BUCK: We are joined by our friend Alex Berenson. He is an investigative journalist, and you can go check out his Substack in case Twitter gives him issues for telling things that are true, it turns out.

ALEX: (laughing)

BUCK: Alex, Clay and I both have a ton of questions, and we never have enough time so let’s get right into it. Thank you for being with us. Turns out we’re gonna need boosters ’cause turns out you were right. The Israeli data was shows us where this all was heading, and the vaccines failed pretty rapidly. What am I missing?

ALEX: You’re missing nothing. You are correct. Yeah, so last month Twitter repeatedly suspended me for pointing to the Israeli and data and saying this is leading to vaccine failure — and, by the way, as you know, there’s next-to-no evidence that these vaccines in the long run actually reduce deaths. If you look at some Pfizer trial data from their own trial, you don’t see a reduction in overall deaths.

And guess what? You can ban me if you want, although they’ve now let me back on. I’m on my last strike. Who knows when they’ll decide to ban me permanently which, again, thank you for mentioning the Substack. Thanks to you guys and thanks to Tucker, I have almost 100,000 people signed up there so I can get the word out if Twitter does ban me. But, yes, you can ban me, but you can’t ban reality.

And the reality is the data coming out of Israel is terrible. The data coming out of U.S. states and the U.K. is increasingly bad. And so the Biden administration and Fauci and the public health quote-unquote “experts” are all demanding a booster shot — even though they have no idea what the long-term effects of a booster shot are going to be!

CLAY: Alex, where are we going from here? Right? I know you hate sometimes to predict. But I’m just saying, based on the data, Israel not looking good; Iceland also not looking good. You can look at a lot of countries that have had high levels of vaccination. Certainly, the Biden administration acknowledging that when they’re requiring people to get boosters eight months after their final shot. What does the fall and winter look like based on the data that you’re seeing right now?

ALEX: That’s a really good question, and I don’t think we have a really good answer right now. Vaccine immunity does not last, okay? I don’t think anybody can argue this point anymore. That means that vaccines — at least this first generation of vaccines — is not gonna end the pandemic, period. That means it’s not gonna end until everybody is infected.

I can only hope this piece marks a MUCH bigger change in @nytimes’s attitude toward the vaccines, the boosters, VAERS, and everything else – starting with the question of how regulators can approve boosters with NO clinical trial evidence. We will see. pic.twitter.com/Rqh4P0XQbI

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) August 19, 2021

Most — 99%-plus, 99.5%, 99.7%, whatever the percentage is, 99.8% of — people who get this are going to recover. The rest, then some tiny fraction of people will not recover. Once that happens, the pandemic should effectively be over, okay? But all we’ve done in the last several months by giving people these vaccines that sort of temporarily protect them is delay that process. Okay?

So the people who’ve been vaccinated now have a choice to make. They can get a booster and sort of start the clock again, with no guarantee it’s gonna last longer or even as long as their current protection did, or they can say, “You know what? I’m not gonna be vaccinated again, but ultimately that means that I don’t have protection and I’m gonna get sick with covid.” Okay?

I don’t know what percentage of people are gonna do either of those things. And, because in the United States — for reasons that are absolutely inexplicable — we’ve never done a proper survey to know how many people have already gotten covid and recovered, putting vaccines aside, we don’t know what the base level immunity is, okay? It looks actually…

The good news, the one bit of the good news that I want to emphasize people, it looks like natural immunity is really pretty good when it comes to the coronavirus, the novel the coronavirus. It looks like you’re really well protected, even from the variants, okay? Very few people who have natural immunity have gotten sick with the Delta variant. Very few.

So once you get this and you get through it, you seem to be on the other side of it. Now, look, a different variant could come along that our immune systems are less able to recognize, but it looks like natural immunity’s pretty good. But we don’t know how many people have that. So just to sort of look at a state like Oregon, a state like Hawaii. They’re states that have high vaccine rates, but they didn’t have a lot of cases early on.

Oregon didn’t have a lot of cases.

Hawaii locked down.

They’re having tons of cases right now.

So what I’m saying is, this is gonna go on probably through the fall and winter. I think I said this to you guys last week: You can expect that there will be a surge in cases in the Upper Midwest and then it’s gonna roll South. Why do I say that? And I don’t like making predictions, Buck, because the coronavirus makes fools of people who make predictions. But that happened last year. And guess what? The vaccines don’t really work. So that’s gonna happen again.

BUCK: Alex, Buck here, and thanks again for being with us. And we’ve been saying on the show this week, “Just look at the fact that they have a booster that’s now recommended, not just for…” They started with the immunocompromised folks —

ALEX: That’s right.

BUCK: — and then all the sudden it’s, “Well, actually everyone needs one.” There’s so much that I want to ask about this, but I start with a very basic question: How the heck can they know what a…? I’m somebody who sits here now and says that people have to get vaccines in New York, where I am, or else you’re executed from public life. That’s what they’ve done to you now.

Even if you have natural immunity, you still have to get the vaccine, and now you’re gonna get another vaccine on top of that? How can they honestly know what the safety profile is for a vaccine, when they just said…? Have they been doing widespread booster testing? Are we just…? Am I not aware of this?

ALEX: No. Okay. Great question. So I wrote a Substack about this a couple weeks ago. No. They’ve done next to no testing of the booster. Okay? There was some. They went to some of the people who were in the main clinical trial. This was months ago. They said to them, “We’d like to try a third and fourth dose.” That was a couple of thousand people. But those results are not out yet. They do not actually have that data published yet.

Instead, what they have are tiny trials — and I mean tiny — that are “open label,” meaning everybody knows that they got the booster. So that’s not how a real clinical trial or a good clinical trial is run, and all they’re doing is looking at antibody levels following the booster shot. Okay, that’s called a biomarker. That means what we hope is that if your antibody levels go up, we would like to think that what that means is you’re more protected.

But it doesn’t mean we know you’re more protected, and it doesn’t mean we know what the side effects are, and it doesn’t mean we know how long the protection is gonna last. You have to run real clinical trials to do that. They’ve done none of that. My impression — and I wrote this last night on something and also is in the Substack — that they just don’t want to admit how much they overpromised with the vaccines.

And they know… They can look at the data out of Israel too. They know that in a matter of weeks or a month at most there’s gonna be surges in blue states, okay, that Michigan is gonna have a surge, that Illinois is gonna have a surge, and they’re not gonna be able to blame it on unvaccinated people anymore. And in a desperate effort to push that off, they’re telling people to get boosters. This is a horrible way to run public health. It’s so wrong.

CLAY: Alex, I’m curious. When you look at the booster shot… I want to focus on that for a minute, and I’m curious what kind of research you’ve done into this. I can’t remember any adults getting a vaccine and then, after the full dosage of that vaccine, being told in less than a year, “Oh, by the way, you now have to get another booster within eight months, nine months.” Is there any precedent for a vaccine that works like this for adults? And I’m sure there are a lot of other people out there thinking this same thing that are wondering. Have you looked into what the precedent might be?

ALEX: The precedent is the flu vaccine, okay? The flu vaccine.

CLAY: Yeah.

ALEX: But the flu vaccine is for a different strain. Now, a strain is much bigger variation genetically than a variant. You keep hearing about the Delta “variant,” okay? But you hear the different flu “strains.” What that means, basically, the flu is much more likely to mutate and mutate kind of quickly than the coronavirus.

And so the flu changes a lot more year to year than the coronavirus does. So one flu strain is really not comparable to another. These variants are very have been very genetically close, these coronavirus variants. So the fact that the booster doesn’t seem to work very well against one versus another is not a good sign. But the flu shot is the only comparable thing. The other thing I’d like to point out, the flu shot is much, much less dangerous than the coronavirus shot, than the mRNA shots.

The flu shot technology has been around for 50 years. We basically know the side-effects are very mild in most people who get it. The coronavirus shots, their side-effect profile is off the charts compared to the flu shot! So you’re asking somebody to get the coronavirus shot versus the flu shot — there’s no comparison — every year. And, by the way, we’re not even talking about every year. They’re saying eight months. In reality, it looks like you really should get it four to six months after your second dose.

BUCK: Alex, we want to keep you ’cause we got more. (chuckles) This what happens. We’ve got more we gotta ask you about, including where this goes, what you think about vaccine passport future places like in New York know New York City, and also the mask wars playing out in schools right now, the Biden administration weighing in on that heavy. If you want to help, subscribe to Alex’s Substack. Just look up Alex Berenson on Substack, and that’s a place where he can reach everybody with the research that he’s doing that’s, once again, proven to be correct —

ALEX: (chuckles)

BUCK: — despite all the lunatic haters that I see on social media, Alex.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: We are talking with Alex Berenson, who has done, I think, the best job of anyone in the media of covering the data, the analysis, and the situation surrounding covid ever since this whole process began about 18 months ago. And we have a battle that’s continuing — Joe Biden keeps fighting it, Alex; we appreciate you making the time for us — but over masks in schools.

This seems to be the chosen battleground of Joe Biden and the advisors that he has in the White House. So I just want to ask you this. Obviously, I’m pretty fired up about this. I talked about it last week in my school’s own school board meeting. And I know you have kids as well, Alex.

ALEX: Yep.

CLAY: Is there any evidence at all that masks make kids safer in schools?

ALEX: No! No. They’re completely useless for kids. Kids are not likely to get the coronavirus. Well, they may get it, but they’re not likely to get sick from it. They’re not likely to transmit it to each other. They’re more likely to get it from adults. Beyond that, there’s no evidence that masks do any good to protect the wearer, and there’s next-to-no evidence they do any good to protect anyone else — and kids are kids!

They’re running around and playing with each other. They’re not wearing their masks properly anyway. It’s all a joke. It’s all theater. It’s all useless. And there’s a bigger issue here, okay, which is we spent the last segment talking about vaccines and all the evidence pointing out that vaccines really probably don’t work, maybe. I know there’s still people out there — smart people — who think that they may offer some protection from severe infections and death.

We’ll see if that’s true. They definitely don’t protect against infections and transmission. They definitely can’t stop the pandemic. Anybody who looks at the data can see that. What is the Biden administration doing? They are trying to cram mask mandates down the throats of health care workers at a time when hospital systems — all over, not just in the South, in states where there’s not very much covid right now — are under stress because we’ve worked these folks pretty hard for the last 18 months.

Certainly, some of them have worked pretty hard, and so instead of backing off and saying, “You know what? We’re not gonna tell you to resign if you won’t get vaccinated for this thing that you know better than anybody is not probably a big threat to you, you 30-year-old nurse.” We’re forcing these people into a bad choice, and some of them are gonna walk.

That’s gonna increase the pressure on our health care system. Same thing with the booster. There’s no evidence that the booster works, really, but we’re pushing it. I hate to put this… I hate to try to look at Joe Biden and say, “This guy seems to be in cognitive decline, and one of the things about cognitive decline is it makes your mind more rigid. You’re unable to adapt to new information because the world becomes a more and more frightening place as you decline.”

But look at Afghanistan, okay? He seems completely unable to make a course correction here despite the massive failure that everyone can see, and so whether it’s because he’s actually in decline or whether it’s ideological or whatever it is, I am not optimistic, and I want to be optimistic. But how can I be when I see these tremendously bad decisions being made in the face of clear evidence?

BUCK: Alex, it’s Buck again. I gotta say, the disappointment that I have in the medical community overall… I know there are doctors that reach out to you, and I’ve been in contact with doctors from the beginning of the pandemic, who will speak the truth, but they’ll say things like, “I don’t want to use my license. I don’t want to lose my hospital affiliation. I have patients who depend on me.

“If I get canceled, it’s not just I lose this job and I have to go somewhere else. It’s there are people that I’m treating that all the sudden are gonna think, ‘Have I been treated by a quack this whole time?'” There’s a lot of implications for them. All of that said, it feels like until nurses and doctors come out and say, “Forcing a booster…” It’s crazy enough to be forcing vaccines on people in New York and L.A. and San Fran and all these other cities.

But forcing boosters on people where you get a shot or you lose your job, and we don’t even know if it works and we don’t even know what the safety reality is? I mean, this is tyrannical-level crazy stuff. Do you think the medical community — not all of them, but enough of them — will finally say, “We can’t do this anymore”?

ALEX: — speak out against boosters because it’s just so obvious the evidence isn’t there. I don’t know. The problem is that the hospitals in the United States have consolidated to a great extent, and CMS has tremendous — that’s the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — has tremendous power over these hospitals because they are such a large part of their budgets.

And they are forcing this down the hospitals’ throats. Look, if you’re the executive of a large nonprofit hospital system in New York state or wherever, that’s a really good job. You make $5 million a year. Okay? You don’t want to get in the way of this train. Okay? So you’re not going to. But you have an audience. you have an audience. I have Substack and I’m free. Tucker has an audience but there are not enough of us who can speak the truth right now. And you’re right, doctors have to speak out. I don’t know what turns this around.

CLAY: It is such a difficult question to ask. We’ve got quick hit for you here, Alex. We’re going into the weekend. Do you have anything positive at all to say only 30 seconds here?

ALEX: I told you I think natural immunity is a real thing. I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s possible that in some of the southern states the surges have topped and they’re gonna start to go down. I think if enough nurses and doctors say, “You know what? Fire me, but you’re not gonna be able to run your ICU,” I think maybe the message will get pushed back up. I hope so.

BUCK: Go subscribe to Alex Berenson CMS with everybody. Alex, we always appreciate you, man. Thank you.

ALEX: Thanks, guys.

CLAY: That’s Alex Berenson.