BUCK: One thing that has been a recurring theme all along here of covid is you know how they always say, Clay, that “real communism has never been tried” —
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: — which is an excuse for every failure, every failure of communism. The old joke is that “real communism has never been tried.” Real masking, apparently, has never been tried. Real vaccination, if you look at it in terms of the unvaccinated and everything, has never been tried. This is always the way it goes. They want us to mask down, lock down harder. That’s the way this always goes. And that includes boosters. And we’ve got our friend Alex Berenson with us now to talk about that. You should go subscribe to his Substack, please, the Alex Berenson Substack. I’m a subscriber — full disclosure — and it’s because he’s kicked off of Twitter, which is complete madness, and Elizabeth Warren wanted to kick him off of Amazon. But, Alex, we will get to that. Thanks for being with us.
BERENSON: Thanks, Buck.
BUCK: Let’s start with the boosters. I’m kind of amazed at how the Biden narrative here seems to be, “Yeah, you know, we’re just FDA meeting right now, talking about the boosters. There’s a little back-and-forth, but don’t worry about it. We got this!” It seems like a pretty big deal to me, Alex. How much research and data can they really have about what a third shot is gonna be like in terms of efficacy and side effects?
BERENSON: So they have next to no data. And let’s talk about that, but before even we get to that, this is insane okay? Two of the chief FDA officials around vaccines are resigning, okay, later this fall. They both announced they’re leaving the FDA, and they both signed a major letter to The Lancet — which is arguably the best medical journal in the world — this week basically saying, “We don’t think boosters are a good idea,” okay?
And so imagine if Donald Trump had done this, okay? Imagine if Donald Trump had come out a month before a meeting and said, “You need a third shot. You need a third shot of my vaccine, the Trump vaccine — and, yeah, the FDA hasn’t said anything about it yet. But don’t you worry. They’re gonna say it’s fine.” Can you imagine what the media response, correctly, to that would be?
CLAY: All right, Alex, this is Clay. I appreciate you coming on with us. We were just talking about this. I think it was in July; you were in studio with us, and we were talking about the data from Israel and the data from England, high vaccination countries, and what it foretold for us. Given where we are now in mid- to late September, what are you seeing, and where are we headed, to the best of your knowledge?
BERENSON: So if you think that Israel and Britain are sort of a few weeks ahead of the U.S., which has been the case all along — and which the chief scientist at Pfizer said on a Zoom call about ten days ago, and he was taped saying it and didn’t deny saying it — what happens in Israel first happens in the U.S. later, then we’re in trouble.
We had a big spike in the summer, and now we’ve had sort of a bit of a… You know, things haven’t really gone down but they’ve stopped going up. But if you believe that vaccine efficacy is fading, then we’re gonna have a spike this fall. Because all the people who didn’t get sick last year who got vaccinated and got some temporary protection, that protection is gonna roll off just like it rolled off in Israel. And that’s why the Biden administration is panicking.
BUCK: Alex, I gotta throw this in because this is what right now… I was gonna say, you know what the blue checks on Twitter are like, but you may have started to forget considering that they ridiculously kicked you off of Twitter.
BERENSON: (laughing)
BUCK: But everyone should go to Alex Berenson’s Substack, subscribe to it, he’ll email you directly his research and his thoughts on all this. And, Alex, what I keep coming up against is this — and I just want you to make sense of people. We are told constantly — the drumbeat, the talking point among all talking points from the Biden team is — 99%, give or take, of the hospitalized and the people that are dying from covid are unvaccinated. What is the truth or lack thereafter in that statement?
BERENSON: Yeah, it’s a total lie, okay? It’s a total lie. The way they come up with that is they basically calculate it based on everybody who died from the day the first vaccine went into somebody’s arm in December, okay? So many of the people died long before vaccinations existed, essentially. Right now — and because the U.S. data is so politicized and so terrible — we don’t have a good number nationally.
But you can look, for example, in Vermont. Now, Vermont is the most vaccinated state in the country, and it’s also pretty rural, and it had relatively little covid infection in 2020 and March of 2021. Vermont just had more cases, more positive tests than it had ever had before, two days ago. Okay. And 20 people in Vermont — a relatively small state — 20 people in Vermont…
I think it was 23 have died of covid since the beginning of August. Ten of those people were vaccinated. So that’s almost 50% in Vermont. Okay? And there are other states where you can kind of pluck out the data bit by bit, but it’s sort of hard to do and you gotta find the right website and you gotta go back and do the math.
But where we have this data, it’s not 99%. It might be 50 to 70% of people are unvaccinated. And in Britain, where the data is real and it’s good, only 25% of people are unvaccinated who are dying of covid right now. And that is a real number. In Israel, it’s fewer than half.
CLAY: So let me cut that. So 75% of the people that are dying in England right now are vaccinated?
BERENSON: That’s right: 70% are fully vaccinated, 5% have had one dose, 25% are unvaccinated.
CLAY: So I want to go into this, Alex. This is what Buck and I have been talking about. Yesterday we had doctors calling in starting to talk about this. There is a thesis — and I think you have hinted at this before. Again, hypothesis, I probably should say, because the data tells us a story, and part of the job of science is to look at the data and come up with hypotheses for why that data is appearing as it is.
There is a thesis among some doctors that what is going on here is the vaccinated are the ones who are spreading the virus at a high level. And I feel almost like a crazy man even sharing this, ’cause it’s in such direct contravention to what we are being told by the Biden White House. But there is a thesis out there, and I want you to explain it to people and say whether you think there’s any legitimacy to this thesis that some doctors are sharing.
BERENSON: Sure.
CLAY: And the thesis would be this: The vaccination gives such a high rate of the virus that people who are vaccinated are shedding that, and many other people are getting covid from the vaccinated. In other words, it isn’t the unvaccinated that are spreading it to the vaccinated; it’s the exact opposite.
BERENSON: So that’s actually not the thesis.
CLAY: Okay. I messed it up?
BERENSON: Yeah, and that’s the thing. If you mess it up like that, then people who are the blue checks and the vaccine fanatics will jump on you and say, “You’re crazy! There’s no such thing as vaccine shedding! You’re an idiot!” This is why you have to be careful about it. Here’s the real thesis.
CLAY: Okay.
BERENSON: The real thesis is that for some people, especially healthy people, the vaccine confers partial protection, okay? So if you’re pretty young and healthy and you get vaccinated and you get infected, you can be walking around with really high levels of virus in your blood — post-infection, okay, separate from the vaccine — and the vaccine is protecting you enough that you don’t have symptoms.
So you become a superspreader who’s capable of spreading this virus both to people who are vaccinated and are unvaccinated because what’s called your CT threshold which is a… It doesn’t matter what it is, but your CT threshold is low, and a low CT threshold means you have a really high viral load in your blood. So I get the vaccine; I’m 30 years old and healthy.
I get really high levels of antibodies. For some reason, I have a breakthrough infection. I then, for whatever reason, have a lot of… The vaccine actually takes… I’m sorry. The virus actually takes off in my blood, in my body, I wind up with a lot of virus, a heavy viral load. But I don’t have symptoms, and I spread that rapidly. This is not some crazy conspiracy theory. There’s very good evidence that this is happening.
And one bit of evidence came out about a month ago. There’s a paper out of Wisconsin, and they compared viral loads in people who were vaccinated and people who weren’t, and they found just as high viral loads in people who were not vaccinated as people who were.
BUCK: Alex, there was this number that came out — and everyone should check out Alex’s Substack. You have to subscribe to it, sign up for it. Go to Substack and type in “Alex Berenson.” The Biden administration… The president actually himself said one in 5,000 cases are breakthrough cases.
BERENSON: Per day!
BUCK: Put a comma behind that for a second because —
BERENSON Per day! Per day!
BUCK: (laughing) Hold on. One in 5,000 on breakthrough cases. Meanwhile, I spoke to Ron DeSantis’ office this morning just to check on the numbers in the state of Florida. They’re saying that at their main monoclonal antibody sites, over 50% — granted, it’s like 52 to 55% — of people are fully vaxxed, desperate for monoclonal antibodies. So what gives?
BERENSON: I can’t… This makes me crazy! You heard me just yelling. I can’t stand this, okay? This number is just nonsense. Somebody I didn’t know who used to — I guess I still — respect at the New York Times said your chances of having a breakthrough infection are one in 5,000. Okay? One in 5,000 per day! That’s not how we calculate risk about anything. Okay?
You calculate it on a reasonable time period, like a year. One in 5,000 per day means a 7% chance of being infected over the course of a year, if you’re vaccinated. That’s what he said. But the Biden administration loved this because it sounds so little. They said one in 5,000 per day — or they didn’t say one in 5,000 per day. They said one in 5,000, and then they said hospitalizations were one in 160,000 per day.
These people are lying and spinning like crazy — and it’s bad, okay, Buck? It is really — and Clay, it is really that they’re doing this because the biology doesn’t change how much you spin it okay? And people are getting sick and dying. Some of those people are vaccinated. Some of those people are not vaccinated. And the effort to try to turn the vaccinated against the unvaccinated and cause the vaccinated to blame the unvaccinated for this is crazy. Okay?
The problem is not vaccine hesitancy. The problem is the vaccines don’t work very well. There aren’t that many hard-core anti-vaxxers in the United States. If you look at the data about children and vaccines, more than 90% of children under two get their vaccines essentially on schedule. Okay? That’s kids. People are willing to give even their children vaccines that work. The reason there’s hesitancy is ’cause these vaccines don’t work, or at least don’t work very well.
CLAY: Yeah, and I want to go to that. If the Biden administration got their absolute dream scenario and we had a 100% covid vaccination rate at least among adults or 12-plus or whatever you want to say, would that actually change very much in terms of the covid infection rate across this country, Alex?
BERENSON: No! Because that’s what they have in Israel and the U.K., and Israel had more covid infections three days ago than they’d had in the history of covid okay? They are at where we’re supposed to be, and it’s not doing them any good. The vaccines works for a couple months at most, and that’s why you’re seeing the booster push. But here’s where I thought you guys were going before.
The issue around boosters is, there’s a real risk — and I’m not saying this is happening. We don’t have evidence that this is happening right now. But we have evidence that it’s a risk that the vaccine can cause the virus to mutate in a way that makes the vaccine less effective. And the worst version of that scenario is something called antibody dependent enhancement where the vaccine causes the virus to mutate not just in a way that makes it less effective, but it then actually uses the antibodies the vaccine has created to attack your cells more efficiently.
CLAY: So it basically puts the virus, the vaccine does, in that theory, on steroids and is creating the variants to make it more virulent?
BERENSON: That’s basically correct. Okay? And if that happens and we are boosting people’s antibodies, we are gonna regret it.
BUCK: Alex Berenson, everybody. Go subscribe to his Substack. Alex, always appreciate it, man. Thanks for the work you do.
BERENSON: Thanks, guys. I’m sorry if I get excited.
BUCK: No.
CLAY: (laughing) That’s why we need you.
BUCK: We’ll have you back on soon. Thank you.
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