CLAY: We’re joined now by our buddy Alex Berenson for the latest on the covid shot data. And, Alex, yesterday on your Substack very alarming data that is coming out, we’ve moved from I think everybody basically acknowledges, generally speaking, that the covid shot does not do anywhere near what it was promised to do and at best has some small prophylactic value for a relatively short period of time, three or four months after a shot is given. Now it’s moving from “It doesn’t do very much,” the story, Alex, to “There may be actual harm done by these shots.” What can you tell us about the latest data? Is that an accurate trajectory of how you would assess the narrative surrounding these shots?

BERENSON: Well, I mean, I would say that the people who defended them would still insist that they reduced severe disease and death. I mean, that’s the claim that, “No, they don’t stop infection. No, they don’t stop transmission. Yeah. You might even be at somewhat higher risk of being infected if you’ve gotten a bunch of boosters in the in the Omicron era, but they do stop severe disease and death.” And you know, to make that case, they rely on a bunch of data that I could go through and explain why it’s problematic but that would take the whole segment.

My new Stack, on a paper from Chinese researchers who found that more than four Covid vaccine shots produced near-complete immune collapse in mice:https://t.co/drfoF2ikA6

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) January 19, 2023

So instead, let me talk about why I’m more concerned right now. You know, and I think I’ve been talking to you now for almost two years. You hear when I think things are getting better, you hear when I think things are getting worse. I certainly, a few months ago thought, I really thought we were probably coming out of this. And now I’m much more concerned than I was. And the reason is it’s twofold. It’s when you look at some of the all-cause mortality. In other words, the one number that truly can’t be (unintelligible) is how many people are dying, right?

If you’re in the United States or you’re in Europe, you’re really almost anywhere in the world with a functioning government, they count births and they count deaths. Okay. And those numbers, you know, some places report them more quickly than others. The U.S. actually doesn’t do that good job of reporting quickly. But in places that for most of last year, in places that used the advanced vaccines, especially the mRNA vaccines, which are the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, excess deaths have been running hot, non-covid mostly.

And that’s not what anybody expected when this whole thing began. They thought, “Hey, there’s going to be a bunch of old sick people who die from covid. And then for a couple of years, we’re probably going actually pretty low deaths because the people who die from covid were very sick and likely to die in the next six months to two years anyway.” And that’s not what’s happened. We’ve had a lot of extra deaths.

And in the last couple of weeks, actually, the numbers have gone way up again to the point in Europe where they’re as bad as they were really at any time in the covid era. And remember, when Italy… when a few countries in Europe had bad excess deaths in March 2020, we shut the world down. It was a really big deal. And now this is just sort of happening and basically the media is ignoring it. Okay. But the numbers are real. You can find them yourself if you know where to look. They’re publicly reported and they’re bad. And no one has a good explanation for that.

BUCK: Well, Alex, that’s the next thing I wanted to ask you, is do you have a theory or a set of theories as to what is going on that’s producing this very obviously troubling data?

BERENSON: Yes. So, Okay. I mean, so you can say, “Well, this is delayed medical care,” but that doesn’t make any sense at this point. You know, we’re sort of two years out from the lockdown. Why now? Why would this be happening now? Or you can say, “Well, this is long covid”, except when you actually try to find a mechanism that makes any sense for long covid, you can’t find one. And there’s data showing, for example, that when you have mild covid — a very big study that came out a few weeks ago out of Israel — they looked at a lot of people who had mild covid and compared them to a lot of people who didn’t.

Between the IgG4 papers, the Chinese study and this @NEJM letter, it is now clear that in the XBB world, chasing antibody increases with boosters at the risk of messing up T-cell immunity – the ONLY immunity vaxxed people have left – is a huge mistake.

A possibly lethal mistake. pic.twitter.com/mxC6nsuxTg

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) January 19, 2023

And guess what? In the next year, the people had covid, but not a severe case. And the people who didn’t have covid had basically exactly the same number of hospitalizations over the next 12 months. Okay. So, long covid, I mean, does not really make sense to me as an explanation. So, what do we know? We know that we vaccinated an enormous number of people with these vaccines, but we didn’t have long-term safety data on. And now we get to the second part of this, why this is concerning.

We are now finding out that these vaccines seem to cause immune system changes that were not predicted, that we didn’t expect. And there’s two very good papers, both of which came out of Germany in the last month showing that after you get the mRNAs, your immune system essentially stops really trying to fight part of the coronavirus. Okay, I’m simplifying and exaggerating, but you make antibodies to the coronavirus and over time you start to make more and more of a kind of antibody that isn’t very good at fighting the coronavirus. And the theory is, although I don’t know why yet for sure, the theory is because the vaccines are so good at getting your immune system revved up early on, it eventually has to downregulate.

It’s like if you flood the engine, eventually you’re going to burn it out. And so, you have to lay off. And that seems to be a problem that was not anticipated, at least not by the companies. And then there’s this paper, and this is why, you know, this is why you guys asked me on today. A paper that came out of China just a few weeks ago, showing that when people had — not people — when they gave mice repeated injections of a version of a covid vaccine after the fourth shot, in the fifth and sixth shots, essentially their immune systems collapsed against covid.

Now, people are going to say, “It’s mice.” It’s true. They’re going to say “This is not the covid vaccine we get in the United States. It’s not the mRNA.” That’s true. They’re going to say “It’s the fifth shot and the sixth shot.” That’s true. So, I’m not saying that this proves that this is happening in the United States. What I’m saying is, against this backdrop of this big problem with excess mortality and the fact that covid hasn’t gone away, we’re getting more and more evidence that these vaccines on a cellular level are doing stuff that we didn’t expect and that we probably don’t want.

CLAY: How scared would you be if you’d gotten five or six covid shots?

The TL:DR highlight from the Chinese paper:

Our findings demonstrate potential risks with the continuous use of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine boosters, providing immediate implications for the global COVID-19 vaccination enhancement strategies.https://t.co/A4QmfoJIHD

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) January 19, 2023

BERENSON: I mean, if I’d gotten five or six, I’d be nervous at this point. I don’t think that’s a good idea. I think the booster campaign should essentially be halted at this point because and here’s the thing, there’s no upside, okay? At best, you’re getting some extra antibodies that last a matter of weeks and don’t work very well against Omicron. So, why are we doing this to ourselves? The core that we don’t want to have happen is we know the antibodies switch is happening. Okay? We know this.

And we know also that the antibodies that the vaccines produce don’t work that well against Omicron. You still have T cells, okay? You still have this back line of defense that if your cells get infected, the T cells go and attack those cells and prevent the virus from, you know, replicating out of control. Okay? You have to have T cells, right? And what we don’t want to do is follow a course of action that causes those to burn out. And that should be where the focus of the, you know, public health and the vaccine companies. We should be talking about this openly and figuring out if that’s a risk right now. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Alex Berenson. You can all subscribe to his Substack. Alex, is there any historical precedent for this kind of taking a shot again and again and again to create an immune system boost like this that has ended up working out very well with a high level of efficacy? I mean, is this totally uncharted territory?

BERENSON: Totally uncharted. I mean, you can compare it to the flu vaccine, and that’s not really a great comparison for the people who want to do this, right? People have been pressed to get the flu vaccine aggressively for the last 20 years. We give out a lot more flu shots than we used to. I shouldn’t even call it vaccine. Really? They don’t even call it the vaccine. It doesn’t work very well. And the number of flu deaths in the last 30 or 40 years has actually increased dramatically.

So, the flu vaccine doesn’t work very well, okay? But at least we know how the flu vaccine works, okay? It’s a pretty straightforward vaccine. The covid vaccine we’re now learning doesn’t work very well either, except it has all these other issues that we didn’t anticipate. And it works in a completely different way than the flu vaccine. So, no, there is no precedent for what we’ve done in the last two years.

Quick Stack on healthy vaccine user bias – or why no one should trust the health bureaucrat and media pronouncements on how well the mRNAs work…https://t.co/VxTIeeXse8

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) January 17, 2023

CLAY: Alex, what’s scary about this is the, I would say, risk profile of the covid shots continue to get worse and the risk/reward obviously continues to get worse. How much worse can it get? And there’s a tie-in with that. Is there good data on all-cause mortality from countries that did not give a lot of covid shots? Those tend, I would imagine, to be more Third World countries and a generality and maybe their data is not as reliable, but in, let’s say, poor African countries, does there seem to be also a higher rate of death in those countries like we would see in England or Israel or the United States?

BERENSON: Great, great question. And I’ve been trying to find that data and I have not been able to find it for exactly the reason you say. These are… They’re poor countries and they report this stuff slow when they report it at all. China would actually be a really good place to look because China, you know, has a pretty modern economy anyway, and it probably collects. But as we know, we can’t really trust the Chinese data on a national level that much. So, there is some, I will say Eastern Europe, there are some countries that are reporting relatively low deaths in the last, you know, the last nine months or so, a country like Bulgaria.

So, those countries had bad covid waves, worse than Western Europe. To be frank with you, they didn’t use a lot of the mRNA vaccines, but since last spring, they’ve had lower than expected deaths. Whereas Western Europe, which did use mRNAs mostly, has had higher than expected death. So, that’s the one place I can point to and say, this is sort of what I would expect to see if it’s the vaccines that are causing the problem. But if you’re asking me on a worldwide basis, I’ve been trying to find that data and I have not been able to find it yet.

BUCK: Alex, when you see people sharing stories, new stories about young athletic individuals, some professional athletes, some are high school athletes, whatever the case may be, and heart trouble, how much of this do you think is in any way tied to the vaccine based on the data right now versus, now everyone, every time they see somebody who’s younger, who is an athlete and has any heart issue, there’s a jump to conclusion that happens.

BERENSON: I think it’s a lot of the latter. I mean, I think we just don’t know in any individual case. I mean, you can look, there are certain cases very, very rare. And I don’t think, you know, we’re not talking about Damar Hamlin here. We’re talking about, you know, a handful of cases where people have gotten vaccinated. They’ve gone to the E.R. with myocarditis, they’ve died, autopsies have been done and they’ve showed that that myocarditis was conclusively linked to the vaccine. But based on sort of like the profile of the inflammatory response and other things. But that is not what’s happening in the big cases. And, look, I’ve been criticized.

I know you have too, for occasionally pointing these cases out and saying “What happened here?” But what I think is happening, the bigger question is… Look, I can find you a story from the last couple of days showing that hospitals in England have been overrun. Okay. I can point you to government data released this morning from Scotland that Scotland had more deaths last week than I think in the last 20 years. You have to go back to 2000 to find when they had more than 2000 deaths in a week, okay? So, people are aware broadly that the vaccines didn’t work as promised and they’re starting to be aware that there’s something going on with excess deaths. And it is the refusal of government health authorities to deal with this in an honest way that’s causing the conspiracy theories.

CLAY: All right. Last question for you, Alex. Let’s pretend President Ron DeSantis was in office right now and he was willing to look at this data as he has been in Florida. What should the government do? Let’s pretend Joe Biden suddenly got Jesus and brought you in and said, “Hey, you’re right. Covid is a disaster, these shots.” What should the government do in an ideal world, right now?

BERENSON: Right now, we’ve got to find out the impact of this IgG4 class switch, this antibody class switch. We need to figure out, you know, who this is happening to the most and sort of try to look prospectively at whether or not they’re getting sicker. We need to look at the various causes of all-cause mortality. You know, what’s driving the extra mortality in the U.S. and elsewhere and try to find out, you know, are people who got four shots more likely to be in this group? There’s a lot of really complicated epidemiology and there’s complicated basic cellular work that needs to happen. But we can get some answers to this. And in the meantime, what I would say is, you know, if Ron DeSantis were in charge, I bet you would be suspending the booster campaign and that would be a good thing right now. Because, again, you know what Buck said, there’s no good, there’s no reward here. There’s only risk to doing this at this point.

CLAY: Thank you, Alex. We’re going to keep updated. Tell people to check out the Substack, as always. And we appreciate your time.

BERENSON: Thanks for having me, guys.

CLAY: It’s Alex Berenson and that is alarming.