Fauci Starts Waffling on Whether Lockdowns Worked

CLAY: Dr. Fauci is back out, and he is now circling around. We’re gonna play his cuts in a minute. But Joe Biden has just spoken, and they’ve announced, by the way, a fourth booster shot for people who are 50 or over. So you’re up to four shots now in the last year if you are keeping track of all that. And, by the way, encouragement — continued encouragement — to people who are senior citizens, to people who are not healthy.

Those shots I do believe are helpful to you. If you are relatively young, if you are relatively healthy, it makes absolutely no sense for you to be concerned about the covid shot, based on the data. But here is Joe Biden. Look, Buck, we’ve been arguing about this. Not “arguing,” discussing. But arguing as if we were Democrats.

What is the pitch that Joe Biden is going to make to try to forestall the red wave that is potentially going to sweep over this country, we believe, in November? Really there’s not much out there he can argue. Covid, he is going to try to argue — and I don’t know if the data is going to allow him to do it, Buck. But he’s gonna try to argue that he has been successful in beating covid. Here is Joe Biden just a few minutes ago saying covid “no longer controls our lives.”

BUCK: I’m just gonna say, no. No, this is not what was promised, Clay.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Remember, it was very clear. We heard it. It was really the primary rallying cry other than (impression), “Grr, no joke! Grr,” you know, a bunch of mumbling from Biden, the primary rallying cry of the Biden candidacy was, “I’m not gonna shut down the economy. I’m gonna shut down the virus,” and now what we see more than a year into it is Biden saying, “Oh, well, we have the tools to better manage the forever reality of covid circulating in our population.”

So let’s just start with this is a fail based upon the promise that Joe Biden made. You and I expected this failure, but it is a failure based upon the promise that he made to voters, and there’s still a lot — and we’re gonna be talking to people that have been right on this, whether it’s Dr. Marty Makary or our friend Alex Berenson or others in the days ahead.

They just think they’re gonna keep rolling out these shots and everyone’s gonna just keep getting ’em, and we’re not done with vaccine passports everywhere. We’re not done with these things. It is just a pause, and that’s why Biden’s saying, “We have the tools now.” They’re trying to…

He is trying to normalize in the conversation this — call it the — apparatus of covid compliance, which is just gonna be something that we’re expected to live with. Whether it’s masking on the planes or getting the shot every fall and getting the card to say you can go into a restaurant or maybe getting a booster and all of this stuff. This fight, we told you, isn’t over, and you’re seeing right now, they’re getting ready for it again.

CLAY: What about the “winter of death” ending and nobody even calling Joe Biden on this? Remember, Buck, in December when he put out the official statement and said, “If you’re unvaccinated, it’s gonna be a winter of death”? And now we’re into spring, thankfully, and Joe Biden is just trying to pitch, “Hey, we beat covid! Hey, we’re fine.” I don’t think it’s gonna register with the American public.

And also, speaking of which, how about Dr. Fauci? How about Dr. Fauci getting interviewed by the BBC, Buck, and being asked about whether or not lockdowns had any sort of positive impact, and Fauci now has moved on from — and I think this is significant. Even if he’s not acknowledging the pivot, for a long time the lockdowners out there, Buck, they argued, “Oh, my gosh! If we haven’t locked down, millions of people would have died.” Now they’re not even willing to acknowledge that the lockdown was ever the right decision. I believe we have audio. Do we have audio of Fauci?

BUCK: Yeah, he’s asked about assessing this, and it turns out it’s a little more complicated than that, he says. Play it.

CLAY: “Obviously”? Because I think he is the first time he’s ever even mentioned it. I’m with you. I’m with you.

BUCK: The tradeoffs. I’ve never heard him say, “Obviously there were bad things that will happen from this,” and notice he can’t even help himself. The little health Stalinist knows that the propaganda is the primary purpose of his appearances on television. So he says, “I don’t like the term ‘restrictions.'” What the hell do you call limiting how many people can be in a bar, you little idiot?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: What do you call making people mask up between bites on planes? You know, this is why he loved that term “mitigation” for so long, and people have to say, “Wait. Why…? First of all, you’re not even mitigating anything,” and the biggest contention, I think, is exactly that, where he says, “There’s no doubt that a lot of cases were prevented, and a lot of lives were saved.”

CLAY: I don’t buy that at all.

BUCK: By lockdowns? There’s actually nothing but doubt. He has no proof, no evidence, no data whatsoever to support his point of view. So really what you have is there’s a little lightbulb going off over Fauci’s head where it’s like, “Oh, my God. There’s all this horrible stuff that happened that I made people do by pretending I had the answers — and there was no upside, only downside. Only misery and death and destruction in addition to that created by the virus.”

CLAY: And what is interesting to me about this, you and I have been talking about, “Hey, in the years ahead, how were we going to have a reckoning over disastrous decision to lock down the country?” And one answer is, “Well, the midterms.” In November, all of you listening have to go out and vote. Everybody you know, you have to convince to go vote.

There has to be significant consequences for everyone who advocated for lockdowns, who kept your kids out of school, who kept your kids in masks, who didn’t allow your business to be run. There was a failure of American public policy, the biggest failure of American public policy, in many of our lives, certainly since Vietnam.

And I think honestly, at this point, it’s worse than Vietnam, meaning for most of the twentieth century and the twenty-first century now, we’ve never made a worse public policy decision. But, Buck, what I find interesting about that answer is he said, “He said we’ll never know for sure.” He’s not even trying to argue in favor of lockdowns already!

He is implicitly acknowledging that they didn’t make sense when he is the foremost proponent of lockdowns. And what I found so significant about that clip, Buck, is, he’s not even trying to argue that we had to do it anymore. Which is the first step toward what is eventually going to happen, what I’ve been predicting; I know we’ve been talking about this.

The first thing that happens is people who were the biggest proponents of lockdowns start to say, “Well, we’ll never really know whether it was the right choice.” When you stop arguing it was the right choice, you are implicitly acknowledging it was the wrong choice and you’re trying to jump off lockdown train.

BUCK: And the reason they do that is to create the distance from it so then the switch is, “It was a consensus. I didn’t push for lockdowns.”

CLAY: You’re right. You’re right.

BUCK: “It was a conversation. It was a committee.”

CLAY: Responsibility is taken away with the next step, and you say, “Well, we couldn’t know. We had so much uncertainty. We had no other options,” and then eventually we will cycle to, “We got it all wrong.” I don’t know how long it’s gonna take to get there, but this is significant. There’s no defense of lockdowns anymore.

BUCK: It’s a committee of one making these decisions at the NIH, folks, just so you know. Anybody who’s worked over there, anybody who actually has any insider access will tell you, whatever Fauci decided, they all just nodded their heads. Nobody was gonna cross him, because he was on the speed dial of every cable channel except for one in America, and we all know why. So it wasn’t this collective. This guy, to do his part for the Democrat apparatus, pushed us into these disastrous policies and then called for social media to shut down debate. This fight is not over.