Twitter Labels Obituary Misleading — and Other Covid Madness

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BUCK: We’ll talk about whether Fauci is lying about wanting to consider, at least, having you not spending Christmas with your relatives. He said it. Now he says he didn’t say it, ’cause he’s Fauci and thinks he can get away with anything. What do we know? We’re just a bunch of peasants who are supposed to take all of his direction without questioning, right?

That’s what they think. Meanwhile, the CDC has said officially (impression), “Maybe you should consider having a virtual holiday celebration. You know, see your family on the screen and be like, ‘Hey, mom and dad. It’s almost like you’re here with me. I can almost touch you except it’s glass.'” That’s what they want for everybody.

CLAY: What percentage of people are actually still…? This is the thing that I really wonder about. What percentage of the American public is going to restrict their mass or Thanksgiving or Halloween? Have you seen some parents are like, “Oh, I’m not letting my kids trick-or-treat.” Not letting your kids walk around outside in a mask? It’s crazy.

BUCK: I think about 20%. I think about 20% of the country. I think the same 20% who think that climate change is going to consume the world in flames unless we put AOC in charge of the economy with the Green New Deal.

CLAY: I felt so bad, Buck, for the kids of those 20%. Can you imagine the hell that living in those houses for those kids must have been over the last 18 months?

BUCK: It’s crazy, but there are people that still want it. They are masking up their kids, they want to get them the shot, they want to do all these things. And then also going into the holiday season, I think you’re gonna see a much bigger push for boosters. They say right now, it’s not mandatory to be fully vaccinated. I’m telling you — I’m making a prediction — they will change that.

Fauci will say, “Oh, it evolved.” That’s what he always says. Everything “evolves.” He lies to you, the incrementalism keeps going, and there’s an evolution. And if you’re wondering to what extent they’re willing to shut down information still, and I know there’s that Facebook — and, Clay, if you want to get in in the next hour. There’s the Facebook whistleblower. She’s a liberal, folks.

Not blowing the whistle on Facebook being unfair to conservatives, but we’ll talk about what’s really going on there. Over the weekend Twitter got a lot of heat, right leg so, because there was a woman named Jessica Berg, who “was an exceptionally healthy and vibrant 37-year-old young mother with no underlying health conditions.” This is from OregonLive.com, from a real news site.

She “passed away … from Covid-19 Vaccine-Induced Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia…” She did not want to get vaccinated. Twitter, Clay, labeled that — a woman’s obituary — misleading. We know there are side effects! Maybe they’re incredibly rare. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It’s now misleading for people to find out if somebody got the shot. It is very rare to get the shot and die from what we know so far. But you can still say it if it’s true, right? Not according to Twitter.

CLAY: Well, it’s not even that rare right now in England based on the data that’s coming out of England, right? Something around 70% of the people dying with covid.

BUCK: No, no, no. That’s dying from the shot, not dying with the shot.

CLAY: Yeah, but I’m saying even for the vaccinated people to be dying with covid. And the problem is, you aren’t allowed to share data points that contradict the narratives. But in this scenario, I’m not surprised but it goes against the prevailing narrative. So we don’t know. Look, it’s rare for someone in their thirties to die, period.

Having said that, every single day people in their thirties die of a variety of different, unexpected outcomes. So getting into why that is occurring is important but also understandable that it’s an outlier. What happens here, Buck, is when outliers, right — when a 24-year-old — dies with covid, everybody shares it widely, and it’s one of the most distributed stories on Twitter, even though that’s an outlier.

There’s almost no 24-year-olds we’re gonna die with covid. But when somebody has a vaccine reaction that also is an outlier, but that’s not allowed to be shared, right? So I think the problem we have in American society in many ways is that we try to treat outliers as if they are representative samples of the larger data sets. When in reality, the reason they’re newsworthy is because they’re so rare.

And so, we end up with this anecdote-driven culture, and then you have everybody trying to respond to the anecdote like on the border, Buck, when suddenly we aren’t allowed to have horses ’cause somebody took a photo and they decided to try to make it look like it was inappropriate behavior from a Border Patrol official even though it wasn’t.

BUCK: Speaking of data, this is out of Massachusetts. We’ve been mentioning on the show today of how the covid cases have been surging further north. If you believe or just know about the seasonality of this virus in the past, this is as predicted, as expected; it’s just a question of degree. But you knew there would be more covid going up north.

Florida looking better and better. Texas looking better and better. The covid wave has gone beyond those areas, and now in Massachusetts they have 675 — this is as of over the weekend — patients currently hospitalized with covid: 173 in intensive care; 213 patients of the 675 patients in the hospital with covid right now are reportedly fully vaccinated.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Now, I need someone to start to think about this one, folks, ’cause they’re gonna change the numbers; they’re gonna move the goalposts again. We have been led to believe up to this point it is incredibly rare for someone to be in the hospital who is fully vaccinated, that you’re good; you’re protected.

How is it the case that almost a third — during a surge, no less, in Massachusetts, almost a third — of people in the hospital are fully vaccinated if it’s incredibly rare? A third doesn’t sound like incredibly rare. Now, I know that’s not a representative sample of everywhere and everything. But it’s early stage in what we’re expecting to happen here.

CLAY: And again, I would go to England where 70% of people dying are fully vaccinated.

BUCK: How can Fauci not be asked that question, by the way, Clay, on TV? How come they don’t ask?

CLAY: I think, one, if you watch White House press briefings, I think we very often overrate the average intelligence of White House press briefings.

BUCK: Journalists in general. Most journalists are B- students from crappy, second-tier liberal arts programs. I’m telling you the truth.

CLAY: I think that’s a problem, and then I also think they’re so many people who are afraid of being anti-vaccine, classified as that, on Twitter that they won’t even ask that kind of question. It’s a fantastic question. It should be do you have question Fauci would get asked. That’s why they won’t let him come on our show, Buck.

Because I think deep down, they know we’re not gonna try and lacerate him or just call him names or anything like that. We would just want him to have to answer — intelligently to the best of his ability — questions that require nuance as opposed to basic screaming, nonentity questions which is what he usually gets all day.