CLAY: Big story out there. Now, I don’t know how much you can trust the WHO. They clearly have carried the water for China a lot. They initially gave us totally flawed information out of Wuhan, China, about how prevalent covid was, where it came from.

Like many of you — or most of you, I would imagine, listening right now, maybe almost all of you, because I think most of you have functional brains — the evidence all supports the idea that covid came out of a Chinese lab, that we were probably using American dollars to do gain-of-function research, that some of that money would have come from the NIH with Dr. Fauci’s fingerprints all over it.

One of the big questions — and we’re gonna get into being as honest with you every single day as we can, and I’ll talk about this from a father’s perspective because Sunday was Father’s Day. One of the big questions out there has been as kids under 18 years old are now eligible for the vaccine, what should be the choice that you make as a parent? And I’ve got three kids, Buck, 13, 10, and 6. I care about them more than anything in the world.

I don’t want them to get vaccinated because the data reflects that they are not in danger from covid, and that, if they get it, they will be fine. I’m more afraid, frankly, of this vaccine and it being rushed and the fact that why would you give it to children? My kids have all been in-person in school. We have, fortunately, been able to weather covid I think better than almost anywhere in the country here in my home state of Tennessee.

But I’m not gonna give my kids the vaccine, and I know there are a lot of parents and grandparents out there listening to us, aunts and uncles, who have young kids as well. And I feel like it has become an anti-vax argument to say that you don’t want your kids under the age of 18 to get the vaccine and I think that’s fundamentally unfair. Because every parent out there cares, every grandparent cares more about their kid than anything.

These are real decisions that we’re making.

I got my kids vaccinated from measles, mumps, rubella, all of the things that are tangible threats to them. But there’s a lot of evidence. Germany, not exactly known for its irrationality… German scientists have come out and said kids under 18 shouldn’t get the vaccine, and now the WHO — and I know, again, there’s questions about whether or not you can trust them. But, Buck, the WHO came out and said they don’t support vaccination for anyone under the age of 18.

BUCK: Always with this, Clay, there’s a lack of the next step in the conversation too. There’s the rewriting of history which we’ve talked about where we’re supposed to forget that what I often refer to as the Fauciite consensus, the blue-check expert —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — MD class have been not only wrong, but obviously deeply politicized in a lot of the recommendations here. I mean, all you have to do — and I just came from New York City — is walk around. You will see people double masked in 85-degree weather outside by themselves.

CLAY: How is Nashville comparable to New York City in your experience?

BUCK: I walked into hotel here and the people at the front desk had no masks on and I thought I was in some alternate universe all of a sudden.

CLAY: It is amazing.

BUCK: You still require masks at the coffee shop on my corner in New York, you still have masks required in every grocery store everywhere, and this is despite the fact that New York City, for example, has a 70% give or take vaccination rate, among the highest in the country, this has become a political branding exercise and religious belief really for a whole lot of people, which you and I saw when we used to talk about this over a year ago now.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Because it was an object that people wanted to show off to people. “Oh, I’m… I wear masks all the time. I wear them on the treadmill,” all the rest of it. And when we go back and look at so many of the decisions whether it’s the shutdown of schools, which never should have happened, or now the masking. After Fauci said, “Don’t mask,” then it was, “You should mask,” and then it became, “Double mask!” As we know, the whole thing became absurd.

We’re now being told that you have to get vaccinated no matter who you are across the country. That’s where the Biden administration is. Everybody’s gonna get vaccinated. They don’t even talk about how there could be a need for boosters, which would mean that we would have to also run this process again.

CLAY: All the time.

BUCK: So if you think that it’s a one-and-done, I need someone to explain to me — and I’m someone who’s seen a lot of the bad policies here coming — why we’re not gonna have to go through this, you know, year in and year out. And the return of Fauciism with masking during flu season. If you think that they’re not already gearing up for this, we actually have President Biden at the White House on Friday talking about — you guessed it (impression), “New variants, folks! New variants.”

BIDEN: (whispering) The new variant will leave unvaccinated people even more vulnerable than they are a month ago. This is a serious concern, especially because of what experts are calling the Delta viruh…. (sputtering) Uh, the Delta variant. It’s a variant that is more easily transmissible, potentially deadlier, and particularly dangerous for young people.

BUCK: Now a few things. One: I guess we’ve moved away from the South African variant —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — or, you know, the U.K. variant whatever it was they were saying before. But also, Clay, the story over the weekend — Daily Mail had this — was that there are all these experts now who are saying these red states are gonna get it and they’re gonna get it badly, if they don’t just bend the knee and get vaccinated across the board. Everybody! Man, woman and child across the board.

CLAY: And what’s the biggest issue here that isn’t being talked about to me is I went to my local grocery store last week and I got an antibody test. It was 25 bucks, took 15 minutes, get my finger pricked. They come out and they say, “Hey, you’ve got covid antibodies.” I never tested positive for covid. I had one day in the last 18 months where I had a fever, a Sunday.

I worked from home for the next eight to 10 days. I didn’t go get tested. It was the middle of November, and the testing sites were totally overwhelmed. I’ve had the flu before. I’ve had a lot of other illnesses. I’ve never gotten tested for the flu. I felt fine. One day had a fever; the next day I was fine. Okay? So I went and got tested for the antibodies. One of the things that the experts don’t seem willing to acknowledge is we know that there are over a hundred million people who have had covid. I’m one of them.

BUCK: You’re one of them.

CLAY: I’m one of them.

BUCK: Yep.

CLAY: We have right now in our blood, antibodies, many of us do. The same thing that you would get if you got the vaccine except a natural version. Rand Paul, senator from Kentucky, talked about this. He is a doctor, unlike a lot of other people who claim to be doctors out there, the blue checkmark brigade as I call them. I’ve made the decision that I’m not going to go get vaccinated now because I’ve already had covid.

Other people could make other decisions. But when I have the antibodies in my blood, I would literally be going to get a vaccine to get antibodies in my blood. I feel fine, I feel healthy, and I understand that everybody should be able to make their own decisions about whatever they choose to do for their own health.

Additionally, as a parent, I have to sit back and look at my 13-, my 10-, and my 6-years-olds and say, “Okay, what am I going to do for them?” And the answer is not a damn thing. Because I look at the data, and if they get covid, they are under infinitely more risk… This is true. For people under the age of 18, you are under infinitely more risk of death from the seasonal flu than you are from covid.

Look at the data. Covid is drastically overrepresented with people who are senior citizens. If you’re a senior citizen and you’re listening to us right now, I’ve said this to my own parents, “I would encourage you to go get the vaccine. You are in a greater danger from covid.” You don’t have to listening to me, but that’s the advice that I gave my parents. That’s the advice that I gave the elderly family members in my family.

BUCK: Same advice I gave my parents who are vaccinated.

CLAY: Yes. My parents are too. That’s the same thing: You don’t have to listen to us. We’re not telling you that you have to do anything. But for kids, I’m not doing it, Buck. And it’s crazy to me that there’s not even a real discussion about this in the United States when the WHO and Germany are both saying, “Hey, we don’t believe kids under the age of 18 need to be vaccinated at all.”

Certainly not really young versions of that, right? And this ties in with college kids and everyone else. If you’re in your teenage years, you’re in your twenties, you’re in your thirties, unless you have major health-related conditions, you’re gonna be fine if you get covid. And this has been my argument. I know, Buck, you got into this as well.

When this whole debate started, I said look at the stratification of ages. And if we were making intelligence, rational policy decisions, we would have isolated the elderly and the severely unhealthy and told them to stay away from modern society and let everybody else go to work.

BUCK: This is what the Great Barrington Declaration of thousands of doctors and scientists said.

CLAY: Which everybody tried to shut down —

BUCK: Oh, they absolutely did.

CLAY: — and pretend didn’t exist.

BUCK: And that’s why “the science,” which Fauci has doubled down… I want to come back to Fauci as the science.

CLAY: He’s such a… He’s a clown.

BUCK: He’s referred… He said, again (impression), “If you don’t like me, you don’t like the science.” So let’s —

CLAY: He went to your high school, though, by the way, right?

BUCK: He did. He went to my high school. He’s like the one that high school loves. Me, I don’t know.

CLAY: Yeah. You’re the black sheep.

BUCK: Yeah. But we’ll come back into this, because here’s what I want all of you to understand. This hasn’t gone away, folks. I just flew here. There are still all these regulations and all these rules.

CLAY: Don’t get me started on airports and airplanes!

BUCK: It’s crazy, and unless we go and say, “What did we get wrong here?” I’m telling you, even if where you live… If you’re breathing that free fresh air without two or three masks on your face and a plastic bag over your head and whatever else is going on. But finally, if you’re breathing that fresh air in Texas, in Florida — in any state that’s not basically New England, New York, or California — the federal government, the Biden administration, they’re not done with you on this one yet.