (laughing) vaccines are–
CLAY: And let me unpack that a little bit with you, if I could. So Israel is one of the most vaccinated countries in the world. They now are requiring a third shot of the covid booster. And the data in Israel right now, in terms of both cases and hospitalizations, is worse than it ever has been before?
BERENSON: So the data for cases is worse. In other words, they’re having more positive tests than they’ve ever had before.
CLAY: Yes.
BERENSON: Hospitalizations appear to have peaked, at least now, about a week or 10 days ago. Deaths are still rising, but hospitalizations have peaked. But they have peaked at a very high level, and both vaccinated and unvaccinated people are in the hospital. So here’s the thing. The booster (laughing) should be working right now! If it’s ever gonna work, it’s gonna work in a few weeks after you get it because what it does is it causes your body to produce a lot more spike proteins.
And that, in turn, should generate a strong immune respondent where you get more antibodies to those spike proteins, okay? So if you’re gonna be protected by this booster, it should be in the weeks after you are hit with it. And what we are seeing is nothing like full protection. And one of the things that happened that made people so optimistic about vaccines in the spring was cageses went effectively to zero in both Israel and the U.K.
And they went down quite a bit in the U.S. too. So people said, “Hey, these vaccines really work. You know, this mechanism is really great, and it works!” Unfortunately, it didn’t work long term. But what I’m saying is, it is very bad sign for the long-term or even medium-term efficacy of these vaccines that we’re not seeing cases plunge in Israel at this point, and we are not.
CLAY: Okay. Were you at all optimistic…? I started off today’s program, Alex, saying that the huge crowds of college football fans made me believe that a lot of Americans — and I think you’re seeing this in England and many other countries as well — that a lot of people around the world are finally just throwing up their hands and saying, “We’re ready to get back to normal.”
I don’t know if you watched the clips. Whether it was in Wisconsin, Virginia, Texas — all over the country, the width and breadth of this country — sold-out crowds for college football games. Nobody in the crowd’s wearing a mask. Did that make you believe, “Hey, maybe the great mass of normal Americans are finally saying, ‘We can’t stay curled up in the fetal position forever’?”
BERENSON: I mean, I hope so. That’s not quite what the polling data shows. The polling data shows there are still a lot of Americans who are afraid. But there’s a much bigger problem, Clay, right, which is (laughing) even if half of the country believes like you and I do, you know, it’s time to get on with life, right? You know, there are gonna be people dying from this, we’re gonna do our best to treat them, we’re gonna give them monoclonal antibodies.
Unless the data in the U.S. is completely different from the data in Israel and U.K. and other places that, you know, are sort of more transparent about who’s in the hospital, they are just lying. Because we know in Israel and the U.K. that the most people who are in hospital, even with the boosters, have been vaccinated, and we know from the U.K. that the great majority of people who are dying from Delta are vaccinated.
So, you know, it’s very hard to get from that to 90% of people in the U.S. who are in hospitals are not vaccinated. That is just probably a lie, and I hate to say the CDC is lying. So we’re at a really weird place right now because most people or at least a huge minority of people — maybe it’s 40%, maybe it’s 48%, maybe it’s 55% — want to get on with life.
They want to be done with this, period. But the people in charge certainly outside of a few states… Like you’re fortunately. You know, you live in Tennessee, you know, or Florida or Texas. People in my state, you know, I can’t… I can’t go to a restaurant in New York City right now. I’m not vaccinated. Like, the rules are getting worse in the blue states.
CLAY: So I want to bring you back for one more segment here if I can, Alex, because it is frustrating I know for so many people. And I just ran through the list of all the cities that are seeing their overall populations explode. And it’s not gonna surprise you. There’s a lot of Texas, there’s a lot of Florida, and there’s a lot of Tennessee because people in blue states who are losing their minds are saying I want to live in a free state.
BERENSON: (laughing) Yeah.
CLAY: And that kind of what we’re talking about right now. I want to ask you about why England is making such differentiate decisions with their schoolchildren both as it pertains to masks and vaccines compared to where we seem to be headed in the United States. We’ll ask that question of Alex Berenson next — he’s banned on Twitter, but he’s not banned on Clay and Buck — and we’ll get the absolute latest data from him to finish off that segment. That is next.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
CLAY: We’re talking to the most terrifying man on Twitter, according to Twitter.com, maybe other than Donald Trump, Alex Berenson.
BERENSON: (laughing)
CLAY: You gotta write a book, by the way —
BERENSON: I am writing a book!
CLAY: Oh, you are? Good.
CLAY: Oh, I love that. It’s a good title. All right, I teased as we went to break, Alex, that I was gonna ask you why we’re seeing such a divergence in response in England and the United States — and for people out there who aren’t aware, I want you to set the context for us. But remember, England initially was what I would say kind of a fear porn capital country because of all of the different forecasts that came out of England about how many people were gonna die, how devastating this was gonna be.
They locked down harder than most countries did at least initially, you know, with Boris Johnson there. What’s going on? They’re not making kids wear masks anywhere in English schools, and they’re also suggesting that kids don’t need to be vaccinated for covid. Why the divergence between England and the United States?
BERENSON: That is a great question. You know, because the English hate their kids obviously and they want them all to die.
CLAY: (laughing) And they want all the grandmas to die too.
BERENSON: Exactly.
CLAY: By the way, your kids were running around in the background. You have young kids; I have young kids.
BERENSON: (laughing)
CLAY: Maybe the most ridiculous argument that’s out there in general is that people like you and me don’t care about kids or grandmas or anything else. I mean, you will have young kids like I do, and as like any parent out of it you care about your kids, I imagine, more than anything that’s going on in your life. But also you care about facts and data and rational discussion as opposed to just allowing irrational motion to guide everything.
BERENSON: That’s absolute right — and, by the way, listen. Like everybody else in the world, my kids are gonna get covid, ad I’d rather have them get it right now. They are young, they’re all under 10, they’re healthy, they’re rarely sick, they have good immune systems. Let ’em get covid and be done with it and then they may have immunity for the rest of their lives!
CLAY: Yeah.
BERENSON: We can’t say that, but that would be a much better thing than for them to be on scheduled vaccines. Again, my kids are vaccinated with normal vaccines against everything else. But for them to get stuck on a schedule of these boosters? I would… I couldn’t live with myself if I allowed that to happen; so, yeah. I have kids. I care, as you said, about them more than anything else. And to me, there’s no argument. (chuckles) Let them get covid and recover and be done.
So, so, okay. England. You set it up exactly right. There was a very brief moment in March 2020 when England was actually talking about the Swedish strategy, the herd immunity strategy, and good old Neil Ferguson scared the daylights out of them, and they went into a very hard lockdown, and then Boris Johnson — as the prime minister — got sick. And he actually is the world leader got the sickest with covid, much sicker than Trump.
They were the first country in the world to approve the mRNA vaccines, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Certainly the Pfizer vaccine they were the very first. And guess what? They had a ton of deaths this winter, even as a vaccination campaign was beginning, and they suddenly this spring… Again, the spring was pretty good for them but come July they had a ton of cases and deaths went up and there’s more people on ventilators there than there have been since late winter and they basically have given up.
They basically ended all restrictions in July, and there were people out there predicting, “Oh, cases are gonna reach some incredible heights after this,” and guess what? Cases went down after they ended all restrictions. They’re not making kids get vaccinate. They’re not talking about a booster shot for healthy adults at this point. They are looking at the same data as the United States is, and they’re saying, “Enough is enough is enough. Let’s get up to normal.”
CLAY: Alex Berenson, fantastic. We will continue to have you on, get your voice out there. Encourage to you subscribe to his Substack and search him out on Twitter @Alex Berenson — used to be — search him out on Google Alex Berenson, you can find that Substack. Alex, thank you.
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