BUCK: We’ve got our friend Alex Berenson with us now, author of the excellent book on the covid lockdowns and all the rest of it, Pandemia. Get your copy today. Also subscribe to his Substack. I subscribe, Clay subscribes — and you can’t get him on Twitter ’cause he’s still banned, although we’ll see where that goes. Alex, thanks for being back.

BERENSON: You guys just stepped on my April Fool’s Day joke. I was gonna say that Twitter had let me back on. But —

BUCK: (laughing) I don’t know if anybody would have believed it, though, Alex. I don’t know. I’m not sure that one would have flown. Just let’s start with the macro. It’s amazing because there’s still covid out there, there’s the BA.2 variant, but it feels like the Democrats don’t have the same degree of political certainty about what they want to do, so there’s a little less certainty about “the science.” I mean, what’s going on right now. There’s new shots, more shots. What’s happening?

BERENSON: No, I mean, I think you’re exactly correct, and I wrote a long piece on Substack about this yesterday, one of the longest I’ve written in a while. Basically, you know, politically the Democrats thought for, you know, for almost two years, certainly for most of — for all of 2020, much of 2021, and this worked hugely to their advantage, but, you know, not just with their base but, you know, with the center.

They were compassionate, and Republicans were just a bunch of, you know, jerks who didn’t care whether grandma died and, I mean, whether… None of that was true, but, you know, it was how they played it and how the media, you know, allowed them to play it. And now that is just thrown out the window, I mean, for two obvious reasons, right?

First of all, all solutions they proposed have failed, including the vaccines, right? I mean, everyone knows that the vaccines have not worked to end the epidemic. We can argue about whether or not they reduced serious cases and deaths, but they clearly haven’t ended the epidemic and that’s two years in which school closures, didn’t end the epidemic and lockdowns didn’t end the epidemic and they know politically it doesn’t work.

Plus, I know it’s hard for people on the right to admit that people on the left are human beings just like it’s hard for people on the left to admit that people on the right are human beings. But we’re all human beings. And a lot of those people are now — are tired of this, and they see actually the harm it’s done to their kids, you know, the people who do have kids. And they want it to be over.

And so, you know, there’s this hard core, which now I’d say might be down to 10 or 15% of the population and maybe, you know, less than half of Democrats that still isn’t ready for it to be over, that either is still afraid — and, you know, they’re the ones who are whining about how they have some cousin who, you know, had — you know, has chronic fatigue and is gonna get covid and therefore the rest of them have to wear masks for eternity, or their epidemiologists who think that they can use covid still to, you know, remake society and, you know, make America into a socialist paradise.

But most Americans and even most Democrats don’t believe any of that stuff anymore. And they do just want it to be over. So that’s where we are politically. I’m sort of increasingly convinced of that. The problem is — and, you know, for two years I’ve been saying to you we’ve overstated the risks of this, and we shouldn’t have taken the measures that we took. And I still believe all that is true.

But there is something else happening medically that we need to talk about which is that the virus hasn’t gone away, and although Omicron is not very dangerous and so even though a lot of people get infected, not that many people get really sick or die, we don’t know what the next variant is gonna look like, and that is just sad truth.

And we have vaccinated a huge number of people in the United States and in Western countries with these mRNA vaccines, and we don’t really know what the long-term effects of that are going to be either on the people who are vaccinated or how they’re gonna drive viral evolution. So I’m not sure, by the way, we need to lockdown tomorrow.

We’re not gonna lockdown again period. You know, unless thinks get unthinkably bad, we’re not gonna do that again. What I am saying is, everybody wants this to be over and for two years I’ve wanted it to be over, and what I’m warning people is, unfortunately, we can’t say it’s over, not medically, even if it’s over politically.

CLAY: Alex, it’s interesting on this BA.2 variant of the Omicron variant, however you want to classify it. It doesn’t appear that there is much of a surge coming in the United States, based on the data that I’m looking at. I would bet that you kind of feel the same way. Are we attributing that now to Omicron, the first version interesting swept so thoroughly through the United States that while there is talk about the impact of the vaccine, that the reality is almost everybody at this point either has gotten covid or has some antibodies to covid through the vaccine or some different variation of it?

Buck, when I both had the Omicron version. I imagine a huge percentage of the people listening to us right now did as well. Is that really what you think we’re seeing, why there’s not much of an increase in the overall cases with this BA.2 starting to roll through the United States?

BERENSON: I’m not sure that that’s right. Here’s why. In Europe they, had tremendous surges in the original Omicron —

CLAY: Yes.

BERENSON: — you know, in December and January and they’re having tremendous caseloads. Some countries are. Some countries aren’t, now. You know, the U.K. is having tremendous caseloads now, but, so, here’s what I think. I mean, I think, A, it may be a little bit early to say for sure. B, this is — or traditionally. I mean, we only have three years of data.

But this is sort of we’re heading into the season now when covid is at its lowest in the U.S., right, the sort of the “spring shoulder” season. And, three, I think the U.S. has a lot of natural immunity. Natural immunity is clearly more protective than vaccine immunity, and the U.S. has more cases, right? We didn’t lock down as hard as Germany or, you know, or Europe, much less a place like South Africa.

So I think we have a lot of people with what I think you can call, quote, unquote, “real immunity.” And that, you know, may combine with the Omicron wave of the winter to give you better protection. But, you know, we’ll see in two months where we stand. By the way, I’m not worried about BA.2. I’m worried about the next one, and there will be a next one.

There has been a different variant, really, every six months from the Winter of 2021. And so come, you know… I don’t want to make an exact prediction. But come May or June or July, there will be a next variant. Hopefully that next variant will be even less dangerous to people than Omicron. But “hopefully” doesn’t mean it’s gonna be that way necessarily.

BUCK: Alex Berenson, everybody. Pandemia is the book; subscribe to his Substack. Alex, the shots. We’re now joking around on Twitter… Sorry. Not to rub salt in the wound.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: (laughing) But some of us joke around on Twitter with other Team Reality folks about how, you know, three shots? Those are rookie numbers! You need four shots or five shots. There does seem to just be this momentum, I guess, for now they’re approving another round. But where are they in terms of actually aligning the shot to the currently circulating variant and having enough time to know if the aligned shot — assume it’s aligned — is even effective against a variant and, oh, also about whether three or four or 10 shots are safe and have no problem? I mean, how does that all work?

BERENSON: They are nowhere, Buck! That’s the short answer to that. They have been promising variant-specific boosters since 2020. They haven’t managed to come up with one. This is another great lie of mRNA, that somehow mRNA is gonna enable people to really quickly move and create a variant-specific booster that we can all have. They’re always chasing the next variant, okay?

It takes a little while to actually sequence it, and then it takes a little while to see if that one is gonna take off in the wild — and basically by the time you know, it’s too late. So, on top of that, they haven’t demonstrated to anybody’s satisfaction — not even these sort of completely capture regulators in our FDA and CDC — that having any variant-specific boosters makes any difference.

So people continue to get the same vaccine that was developed in 2020 to a virus that essentially no longer exists. But here’s what I’ll say. They can tell — and we were joking about this on Twitter last year when I was allowed on Twitter that, you know, the three-booster people were gonna go shoot the two-booster people and say, “You’re not really vaxxed!”

CLAY: (laughs) Yeah.

BERENSON: Right? And that’s true. Like, those people, you know, now you’re not fully vaccinated unless you have three. Pretty soon, you’re not gonna be fully vaccinated unless you have four. But whatever the epidemiologists and the public health, you know, nincompoops tell people, they’re not listening anymore. Right now, only about 90 million people… I know it sounds like a lot.

Only about 90 million people have gotten booster shots. That’s out of more than 200 million who got the first two doses, and remember those people are not vaccine hesitant. They’re not the Neanderthals like me, right? They were happy, or at least willing, to get vaccinated, and they’ve looked at this ever since and said, “You know what? No more.”

And it’s not like a million people a day are lining up for boosters right now. Despite everything — despite every ad, despite all the public pressure, despite all the media pressure, despite all the corporate pressure — you know how many people are getting boosters in the United States these days? Fewer than a hundred thousand a day.

The only thing that’s piling up when it comes to vaccines is vaccine in freezers that government is paying for by the billions. Those will never be used. That is my prediction. We will have hundreds of millions of vaccine doses that we’re gonna try to shove to some African country ’cause they will never be used in the U.S.

CLAY: Alex Berenson, fantastic work. As always, go read his Substack, make sure you don’t miss a moment. Have a good weekend, Alex. Thanks for making the time for us.

BERENSON: Thanks, guys. Always a pleasure.

BUCK: Thank you.