BUCK: We’ve got our friend Alex Berenson with us now to weigh in on all of this. His new book, Pandemia, is coming out. Get it before the Fauciites start burning those books as soon as they can. Alex, thanks for being with us.
BERENSON: Thanks for having me.
BUCK: So, boosters, my friend! I think last week we talked to you — a week or two weeks ago. I talk to you a fair amount. I was like, they’re gonna do the boosters anyway, and looks like now, now they are. What happened. I thought the CDC was supposed to go along with the experts?
BERENSON: No, it’s incredible. They didn’t get the vote they wanted. The CDC is clearly concerned about this. They’re clearly concerned about long-term side effects. They’re clearly concerned that this is a game that could have ramifications down the road if the virus continues to mutate, and Rochelle just overruled them! It’s incredible.
I think I say this to you every week. Try to imagine if Donald Trump — someone who worked at the CDC under Donald Trump. If Robert Redfield had overruled his own experts this way, imagine what the outcry would be about not following the science and about politicizing everything. But this administration, they can do whatever they want and nobody says anything to them. It’s really incredible.
CLAY: Alex, by the way, we can hear your kids in the background there, which is really gonna harm your reputation as someone who wants everyone’s kids and their grandparents to die, which is what the blue checks would say about you. But question for you: What is the latest data that we’ve got out here about England and Israel and where is it likely to be headed for United States based on that data?
BERENSON: It’s not good. So, the Israelis, they’ve given out boosters to about half the adult population, which is now what the CDC wants to do. I just read a report today in The Times of Israel that the number of people on ventilators is the highest it’s been since March. They still have a tremendous number of new cases every day. They topped out of those a few days ago. And it’s gone down a little bit since then.
But they’re still having the equivalent of a couple hundred thousand cases in the U.S. every day. If this is what you get after using a third booster, which is a second booster, a third dose, which is an experiment that we don’t really have any science behind, the empirical evidence is not good. And then in England, arguably there’s something even more concerning happening.
The Israelis have stopped giving out data on all-cause mortality. That’s counting all deaths. Not just covid, not just heart attacks, everything. It’s the best way to calculate population health. The Israelis stopped giving out that data. But the U.K. is still giving it out. And, unfortunately, all-cause deaths are hitting highs now that, if you exclude covid…
Because covid killed a bunch of people in the winter; we know that. If you exclude covid, all cause deaths are running about 10% above normal and have been for months. And that’s very odd and unusual. And nobody has a really good explanation. And then, if you add covid deaths in, all-cause deaths are now running 20% or 25% above normal, so in the U.K. that’s a couple thousand — one or two thousand — extra deaths a week that they’re having right now.
So, I thought vaccines were supposed to be the miracle. I thought vaccines were supposed to end covid. I thought vaccines were supposed to mean we were all supposed to be able to fly to the Moon and back in 30 seconds. Unfortunately, if you’re looking for positive population-wide effects of the vaccines, about the only thing you can say is that it looks like in the spring they helped reduce covid cases for a while.
Beyond that, yes, it looks like maybe there’s some slightly longer benefit of protection against severe disease and death. But we don’t know how long that lasts, either. So we’ve engaged in this experiment, and we’re still engaging in it, and the data is not backing up what people like Fauci said.
BUCK: Is there any reason…? We’re speaking to Alex Berenson, everybody. If you have not, if you want to get some of his covid research, subscribe to his Substack, because he’s been kicked off of Twitter forever for writing things — if I recall Alex, the tweet was actual entirely correct but you still got kicked off of Twitter.
Going forward here, the booster situation, why should anyone believe…? We’ve asked, by the way, Fauci to come on the show, Alex, and he keeps on trying to dodge, makes it seem like he’s considering it but he won’t come on. Why should anyone believe that this is their last… If their they’re willing to get the booster — and I’ve already saying I’m drawing a line in the sand: No booster. If they’re willing to get the booster, why would they think it’s their last booster?
BERENSON: I have no idea why you’d believe it’s your last booster. It seems very clear that these vaccines don’t produce the kind of broad-scale, B-and T-cell immunity that real infection and recovery does. They sort of give you this booster antibodies, but that does not last. And so we know that your antibodies are gonna decline in any case.
And so whether you have one shot, two shots, or two shots and booster, your antibodies go up and then they decline. And so in a matter of months it’s hard to understand why that wouldn’t happen again. And the Israelis are already talking about a third booster, a fourth shot. By the way — and we’ve talked about this also — there’s this concern that the virus will start to mutate (and it’s already starting to happen with Delta) — away from the boosters, which was designed for the original wild type virus.
And so what that means is at best the booster doesn’t less effective than they hoped that they would be, but at worse, you could get this terrible situation called Antibody Dependent Enhancement where the boosters actually wind up making the infection more — the new variant more — able to attack your cells. I’m not saying that that… (garbled) I’m sorry.
I’m on the West Side right now and I’m alternating between getting into the car and talking to a person, my daughter, and then getting out. So if you hear, it’s traffic and then the baby. But so there’s this possibility — and again, I’m not saying this is going to happen or is likely to happen but if it happened it would be terrible, but people who’ve been vaccinated are actually likely to have a more severe infection than people who aren’t.
So to me the booster seems like a very, very bad bet. At best, it’s gonna reduce your chance of serious infection for a few months and then you are probably gonna have to get it again. At worst, it won’t even do that — and at absolute worst, it might make matters worse.
CLAY: Now, you’ve got an interesting piece right now up on your Substack, and we’re talking to Alex Berenson as he wrangles — as many parents do on a Friday afternoon — around with his young children. I’m fascinated here. There’s a bull and there’s a bear case, right? And I guess it depends on how you define it from the virus’ perspective or the country’s.
Let’s say the bullish case is, from our perspective, that covid’s going to decline. And that’s one of the forecasts that’s out: Covid projected to drop below a hundred deaths a day by March, which would be good. But it would be the exact opposite of what we saw last fall and winter. Do you think we’re headed for, based on all of the evidence that you look at…?
And I know, look, covid made fools of everyone because it’s difficult to predict the future. But based on the data that you are seeing, as we now are into the fall and winter looms, do you think we will see a rise in covid cases through the fall and winter, as opposed to a decline, as is being predicted by some experts?
BERENSON: I do. So the (garbled) is simply this. Everybody is either been vaccinated or has natural immunity at this point. Okay? And that’s true. And you can look actually in the U.K., and there’s data showing that 97% of people have some kind of antibodies that are either natural antibodies or vaccine antibodies. The reason I don’t — and in the U.S., the numbers are probably pretty similar because we vaccinated so many people.
The reason that I don’t think that this is real is that I don’t think vaccine immunity counts, basically. I don’t think it’s gonna last in any meaningful way for people for more than a thing a few months. So I think basically the number of people who’ve been vaccinated doesn’t matter. It only matters how many people have natural immunity at this point — and that’s assuming that the vaccine doesn’t somehow screw up natural immunity.
BUCK: Alex, it seems to me that if the last bastion, as I call it, of Fauciism is that it prevents… We are ’til told, as of today, the vaccine prevents serious illness and death in a very meaningful way. Well, if that’s the case, then why do we need the boosters, right? ‘Cause if it’s just cases —
BERENSON: Yes. But let me just go back to this one second. So let’s just assume that I’m correct and the vaccine doesn’t really prevent infection, and over time the protection against severe disease and death goes to zero, or close to zero.
BUCK: Right.
BERENSON: In that case, then basically all you can look at is the number of people who have been infected and recovered. And so in the U.S. that might be 40% of the population. It might be 50% of the population. People… There are some people out there who think it’s higher than that. I don’t think it’s higher than that. Look at what happened in Florida over the summer, okay?
In Florida over the summer, they had a very significant wave, despite the fact that they had national average vaccination rates, okay? Everybody who talks about DeSantis and criticized him, it’s nonsense. Florida was at the national average. They weren’t Tennessee or Louisiana. They still had a huge wave of cases and deaths. That’s because vaccinations basically…
The protective effect — again, if it’s there at all — is marginal against severe disease and death. That’s what the Israeli data says. That’s what the U.K. data subsist, so I just think we’re gonna have to go through a fall wave where everybody who was vaccinated is gonna get infected. And some of those people are gonna get really sick and die. Some will not.
BUCK: How many people right now, Alex, do you think are having breakthrough cases as a percentage, as of the month of September in the United States leading to hospitalization or death? Do we have any idea?
BERENSON: No, we have no idea. I said this to you last week; you didn’t believe me. I heard from Tucker yesterday; he didn’t believe me. In the U.K. 70% of all the deaths — 70% plus – -are in people who are fully vaccinated right now. What’s the percentage in the U.S.? We do not know. What’s the percentage of people are hospitalized in the U.S. who are breakthrough cases?
We do not know. If the CDC knows, they’re not telling the truth about it. I don’t even think they do know. Our data collection is terrible. It’s politicized. And for whatever reason, they’ve done nothing to improve it; in fact, they’ve made it worse.
CLAY: What does it take for the Biden administration, for Dr. Fauci, for the CDC to start to acknowledge what the data is actually showing us? It seems to me — and I’m curious if you would agree — that they’ve been 60 or 90 days behind or more throughout in terms of their messaging. Is that going to actually happen?
BERENSON: I don’t know! I don’t know what it’s gonna take because they’re so insistent on pushing this. The new line is, “We just need to get 5 to 11 years old vaccinated; get all the teenagers who aren’t vaccinated, vaccinated, then everything will be fine.” Like what…? On what planet do you live? You don’t live on a planet that has Israel and the U.K. on it.
You don’t live on a planet where you’re looking at the actual data from U.S. nursing homes, for example, which are seeing more and more people who are fully vaccinated getting sick and dying. I don’t know what it’s gonna take. And it’s funny. You talked about me being kicked off Twitter and so now I just have the Substack.
Which, again, fortunately, thanks to people like you, people are signing up for the Substack and they are finding me. But somebody tweeted a few days ago — and I thought this was so right — people were willing to sort of put up with me (I’m talking about the Faucis of the world) as sort of the court jester when they didn’t think I was right. So when they thought I was sort of like just some kind of vaccine anti-vax — which, of course, I’m not at all — and was just saying all this stuff about vaccines that weren’t true, they were happy to have me on Twitter.
BUCK: All right. Alex, we gotta leave it there. Check out Alex Berenson’s Substack everybody. Subscribe. I subscribe to it — just full disclosure so you know — and I think Clay does too. Thanks so much, Alex.