FAUCI: Well, families should plan on enjoying things in the family setting without a doubt, particularly among vaccinated individuals. If you’re vaccinated and members of your family and you are within your household with people you know, you want to try as best as you can with people who are not vaccinated not to mix with people who you don’t know what their status is. But for the family core being together enjoying Thanksgiving, enjoying Christmas? Of course you can do that. One thing you can say: The more people that get vaccinated, the more people that can safely do that.

BUCK: Welcome back to the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show. So Fauci is like (impression), “I don’t even know what you’re talking about!”

CLAY: It’s amazing how fast —

BUCK: “You can go totally normal — and by normal Christmas. Make sure you check the vaccination status of household members and your family members gather together, only in a tight group. No cousins! Certainly, when you look at the caseload, no second cousins.”

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: “No Uncle and Aunt Marty coming over for holiday dinner because otherwise they’ll be lonely.” No, in fact, you must, Clay, allow only the immediate family unit. “Stepchildren? I dunno. Are they vaccinated? Show me the vaccine card!” This is what America has devolved into. We have to listen to this clown walk back, but as he’s walking back, he still can’t help but be annoying and not fully walk it back!

CLAY: I take it as a positive sign, Buck, that somebody in the White House… I’m picturing them running down the hallway screaming when they saw that interview on CBS, because Biden… We were looking. You shared some polling data this morning of the issues that Biden and the Democratic Party are facing right now.

One of the biggest issues is Biden is now underwater on covid. For people out there not familiar maybe with the use of the term “underwater,” it means in a lot of these polls more people now say Joe Biden is doing a poor job on covid than support him on covid. I think that’s because even though the media’s not covering it in the same way, I saw this stat come out, and it even kind of stunned me, Buck.

I shared it with you during one of the breaks. Joe Biden ran his entire campaign from his basement on the fact that he would solve covid, right? That was his thing. “Trump is blowing it! Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing. I’m gonna listen to the science.” Joe Biden said, “I will end covid.” This is crazy. I was actually surprised by this. More Americans have died from covid in 2021 than died in 2020.

So all those people who said, “Oh, Trump is a disaster with covid; he’s been the worst leader of all time,” and they really basically — the entire presidential campaign — ran on the idea that Trump was trying to kill your grandma; Biden would solve it. That’s kind of a staggering statistic to me. Is it staggering to you as well that more people in 2021, so far — we’re obviously not finished with the year yet — have died from covid than in 2020?

BUCK: Well, I think yes. Well, it goes to what we know. If you look at the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918, there was an initial wave that was pretty bad but not that bad. There was a second wave that was just —

CLAY: Devastating.

BUCK: — horror movie, devastating, killing people in a matter of hours. There was a second wave that was the stuff of nightmares.

CLAY: Of all ages.

BUCK: Well, particularly, actually, the young and healthy.

CLAY: Yes. That’s why people were so terrified.

BUCK: For whatever reason, there was a very high mortality rate amongst people 20 to 40. And then the third wave was I believe also bad but a substantial dropdown from what it had been before. You know, we are gonna be able to do a kind of macrolevel analysis eventually — eventually, I think — when the politics are never be fully removed.

As we know, history is still very political to this day in all respects. But there will be a time I think we look back, and that phrase “virus is gonna virus” resonates much more in people’s minds. We did all this stuff; you have to ask yourself, “How is it possible that with a mass vaccination campaign…?” I guess they would say, “Oh, we had a whole winter cycle.”

Okay, but about half of that winter cycle occurred when Trump was still president. In fact, a little more than half of that winter cycle occurred when Trump was still president. Now you’re looking at this year, and you’re saying more people died from covid. I guess, Clay, they will just blame this on the Delta variant being so much more easily transmissible.

But at the end of the day, they also had a vaccine. They also had a huge amount of additional knowledge about it. We had a million ventilators that we needed — that we didn’t actually need — back in March of 2020, right? So when you look at all the factors, how can anyone say that Joe Biden has done a good job managing the pandemic as the commander-in-chief and chief executive the United States government? How can anyone really believe that?

CLAY: It’s impossible to make that argument. And, by the way, we’re in early October. So for people out there who say, “Well, Trump was president until January 20th” or whatever the day was; I think it was January 20th, “then he’s responsible,” however you want to say, right? Somebody will say, “Well, you gotta take 20 of those days out of the equation because Biden wasn’t president.”

And then they’ll argue Trump did such a poor job that Biden had to clean up his mess. But actually if you look at the data, the numbers were declining pretty substantially for covid by the time of the inauguration — and then went to almost nothing, right, for several months before surging again even in the wake of the vaccinations.

Because I think one of the places where Biden is the weakest — and (chuckles) there are, God knows, a lot of places where he’s weak. But in early May, he was saying, “Nobody needs to wear masks anymore; this thing’s over if you get vaccinated,” and then he had to walk back all of that. And I just think it’s an intriguing data point.

And to your analysis of how history is very political, this will actually, I think, help in some ways ’cause you’ll say, “Hey, you had a Republican president, you had a Democratic president, and what happened? The virus was gonna virus. Almost everything we did to try to combat it was totally worthless, in the end.”

BUCK: That’s what they want to avoid at all costs because there’ll be political and power implications that come from this. And I wanted to also follow up, and we could spend a little more time on this, Clay, when we come back. There’s a couple things that were on my radar this morning as I was doing the research that we do every day for this show, which is late at night.

I hope that I don’t wake Clay up when it’s 1 o’clock in the morning and I’m sending him random texts. But this morning I was looking through, and sure enough, that story that was suppressed by Twitter about a woman, a young woman in Washington State who died as a direct result of… This is what the actual state health authority is now admitting.

She got the J&J shot, did not want to get the J&J shot, and died of a blood-clotting condition — which we had heard about for a while that was a possibility — and initially social media’s first reaction is to say, “You can’t say that!” Can you imagine in a different context? If there was a new wonder drug on the market, Clay, and — I don’t know — it cured diabetes, something.

That would be amazing. But someone took that drug and died a day later as a direct consequence of the drug, do you think that anybody would be looked down upon for telling that story? They’d be suppressed for sharing that information? There’s something very wrong in this country right now.

CLAY: No. It’s rotten. Big Tech is rotten.