MAHER: I know some people seem to not want to give up on the wonderful pandemic, but you know what? It’s over.

CROWD: (applause)

MAHER: There’s always going to be a variant.

CROWD: (applause)

MAHER: You shouldn’t have to wear masks. It’s the Democrats who seem to be… I mean, I travel in every state now back on the road, and the red states are a joy and the blue states are a pain in the ass, for no reason.

BUCK: There you go. Welcome back to Clay and Buck show. That was actually Bill Maher, a man of the left, but a man who sees some things clearly, and who goes around, Clay. Unlike a lot of people in the media, a lot of people at CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, Bill, because he does stand-up comedy, goes to states around the country. It would be amazing if you actually polled the New York Times, the Washington Post newsroom.

How many of the people that are writing about the country have been outside of the New York or D.C. metro area in the last 18 months. And I think you’d be stunned to find out that… Well, actually probably not. (chuckles) A lot of you know this. I think it would be stunning to some folks to find there are so many people that think that they understand the country who don’t even go.

They’ve never been. They don’t even know what it’s like in Texas. Maybe don’t even know what it’s like in Florida right now. Blue states are a pain in the ass for no reason. I’m in one, in New York and, yes, New York City is a pain in the butt about covid stuff for no good reason. The new mayor, Eric Adams — soon to be new mayor, mayor-elect — just came out and said he’ll think about maybe getting rid of the mask mandate in schools.

We’re supposed to be thankful that our abusers will stop abusing us and our children? Is that how this works? It’s the right move, but it’s hard to be thankful for it when they’re just deciding to stop being so crazy. But understand this: They’re not done. They’re not done! They want to fight this all the way on the OSHA mandate. What’s the point of Congress when you have OSHA?

Think about what they did with the CDC. They tried to extend an eviction moratorium using the Centers for Disease Control. Now they’re telling you that OSHA can mandate over a hundred — and we’ll get to what happens with less than a hundred-employee businesses in a moment. Over a hundred employees, a federal regulatory agency can say, “Yeah, you have to get a shot that — not to overstate it, but this is a fact — can harm and even kill you.” It is possible. There have been cases of people — very rare — who have had adverse reaction to the shot just like with any pharmaceutical, any intervention. The state’s going to make you do this. Ron Klain as Clay and I like to refer to him —

CLAY: Kind of president of the United States.

BUCK: — de facto chief decider, the decider-in-chief of the United States, here he is saying, “Look, if they can make you wear a hard hat on a construction site they can force a shot in your arm and probably your 5-year-old’s arm too. ”

KLAIN: Look. These vaccine requirements have been litigated up and down the courts all over the country. State requirements, for example, one in Maine. Uhh, and every single court before this one ruled that they were valid. The Supreme Court has turned back several times already various efforts to enjoin, uh, other vaccine requirements. I’m quite confident that when this finally gets fully adjudicated, not just a temporary order, the validated of this requirement will be upheld. It’s common sense, Chuck. If OSHA can tell people to wear hard hat on the job, to be careful around chemicals, you can put in place these simple measures to keep our workers safe.

BUCK: It’s not the same thing, Clay. (laughing)

CLAY: No, not the same thing at all. Look, OSHA on the job, if you are working in an asbestos-laden factory, OSHA can come in and determine whether or not your work conditions are safe. But they directly pertain to the working conditions themselves. And also, there’s a wide variety of different requirements. We said it last week. It’s 490 pages, these OSHA regulations.

And what he’s referring to is the Fifth Circuit of the United States, which is traditionally a conservative federal circuit, has suggested that they may stop the enforcement of the Biden vaccine requirement. I think what that would likely lead to, Buck, is ultimately a conflict among the circuits. And for people out there who don’t understand it, our federal courts are set up in a variety of different circuits.

And I used to know ’em all off the top of my head and I’d be able run through ’em. But for instance, California’s in the Ninth Circuit. Texas, Louisiana, Fifth Circuit. My home state of Tennessee where I am licensed to practice law, Sixth Circuit, and oftentimes what the Supreme Court ends up doing is when you have conflicting circuit court rulings — which I believe is likely. You’ll have the California as the more liberal circuit court saying, “Oh, of course OSHA has the right to do this,” and then you’ll have more conservative circuits saying they don’t.

The Supreme Court’s gonna have to break this tie. And, Buck, to me, this is a massive opportunity and also a massive obligation and responsibility for the courts to overrule the federal regulatory state here and not allow OSHA to implement vaccine requirements on the vast majority of the American populace who is going to work. Will they do it? That’s the question.

BUCK: Yeah. I think right off the bat, you know you got three votes that are sure as heck gonna say shots every day forever, you, your kids. They don’t care. Whatever the leviathan wants to do out of D.C. under Biden administration, you got three Supreme Court justices gonna who are gonna say, “Oh, yeah, that’s great.” Six that could go either way. I gotta tell you, Kavanaugh and Barrett, I don’t think they’re solid on this one. I don’t think they’re solid on this one at all.

CLAY: They need to be. They need to be really solid on saying that this cannot be permitted to occur. And this, by the way, is the kind of Supreme Court opinion that lasts in matters for potentially hundreds of years, because this won’t be the last time there is a pandemic the United States, right?

BUCK: I think everyone needs to understand that if this is upheld… Let’s say Ron Klain is right. This is like the morons that were saying in the very beginning, “It’s like seat belts.” Everything is like seat belts. We can make you do anything. We can make you mask up all day. We can make you stand six feet apart. We can make you do jumping jacks, because we think it will be good for your circulation and help against covid. That actually would be true, by the way.

CLAY: I wish they’d mandate exercise.

BUCK: We can do all of that because of seat belts. That was the argument from the dumb set in the very beginning of this and accuse keep going back to this. If this is true, the federal government can mandate flu shots for everybody too.

CLAY: No doubt.

BUCK: And as we know, the flu shots’ efficacy is usually 50, 60% and at that point you say, “What else are they gonna mandate for health and safety?” Because we’ve adopted — or at least a big portion of the country has adopted — this zero-risk posture about all aerosolized and respiratory viruses, will that just extend into the rest of the culture always and forever? They’re thinking about combining the covid and flu shot, Clay.

CLAY: Well, think about this, Buck. And this didn’t get very much attention, but I saw it and I couldn’t believe it. Over the weekend the Florida Gator football team got destroyed by South Carolina. Congrats the Gamecocks on a big win. Coach of the Florida Gators, Dan Mullen, came out and said one reason we lost is because we had 20 to 30 players who had tested positive for the flu.

Buck, they all traveled, and they played. No restrictions at all in their ability to play in the game. If they had tested positive for covid instead — which is actually statistically less dangerous to most young people in the country — they would have not only not been able to play, they would have quarantined and they would have had to forfeit.

So how in the world are you justifying even for the virus people out there 20 or 30 people have the flu — which can spread during games, all the players go and play (and, by the way, I think that’s fine) — but if it had been covid, they would have shut down the game and canceled it.

BUCK: It would be fascinating to see an actual… Oh, and I got some answers on where the CDC director, Rochelle Walensky, the little propagandist for the Biden administration pretending to be doing medicine, where the 80%… This is looking at observational studies of N95 mask usage in a clinical setting. So they’re pretending that, for people who forgot —

CLAY: Friday, she said mask wearing would eliminate 80% of covid. That is what she said.

BUCK: Which is completely insane.

CLAY: It’s a lie.

BUCK: The fact that she says that out loud and don’t expect to be mocked and ridiculed just shows you where the experts really are at this point but it wouldn’t be fascinating to see a study at this stage — and we’ll have to go through, I suppose, the winter to really know. I’d be willing to bet that you’ll find that the seasonal flu which people think we might have a pretty bad flu year I’ve got a couple friends who are sick right now.

I’ve had family members sick. There’s definitely stuff going around. Is the flu for a young person more dangerous ’cause we’re not even mandating flu shots than a young person who has not the covid shot or covid antibodies? I think the answer you’re gonna find is probably “yes.” So if we’re mandating all this stuff to protect you from covid — even though your risk as a person in the lower age brackets is very minimal — why wouldn’t they mandate it all for the flu?

CLAY: And how does it ever end?

BUCK: It is incoherent.

CLAY: How does it ever end? If you’re gonna start mandating it for the flu in every viral season, kids are gonna be wearing masks forever.

BUCK: Do you remember at the very beginning of all this, Clay, we would say, “Guys, we’d have on an average flu season 40,000 and a bad flu season 80,000 Americans die a year,” all these things, and all they kept saying was, “It’s so different from the flu,” and yeah, it’s worse for older people and those who are at high risk. But now we’re looking at a situation where this is actually kind of like the flu.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: That’s actually where we are.

CLAY: It’s never gonna go away and you’re gonna have to get a shot every year for the rest of your life.

BUCK: In case you’ve forgotten, Fauci is the worst person on the planet.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: One of the big challenges out there, Buck, is when will the Democrats say, “You know what? That goes too far. That’s a restriction we can’t support. San Francisco says, “Hey, you gotta have a vaccine passport for your 5-year-old to go into McDonald’s and get some chicken nuggets.” That’s okay! Everybody out there required to show vaccine passports in order to go watch a concert or a movie in different parts of the country?

That’s okay! What about domestic air travel, domestic travel in general? If there are restrictions on international travel predicated on the covid vaccine, would the Biden administration require covid vaccines in order for us to travel inside of the United States? Well, they were just asked that question, and everything is on the table. Listen to the question and the answer.

REPORTER: You asked about accepting fully vaccinated travels from countries that were previously restricted during the pandemic. Given the spread here within the United States over the summer, why there still no vaccine or testing requirements for domestic travel?

KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: So, you know, we say this all the time. Everything is on the table. We just don’t have any announcement to preview right now. Ever on this. So I don’t have anything else more to share on the domestic travel.

BUCK: Here’s the reality, Clay: They’re holding this stuff back. They’re holding it back dependent on what kind of winter we actually have here with regard to covid. If things start to get bad and I think they’re likely to because even a lot of vaccinated people are going to get pretty sick and there are gonna be people in the hospital and people who are dying who will fully vaccinated.

As you know, there’s only the need for boosters because of the failures that the vaccines have and because we understand that fully vaccinated is really no longer a thing. You’re always temporarily vaccinated with these mRNA vaccines that they’re giving people. So now what we’re gonna see, I think, is the utilization of additional mandates, and they’re gonna keep ratcheting it up dependent on what actually happens with the caseload.

The ultimate… Isn’t it so interesting? Given what they believe, why not have the…? You have vaccine passport in New York City for this. Why not go for it? Why won’t the Biden administration do it? It’s just political consequences. It’s not about science. It’s ’cause they know people would be ticked off if they made domestic flights dependent on vaccine, and also the airlines would probably shut down.

CLAY: Well, not only that, Buck, it also wouldn’t work, and that’s the ultimate kick in the nuts, so to speak, here is that you don’t have any data to reflect that if everybody were vaccinated this story would go away. It doesn’t disappear at all because if you look at what’s going on in Europe, if you look at what’s going on in many other parts of the United States?

Even, right now, highly vaccinated areas are setting all-time records for covid cases, and so as you break all of this down, the likelihood here — the likelihood beyond a shadow of a doubt — is even if we had 100% vaccination rates, we would still have a really high rate of covid all over the country. So, this is what is so frustrating. The Biden administration is trying to tell us that if everybody were vaccinated, this would go away, and it’s simply not true.