BUCK: We wanted to go back to this issue of the vaccines in schools. One thing you’ve noticed as the FDA is preparing… I don’t think anybody believes that the FDA is not going to approve this for kids, right? That’s one part of it, this whole, “Oh, we gotta wait for the approval”? It’s completely absurd to think that the FDA is gonna say they’re gonna wait.

And as we know because this just happened with boosters, even if the FDA were to say, “Well, maybe wait,” the executive branch, the Biden administration may say, “Okay, well, thanks for your advisory opinion. We may just decide, through executive order, to overrule it.” I don’t know. That’s what they did with boosters. Remember they had the committee and the whole bureaucracies?

Then they said, “No, no. We need boosters pretty much open to everybody.” They’re going to make this open to children and then they’re gonna make it mandatory for children. I think one part of this, Clay, that we also need to be prepared for is notice the pushback that has happened against critical race theory but also masks and a number of really intrusive, leftist policies in schools across the country, and they’re calling out…

The DOJ and the attorney general are calling out soccer mom insurrectionists, whatever we want to call them. Think about what it’s gonna be like, Clay, when there are mandates implemented in schools and there are parents who are now showing up to the meetings. It’s not just masks on kids’ faces they’re gonna be upset about, but needles in their arms for a virus that poses no real threat to children.

CLAY: That’s so key, and I wish there were more people giving the data — and I say this as a parent. The reason why I’ve looked into covid so much and paid so much attention to it is like every other parent and a lot of grandparents, I care about my kids more than anything in the world. But it’s important to recognize how to analyze risk.

Buck, every single person out there who has kids, your kids have been under more danger from the seasonal flu every year of their lives than they are from covid. I’ve not seen any parent that I’m aware of who ever said, “Oh, my God. We’ve gotta mask our kids when they go to school because the seasonal flu is such a danger to them.”

It is a small danger, but every year the seasonal flu has killed more young kids than covid has. Your kids are more likely to be murdered. Your kids are more likely to drown. Your kids are more likely to die in a traffic accident on the way to school than they are to die from covid. In Chicago, kids this year dead from covid?

More kids have been shot in Chicago — Chicago alone — by a substantial margin than have died with covid in the entire country. And so, this is a form of madness where parents, I think, have been preyed on by the media. I think there are a lot of Democrat politicians out there that — to your point yesterday, Buck; I think it’s a good one — they wanted to ratchet up the fear as much as they could in 2020 to beat Donald Trump.

And now they don’t know how to turn it off because all these politicians… You see the Rashida Tlaib video — I think we’ve got the clip — of her saying, “I only put these masks on when the media’s here.” So many of the politicians know that the risk and the threat and the fear is all exaggerated, but they don’t know how now to turn it off because it’s become so emotional.

BUCK: If these decisions were really made based upon a true and fair-minded risk analysis… For example, why don’t we have readily available to us…? One thing we’ve pointed out, Clay — and events have proven it correct, when we were saying that there was no real excuse, that it was absurd for there not to be a greater focus on natural immunity.

Data from Florida schools both with and without mask mandates shows that masks on kids make no difference inside schools when it comes to covid cases. If science truly mattered no kids would be wearing masks in schools anywhere in America. pic.twitter.com/ytZfLlEwEJ

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) October 7, 2021

All summer when we’re talking about the Delta surge and everything else and the vaccine mandates were being rolled out in the latter part of the summer by the Biden administration, which still it’s not even clear where OSHA is supposed to implement this?

CLAY: They were gonna have three or four weeks to put the policy in policy. It’s not out yet.

BUCK: It’s exactly how that’s going to go. But of course, they’re threatening people and they’re hoping people just get ahead of it and take the shot anyway. But as we’ve been going along here, they clearly did not want the data on natural immunity because that would conflict with the overall push.

CLAY: No doubt.

BUCK: Where’s the data on the risk of child-to-adult transmission? Okay, we know it happens. But from the very beginning of the pandemic, it was just one of those things that we all heard so many times that everyone kind of knew: Children not only are at low risk from this but are very unlikely to transmit it. I’d like to know how many cases of transmission from child to adults actually occur.

Because that’s the kind of thing you should know if you’re even going to have a discussion. Because if the discussion is merely about protecting children, that’s actually just insane. If the discussion is about protecting adults, let’s say what the data is. And wait a second. Aren’t the adults that are around them vaccinated? Shouldn’t they be fine? Oh, that’s right! In California, the children in the school are gonna have to be vaccinated but the teachers union adults not clear they’re gonna have to be vaccinated.

CLAY: I read an article yesterday the New York Times, Buck, about England, and I think it’s worth mentioning. Because if you were gonna point to countries that the United States has the most in common with, you’d probably point to England, Australia, and Canada. Australia and Canada have lost their minds. They’ve lost their minds as it pertains to covid. England is actually now less restrictive than the United States.

And the article was about kids. No kids are wearing masks anywhere in all of England, and they’re actually starting to make an analogy in England now that I’ve talked about on the radio before that they’ve decided covid is the equivalent of chicken pox and that kids grew up with… I had chicken pox parties when I was a kid. You wanted kids to get chicken pox.

They only think in England that kids getting covid is good because the risk to them is so low and that then allows the herd immunity and the natural immunity to take off. They’re not gonna mandate vaccines for kids in England. They are not going to mandate masks. They are going back to a hundred percent normalcy, wnd that analogy of the chicken pox parties…

Which, if you’re around my age, 40-ish, you may — certainly if you grew up in the South. You may remember before there was a chicken pox vaccine, when you were a young age, your parents… My parents, my mom was a microbiologist, she did strep throat cultures for a living; so it’s not like she was some anti-science Neanderthal.

They wanted you to get exposed to chicken pox at a young age because it was far less dangerous to you than if you got chicken pox at an older age when it could be more severe. And, honestly, that’s the kind of the same situation that exists now for covid, at least how England is discussing it.

BUCK: I just want to know how Ron DeSantis hijacked the United Kingdom. How did he manage to bring the entire U.K. Parliament to heel with his DeSantisism? Because I’ve been told by very, very smart people whose apartments smell of rich mahogany for months and months now… I’ve been told by the CNN journalists and by the people at the New York Times that what Ron DeSantis is doing was…

Even giving the option of no masks in schools was reckless and murderous and terrible. So why is the U.K. doing it? I guess the U.K., they just want there to be lots of dead kids? Oh, no. They don’t even try to engage with that reality because it goes against the overall narrative. And I do believe that when you see, for example, now for some people it’s about fear with their children, right?

They’re so scared because the media has intentionally gone after the fear centers of their brains to better control them, to turn them against Trump in 2020. Now it’s like they’ve got the tiger by the tail. They don’t know what to do. But then beyond that, I think the public health authorities also realize you keep talking about how they gotta land the plane, Clay.

They gotta sorta circle the runway a few more times and make it seem like this was really necessary, everything that we’ve been doing is necessary. Because if they just land that plane like it’s no big deal at this point and say, “You know what? We don’t have to do this. We don’t have to do that.” People will say, “So what have we been doing this whole time?”

CLAY: Yeah. And, by the way, Buck, in Florida, Christina Pushaw… What was her title here? She is the…?

BUCK: She works in the comms shop, communications shop for Ron DeSantis.

CLAY: She just tweeted out: “Fun fact: Covid-19 have decreased about 96% statewide since school started in Florida. Rate of decline is the same for mask optional and forced-masking districts.” We ran through some of those numbers to start the show. But this is a debilitating attack on the “science requires we wear masks” universe out there.

BUCK: Masking children in school is child abuse. It’s child abuse.

CLAY: I think that’s where we are right now.

BUCK: That’s what’s going on.

CLAY: Especially young children, God forbid. You got a 5-year-old, 6-year-old and also for a lot of people out there who are speech therapists and whatnot, kids learning how to speak and learning when you are a young age? Being able to see other people’s facial expressions and their mouths is integral to the development of young children.

Fun fact: COVID-19 cases have decreased about 96% statewide since school started in Florida.

Rate of decline is the same for mask-optional and forced-masking districts. https://t.co/mSY10rH0vo

— Christina Pushaw (@ChristinaPushaw) October 7, 2021

BUCK: You speak of something of which I know intimately ’cause I actually had a speech impediment as a kid.

CLAY: So you would have been struggling.

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: That would have been a struggle.

BUCK: Absolutely. I had to do speech therapy for years, and now look where I am, hanging out with you.

CLAY: There you go. You won.