CLAY: Fauci was asked whether or not he would allow an unvaccinated person to attend a holiday gathering with his family. Here is what he said. Play cut 18.

MENENDEZ: If someone in your family isn’t vaccinated, should you ask them not to show up?

FAUCI: Yes. I would do that. I mean, I think we’re dealing with a serious enough situation right now that if there’s an unvaccinated person, I would say I’m very sorry, but not this time, maybe another time when this is all over.

CLAY: Okay. Here’s what fires me up about this. Aside from this fact — and look. Everybody out there has to make their own decisions about what to do around Christmas, around the holidays, around New Year’s. And I can’t tell you what you should or should not do. But here’s what I would say.

If you are a grandparent and you have been away from your grandkids for two years because you’ve been terrified of covid, what are you living for? I’m not a grandparent. I’m a parent. I could tell you that there is nothing that would have kept me away from my kids over the past two years. I would imagine that someday if I’m fortunate enough to be a grandparent, being a grandparent will be one of the most important if not the most important things in my life. I got three boys. I hope they grow up and they have kids and I hope we have tons of grandkids one day. And I hope, by the way, that I live long enough to see ’em ’cause I work so many hours now, my wife’s gonna live to be 140. I’m gonna die at 52, right? But so she’s gonna have a hundred years without me and an amazing remaining 90 years.

But if you are making that choice to not be around your grandkids because you’re afraid of covid two years in, I think you’re a coward, frankly, and I don’t know what you’re living for. But that is your choice. That is your right. The idea that Fauci would suggest that the health even supports this idea right now is what is particularly frustrating to me about the clip and the fact that no media pushes back on him because being vaccinated does not keep you from getting or spreading covid.

So you are selling an artificial bill of goods out there that the idea that if you are unvaccinated makes you way more significant of a risk to others. The reality is if you look at the data, unvaccinated people are primarily a danger to themselves, not to others. In other words, what Dr. Fauci is selling there is the idea that unvaccinated people are dirty, unclean, and cannot be allowed to be around the vaccinated, which is fully not supported by the scientific data at all.

Most unvaccinated people are primarily a danger to themselves, which is typically the case with most things in life and it’s why I get so fired up when I see people who are idiots out there on social media saying, “Well, if somebody who’s unvaccinated gets covid, they don’t deserve medical treatment.”

Well, you realize that obesity is the number one cause of preventable illness in America today. I’ve never heard somebody say, “Oh, if a fat person gets sick, they shouldn’t get coverage at a hospital because the made themselves fat and therefore skinny people should get coverage first.”

It’s absurd. It’s ridiculous. But the fact that nobody will push back against Dr. Fauci when he says something like this is what is so frustrating. The media should exist, in my opinion, to speak truth to power and hold people accountable who seek to use their opportunity to continue to grab more and more power without having any justification for that power.

And when we see all of these Democratic mayors — New York City, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., San Francisco — I’m sure there are other cities out there as well — continuing to take more and more power over vaccine mandates, I just want to step back and say, “Have you not looked at all of the data?”

The NFL, the NBA, the NHL, they’re all almost a hundred percent vaccinated, and they’re setting record high for cases. Why is that? Because the vaccine doesn’t protect you from getting or spreading covid. We were lied to and told that that was the truth initially. Remember in the summer back in May, “Take your masks off if you’re vaccinated. You never need to wear a mask again.” And then slowly the cases continued to tick up and people said, “Uh-oh.” Turns out these vaccines, they may provide some limited amount of protection when it comes to death or serious illness, but they are vaccines in the traditional method or methodology that you and I have been taught about.

In other words, think about this: You’re vaccinated for measles. If somebody was coming to your house and you found out that they weren’t vaccinated for measles, would you restrain them from entering your home? Of course not. Because you’re vaccinated for measles, which means you’re not going to get measles. What the covid shot is is a therapeutic that provides limited protection.

Now, I’ve said this. Buck has said this. My parents have gotten the vaccine. They’re over 75. They got boostered. They’re over 75. If you are in ill health, if you are obese, if you are senior citizen, I think you should get every shot imaginable to help protect yourself. But if you’re a young, healthy person, your risk from covid is far less significant driving to a Christmas party than it is to actually die driving to the Christmas party. And your kids going to school are more likely to be murdered walking to school than they are to die of covid. They’re more likely to drown, they’re more likely to die of the seasonal flu. All of those things are bigger risks.