Alex Berenson Shares Unreported Truths About Covid

,BUCK: We have our friend Alex Berenson with us now. You all know him as author of Unreported Truths About Covid-19, a series you can get online. Also, to his Substack. Please subscribe, because if he gets kicked off of Twitter, you’re not gonna know how to find his stuff. Alex, great to have you back.

ALEX: Thank you for that. Yeah. Last week I was on. Fortunately, Twitter unlocked my account and I’ve managed to stay afloat this week. And, you know, I’d like to say I haven’t censored myself at all, but that is not entirely true, and I’m still exploring what I’m gonna do. But, yes, please get on the Substack. A lot of people still haven’t heard what that is.

But it is a newsletter platform, and it is uncensored — at least for now — and it’s really good. My Substack is just my name. It’s called Unreported Truths but if you put my name in, “Alex Berenson,” you can find it. So, I’m sorry. I apologize for promoting it so aggressively, but I do worry that Twitter is gonna cancel me. I only have one strike left.

BUCK: So, tell us all right now. What’s going on, man? We have all this pressure on Florida and Texas in particular, people are saying, “Record cases, hospitals overwhelmed, ventilators being sent to DeSantis,” all this stuff. What’s true; what’s not? What’s happening with the vaccines?

ALEX: Okay. So there’s a whole bunch of stuff happening. A, Florida and Texas have a lot of cases right now. They had a lot of cases last year at this time. This virus has tended to move seasonally. That’s been a very strong seasonal and geographic pattern. And all the people who are telling you, “Vaccines are saving the Northeast and the Upper Midwest,” give it a month, okay? It’s gonna migrate. Just like I think I said this to you last week.

I don’t love making categorical predictions, but I’m gonna make this one. Okay? At this time in October the upper Midwest will have a surge of cases. It’s absolutely gonna happen. It happened last year. The vaccines are not gonna prevent it. They’ve prevented nothing in Israel, and they’ve prevented nothing or very little in the U.K. and they’re gonna prevent nothing in the upper Midwest.

CLAY: I want to ask you, Alex — thanks for coming on with us — about Israel. I saw you just tweet out — and I may mess these numbers up a little bit ’cause I jotted them down as I was doing the radio show, but — 451 seriously ill with covid hospitalizations going on right now in Israel; 266 of those 451 people have been fully vaccinated. That means roughly 60% of the people that are hospitalized right now with serious covid issues Israel are fully vaccinated. And, by the way, last year before the vaccines even existed there were fewer people hospitalized in Israel. What’s happened?

ALEX: So, it just occurs to me one thing. There were not fewer. There were slightly more.

CLAY: Okay.

ALEX: If the trends continue, within a few more days there will be more vaccinated people hospitalized in Israel in 2021 in August than there were total people hospitalized in Israel in August 2020 — if the current trends continue and I do think they will continue. Certainly, the Israelis are very, very concerned that they’ll continue. And they’re talking about a variety of lockdown and mask measures that they’d eliminated because covid was supposed to go away once you got really high vaccination rates.

CLAY: Yes.

ALEX: What is going on is that the vaccines are failing. Okay, I’m not allowed to say it that way openly on Twitter anymore, but I can say it to your audience; I can say it to you. The vaccines are failing. There’s two possible reasons they’re failing. One is time, that you get this burst of antibodies after the second dose when you’re, quote-unquote, “fully vaccinated.” Those antibodies don’t last.

They don’t last that long if you get covid naturally, either. But what happens if you get covid naturally is you have a broader immune response. Your T-cells and your B-cells — which are immune system cells that are responsible for long-term immunity. They’re the reason why you don’t get measles decades after your measles vaccination.

Not because you’ve got antibodies to measles circulating. It’s because your T and B cells know how to recognize measles. The vaccines do not seem to produce a good response, at least in one very important form of T-cell. So when your antibodies go away, your protection seems to go away. So, that’s one potential problem. The second potential problem is that the virus is mutating, right?

So, there’s a Delta variant. The Delta variant is a real thing, and, unfortunately, it appears that natural immunity provides broader protection against mutated variants than the vaccine immunity. Now, the worst-case scenario, which I have barely talked about because there’s not strong evidence for it right now and I don’t want to freak people out, but a paper came out on Monday in a British journal — and it’s a real British journal — suggesting that this is at least a theoretical possibility is something called antibody-dependent enhancement.

What that means is that the antibodies that you produce after being vaccinated, if the virus mutates in a specific way, might wind up actually not blocking the variant from entering your cells but helping the variant to enter your cells.

That is a very dangerous thing if it happened. Now, I want to be clear. This is not… We don’t know this is happening. Everybody who’s looked at the data for months said this is not a high risk. But this new paper and on-the-ground data in Israel I think are concerning enough that people should at least know about this.

CLAY: Alex, I got a good friend who asked me this question and I think it’s a fantastic one. Why are Israel and England not looking the exact same right now? But we understand it’s opened up. They also have a high vaccination rate. Is it because they have more natural immunity in England? How would you explain the difference between the Israeli story right now and the English story, and is there any particular reason why you think America is gonna be more like England or more like Israel?

ALEX: That is a great question. I fear that the answer is we will be more like Israel. Now, there’s a couple things. First of all, the data out of Israel is the best. The data out of England is a little bit confusing ’cause they have a bit of a “test-demic” going on. They have had it over the summer, meaning there’s a lot of cases that are asymptomatic and they have these tests called lateral-flow tests which were very cheap and self-reported and there were reasons, actually, to believe that…

For example, an 18-year-old who didn’t want to go to school would just self-report a positive test in June. So some of that was happening. Okay. So the Israeli data is probably the best data. But more importantly than that is Israel used only an mRNA vaccine. They used only the Pfizer vaccine, and they used it on the correct — quote-unquote, “correct schedule.” So you got your first dose and then get your second dose three weeks later.

England, the U.K., used both the Pfizer vaccine and an AstraZeneca vaccine, which was supposed to be actually less potent but maybe (sigh) isn’t less potent. We don’t know, okay? And they used that Pfizer vaccine on a weird dosing schedule. They were a little bit short on doses in the spring so they were giving people one dose and then a second dose eight to 12 weeks later. And so even though that wasn’t, quote-unquote, “the correct regimen” (chuckles) there’s now a little bit of evidence that it might actually work better which is something else we did not know because we had rushed this so much.

BUCK: Alex, what do you expect is going to happen here as the data rolls in in this country over the next let’s say 30 to 60 days? We’re led to believe that all we have to do is get those vaccination numbers up and everything will be better and anybody who’s not going along with that — this is what all the mandates rebuke rooted in — is a troglodyte who is a horrible person who is ruining America, is the reason people are still sick, all this stuff, but they’re already talking about boosters already, Fauci, not like some crazy blogger somewhere. So, what do you think is gonna happen?

ALEX: By the way, it’s not just boosters. It’s not just boosters for older compromised folks. Fauci said yesterday everyone was supposed to get boosters.

BUCK: Yeah.

ALEX: So, listen, I really sort of got lost there in the weeds about Israel and the U.K., but the one-sentence answer is I think the U.S. is gonna be more like Israel. Okay, we only used mRNA vaccines and we used them on the correct schedule, and I think anybody who doesn’t believe that what… In Israel in June, you could start to see this late June, early July.

I was warning about it, people were telling me I was an idiot. Cases were still so low; there were no deaths. I had no idea what I was talking about. That is all out the window, okay? It’s all out the window. Israel is headed for a bad month, okay — at best, a bad month — and I don’t understand anybody who thinks that’s not gonna happen in the U.S. And let me be totally clear: Israeli vaccine levels were basically the highest in the world. They were the highest in the world, higher than the U.S.

BUCK: So, when the Biden administration says, Alex, this is important — ’cause I keep seeing these lab coat pundits going on TV now saying 99% of the people in our hospital, they’re all unvaxxed. We keep hearing this all the time.

ALEX: It’s a lie. It’s a lie. It’s a lie. It’s a lie. I’m gonna say it straight out. It’s a lie. The data… Again, we have a couple states that provide decent data. They show that, for example, in Oklahoma about a quarter of the people in Oklahoma who were hospitalized in July (chuckles) were vaccinated, okay? Those numbers are going to go up.

There’s no reason they wouldn’t go up. The human biology is the same in Israel as in the United States. The vaccines are gonna fail in the United States just like they’re failing in Israel, okay? It’s only a question of how bad they’re gonna fail. And when I came on with you guys last week, it looked bad. This week it looks worse.

CLAY: Can you come back with us for one more segment here, Alex —

ALEX: (laughing) I told your…

CLAY: — to answer a couple more questions?

ALEX: (laughing) I told your producer you guys were gonna ask m that. (laughing) Yes, of course I can.

CLAY: I just want to ask a couple more questions, ’cause what you’re telling us is something that I think is significant as we kind of work our way through it, which is that we are headed for a real mess and that getting more people vaccinated is not going to solve it, which is the act opposite of what the mainstream media is telling everybody, right?

ALEX: Yeah, that’s what we’re all hearing.

BUCK: There’s so much that doesn’t add up right now. We are gonna keep Alex through the break for another one.

ALEX: (laughing)

BUCK: If you appreciate what he’s doing here, folks, go subscribe to his Substack. I’m a big believer in actually supporting contact creators, researchers, thought leaders directly these days as much as you can, ’cause God knows when Big Tech is gonna decide to crush them.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: We’re talking with Alex Berenson. I want to dive right back into it. You’re basically the Grim Reaper here, Alex. I want to ask one question to allow you to say something positive. Did you enjoy at the same time, the Field of Dreams game in the Iowa cornfield yesterday on Fox?

ALEX: It was fantastic, wasn’t it?

CLAY: Yeah. All right. I just want to make sure. I wanted to be able to say something positive.

BUCK: Now I’m gonna take us back into the world of “Alex is making us all pretty scared about what’s gonna happen but we might as well know the truth now.” And, Alex, to that end, where are we with hospitalization shortage right now? There’s a report that I’m just seeing from some guy who’s a blue check out of Tennessee, so here’s one of these journos.

He says, “Breaking from Tennessee! There are no beds in middle Tennessee right now, impossible to find a staffed ICU, ER, or medical surgery bed, according to chief medical officer for Sumner Regional Medical Center.” We’ve heard about this also in Austin, Texas. We’ve heard about this in Florida. What’s true? Are they overwhelmed? How could they be overwhelmed when there’s a third of the case rate nationally?

ALEX: Well, it is regional, okay? So look, we saw last summer Houston, Texas — Houston’s a giant metro area, right? There’s eight million people in southeast Texas. It came under pressure. Parts of Florida came under pressure last year. Pressure does not mean that if you get in a car accident there’s gonna be no ICU bed for you. Okay? The hysteria overwhelms or overruns what’s really happening.

It doesn’t mean that the hospitals aren’t full and doesn’t mean that nurses and doctors and medical staff aren’t working very hard, and that sometimes you’re gonna be wanting to try to bring in some extra swing shifts and stuff. That’s not the same thing as the medical — as hospital collapse. Okay. And I will also say that it is clear after 18 months of this that these stories are typically written just at the peak.

BUCK: Right.

ALEX: Okay. So they have been a very reliable sign that cases are gonna start to decline, and look, if cases don’t start… If positive tests and hospitalization rates don’t start to decline in Florida and Texas pretty soon, I would be surprised. Again, this epidemic has made fools out of anybody who’s made predictions for the last 18 months. But I would be surprised, and I would be worried about that here.

Here. Let me give you one data point, okay? You can look by state, see which states have the highest vaccination rates, okay? Outside of the Northeast the three states with the highest vaccination rates are Washington, New Mexico, and Oregon. I would urge everyone listening to this to go type in “Oregon covid” to Google and see what’s happened to covid case rates there in the last two weeks. Okay. They are off the charts. The vaccines, it doesn’t matter whether you’re 50% or 60% or 70%. You are not gonna make a meaningful difference, because the Israelis and the British (chuckles) got to 70%.

BUCK: So, New York City’s gonna get hit hard, for example, because here in New York we think we’re the vaccine superstars but you’re telling me —

ALEX: New York may not get hit as hard because New York has a lot of natural immunity.

BUCK: Ahhh. All right.

ALEX: The reason Oregon’s getting crushed right now is that Washington and Oregon state and Northern California were the places that somehow, they’ve been the covid miracle. They’d avoided getting hit really as hard as anywhere else the United States. Guess what? It’s all gonna revert to the mean. Okay. It’s gonna happen. And, you know, again, I typically be wary of making predictions; but I think the data out of Israel and the U.K. (chuckles) is so powerful right now, not to make predictions off it is a form of cowardice.

CLAY: Alex, what about kids? You may have seen me go talk to Tuesday about masks and kids. Are kids under a massively increased risk from the Delta variant based on the data that you’re seeing?

ALEX: No. No. That’s another lie. Are they at risk of getting it more because it does seem to be somewhat more contagious? Yes. Are they at risk of severe outcomes from it? No. There’s no evidence of that. And really if you go to the smart people on Twitter, they’re pointing out right now that the U.S. is in this hysteria about schools and nowhere else in the world is having that.

Even countries that are having bad surges are well aware that kids are not at high risk or even medium risk or even low risk from getting really sick from covid. I mean, obviously can always happen but if I have one piece of good news for people, Delta is not any more of a threat to your kids than earlier — than the original, wild-type variant, and this was a very, very, very low risk for kids.

CLAY: Alex, man, you need to get on weekly.

BUCK: The Alex Berenson segment!

CLAY: But, yeah. I really, really appreciate it. I really appreciate the time you’re spending with us, man. We’ll unpack everything that Alex said when we come back and continue to discuss all these stories and more.