BUCK: We are joined now by the man who has been instrumental in bringing forward data, facts, and truth for two years now, Alex Berenson, author of Pandemia. Please subscribe to his Substack. I am a subscriber, Clay’s a subscriber, we recommend you do the same. Alex, thanks for being here.
BERENSON: Thanks for having me, Buck.
BUCK: What are the most important thing people need to hear now about the situation of covid, the data… I mean, there’s so much we can dive into. But Alex, honestly, just want to give you the floor. What do people need to know about what’s happening right now?
BERENSON: Well, I mean, I think you’ve said it. And we’ve talked about this for a while and it looks… You know, it looks like, you know, it is even more true than it was a couple weeks ago or a month ago. We’re in a better place in terms of the pandemic itself, in terms infections and, you know, the spring is coming, and it’s likely we’re gonna see a continued seasonal fall.
But in terms of the politics, I think it’s really important to understand that the people who did this, the people who — you know, who forced lockdowns and who forced masks and who forced school closings, some of them just want this to go away, right? The politicians on the Democratic Party side probably just want this to go away. But the public health establishment has not conceded defeat.
And they want to sort of set policies in place so that when the next pandemic comes, or when covid comes back — and I do believe, as I said to you before, it’s likely to come back, that the rules that they established in the last couple years will come back too. And so we need to fight on a couple of levels, those of us who are on, you know, what I call Team Reality have called from the beginning.
One, we need to make sure that the truth about what happened over the last couple years comes out, starting with the lab leak, you know, and the likelihood that that’s the real source of this, going on to the fact that, you know, lockdowns failed completely to make any difference in the course of the epidemic, and talking about vaccines, which is probably the most controversial issue. But one where I will say and, you know, have said and will continue to say that, you know, it doesn’t look like vaccines did very much good at all if you look at the overall course of the pandemic the last couple of years. It certainly doesn’t look like they should have been mandated.
BUCK: Can I ask, Alex, what is the latest on…?
BERENSON: Yeah.
BUCK ‘Cause the last thing that they were really holding onto even into let’s say January, mid-January, it was, “Well, if you get the shot, you’re not gonna die, and if you didn’t get the shot, covid will kill you,” was essentially the binary they set up. Do we have a better sense of, “Okay, it was somewhat effective at lowering mortality but at what level?”
BERENSON: So really good question. Really complicated. In the U.K. — and I wrote a Substack about this this week — 90-plus percent of the people who die in the United Kingdom now are fully vaccinated, meaning two shots or boosted or, you know, or… Yeah, two shots or boosted: 90% of the people who die in the United Kingdom are in those two categories, okay? And the United Kingdom still has a lot of covid deaths.
It’s not like I’m talking about five deaths a week. There are a thousand people in the U.K. dying a week plus, and the U.K., you know, it’s about one-fifth the size of the U.S. So there’s a lot of death happening in a basically fully vaccinated population. Here’s… The math gets really complicated because Delta is different than the wild type and Omicron is different than Delta and there’s this time element where you don’t get…
You know, you get benefits for maybe a couple months after the second shot and then it goes away. Every… Here’s the takeaway: Everybody who said, “This is gonna stop the pandemic,” they were wrong. They said, “It’s gonna reduce your risk of infection meaningfully.” They were wrong. Now they’re down to, “It reduces your risk of death and severe disease,” maybe marginally, when you look at the whole picture.
Not by 90%, not by 80%, not by any amount that is gonna stop a lot of people who are fully vaccinated from dying. That’s the truth, and that’s why this has to be a personal choice. If you’re 80 years old, you’re really scared of covid, you’re at higher risk from covid, taking the vaccine and hoping for the best may still make sense for you. Okay, if you’re 20 years old, and you’re at low — very low — risk from covid to begin with and you have risk of myocarditis, taking the vaccine makes no sense.
It should not be mandated. College shouldn’t make you do it. Your employer shouldn’t make you do it. It should be your choice. Most of us aren’t 20, and we’re not 80. We’re somewhere in the middle. It should be a personal decision for all of us. And, you know, when we talk about going forward, that’s maybe the most important, you know, lesson of all. We need to talk honestly about what the vaccines did and didn’t do, and we need to talk honestly about what the rules should be, and the rules should be: Nobody who doesn’t want take this has to take it.
CLAY: Alex, when you look at the Covid Zero attempts that were made in China, that were made in New Zealand, that were made in Australia, New Zealand and Australia have completely abandoned that idea —
BERENSON: (laughs)
CLAY: — and as a result, their case rates are skyrocketing. Interestingly, China’s still trying to do the Covid Zero, and I think they just shut down Shanghai. But Hong Kong is having an outbreak that is really off the charts if you look at what is going on there.
BERENSON: Yeah.
CLAY: What is going to happen, in your mind, when you look at what’s occurring in places like Hong Kong? Is Covid Zero still a viable strategy even for a place like China which is having Draconian lockdowns and has been doing them for two years, or is Omicron so incredibly infectious that it’s impossible?
BERENSON: Great question! And, you know, I think China is the last domino to drop. And you’re absolutely right. Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, you know, Japan, South Korea, I mean, they weren’t at Covid Zero, but you know they very effectively had low case rates. All of Asia now — aside from China — is having off-the-charts levels of covid and it’s very hard to see.
I mean, China is a densely populated country. How exactly are they gonna continue to have no cases? And I think the answer is they’re gonna have cases. They may be scared because, you know, they did have these sort of Draconian lockdowns and they did pursue a Covid Zero policy, but they’re gonna have Omicron in a population that has essentially no base natural immunity —
CLAY: That’s exactly right.
BERENSON: — and it’s gonna be crazy for a month or two. But they’re gonna have no choice. They’re gonna have to do that. That’s what the rest of the world’s experience suggests.
BUCK: We’re speaking to Alex Berenson. His Substack is certainly worth your subscription, friends, and Pandemia is his book. Alex, we just had to have you tee off on this one for a second. Clay and I have been going back and forth ever since they announced it. Not only are they extending the mask mandate on planes. Clay and I were both flying last week, and a lot of people flying listening to us flying in recent days.
BERENSON: (laughing)
BUCK: They extended the mask mandate on planes and in airports, of course. It’s actually a mask-up-between-bites policy. And Jen Psaki tries to defend this as though, “Oh, but you’re moving from a high transmission to a low transmission through a medium transmission.” Do people come to you more and more in the recent weeks and say, “Wow, you were right; the libs are insane”? Like, what’s going on?
BERENSON: (laughing) I mean, you know, it’s not so much that. It’s that they just want to forget the last two years, right? So my mother, okay, who’s fully vaccinated and boosted and, you know, for two years called Tony Fauci “America’s doctor” unironically, she —
CLAY: Hold on. Hold on. (laughing) I want to hear more about this.
BERENSON: Okay.
CLAY: But what are the holidays like given what you do and what your mom’s perspective obviously was?
BERENSON: You know, we — we didn’t talk that much about covid. (laughing)
CLAY: (laughing) A lot of people can respect that, by the way. I want to hear more about your mom and Dr. Fauci and what her perspective is now.
BERENSON: (laughing) She literally… So she, you know, she hadn’t traveled for two years, she been, you know — although she wasn’t personally, you know, like, “I’m gonna hide in my basement,” kind of freak like that but, you know, she was cautious. So last month — and she was alone now; my father died, as I actually mentioned in Pandemia. He died sort of early in the pandemic although not of covid. So it’s been a lonely couple years for her.
So she got on a plane and went to London for two weeks. This 77-year-old woman just decided, “You know what? I’ve had it. Like, the restrictions are off; I’m going somewhere,” and she went there, and she came back about a week ago, and we were talking, and she said, “Oh, yeah, covid, but everybody seems to be done with it.” (laughing) So it’s like, “Did the last two years not happen to you? Do you remember?”
CLAY: (laughing)
BERNESON: And I think most of the country — I mean, most of the left, I would say. I’m guessing now, but let’s say 60% of the left is like that, right? Like a hundred percent of the right is done and close to a hundred percent of people in the middle are done. Sixty percent on the left just wants to pretend it never happened, and certainly all the politicians want to pretend it never happened.
But then there’s this group of people, and I get emails about them, covid just broke them. Right? (laughing) So I get an email from a reader the other day saying, “My dad has gotten five shots. He lives in a Northeastern state and he drives to other states to get more shots, and still won’t go outside.” You know, it sounds like a joke, but this guy’s broken, right? He’s never gonna get better.
So there’s a group of people who personally can’t leave this behind, clearly, and then there’s a group of people in the public health establishment — the ones I was sort of talking about at the beginning — who are almost regretful it wasn’t worse, right? They were gonna use this thing to remake society and, you know, give us all universal basic income and nationalized health care.
And they didn’t get to do it ’cause the pandemic wasn’t bad enough, and they are plotting the next one, okay? Those are the people who are dangerous and those are the people we have to be careful about. But most of the — and the problem from the point of view people on, you know, my side or your side is: We have to make sure that people in the middle who just want to forget about this, don’t forget, because there needs to be a reckoning. It needs to be a political reckoning and there needs, you know, to some extent to be a criminal reckoning. Whether or not that’s gonna be possible, I don’t know.
BUCK: Amen. I mean —
CLAY: Where do you think, by the way, Fauci is?
BERENSON: (bursts out laughing)
CLAY: I mean, do you have, like, a tracker on him, because he’s vanished. Buck and I started making jokes about this a couple of weeks ago, and I thought at some point he would reemerge.
BERENSON: (laughing)
CLAY: But, I mean, they really have totally, like, killed him in terms of being able to talk to any media. I mean, it’s wild.
BERENSON: (laughing) I issued a silver alert for Fauci last week.
CLAY: (laughing)
BERENSON: But no joke. ‘Cause he’s such a megalomaniac they haven’t been able to get him off the air entirely so he’s talking to like — I’m not joking — African-American, like, podcasters — who, you know, who have some audience; you know, I don’t know whether it’s thousands or tens of thousands — that you’ve never heard of. Because, like, if he doesn’t get endeavored like I think his oxygen supply dries up and he dies. So they’re letting him speak, but they’re letting him speak in places (laughing) you’ve never heard of. That’s what they’re doing with Fauci right now.
BUCK: Yep. He’s lying in the basement somewhere on someone’s podcast.
CLAY: Maybe we should put another request in. Maybe he’ll come on with us now.
BERENSON: You should! Get him on! (laughing) That’s right!
BUCK: We’ll try.
BERENSON: Oh, I’d pay to hear that.
CLAY: Yeah. Me too.
BUCK: Us too. Yeah. Alex Berenson, everybody. Check out Pandemia. Get a copy of Alex’s book. Alex, we’re gonna keep on this, man. So we’re gonna be talking to you. Thanks for being with us.
BERENSON: We will forgive but we will not forget.
BUCK: One hundred percent. Thanks, Alex.
BERENSON: Thanks, guys.
CLAY: Amen.