BUCK: You can’t make this stuff up, folks. The CDC… This is a big story for you: “The CDC Isn’t Publishing Large Portions of the Covid Data It Collects.” Now, you might think, that must be some kind of right-wing Substack, some dot-com they’re running. No, that is the New York Times headline on this. The subheading is, “The agency has withheld critical data,” the New York Times, everybody, “on boosters, hospitalizations, and, until recently, wastewater analysis.”

Now, Clay, we could do the, “We Were Right” dance here ’cause we’ve been talking about the hiding of data particularly in hospitalizations for a long time. But, can I just give you one data point from this one, and you tell me what you think’s going on here. “When the CDC…” This is a quote from the article. “When the CDC published the first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65 two weeks ago, it left out the numbers for a huge portion of that population, 18 to 49-year-olds, the group least likely to benefit from extra shots because the first two doses already left them well protected.” What do you think’s going on here?

CLAY: I think that the clear data here is going to reflect that, as we have been saying for years now, really, that there’s not any real need for young people to be getting covid shots at all, and if they’re not saying that 18-to-49 data — and, by the way, that’s a pretty broad definition of “young,” right, and also a huge percentage of the overall American population. Note we’re also not getting great data on kids, people who are 0 to 18.

What the CDC has done is shameful in so many respects, Buck, because at least for a long time precovid… I don’t know that we all spent a lot of time distrusting the CDC, and I don’t know in the years ahead how they are ever going to be able to rebuild their legitimate public authority for huge populations in the United States because of what I believe has been actual medical information that they have put out. And the biggest question here to me, Buck, remains, we mandated…

Joe Biden attempted to mandate, but certainly we did basically everything we could as a country to insist that people consume a for-profit business’s drug that was newly created, and we minted billionaires, many of them based on this, and now we’re trying to give them an annuity for years to come where we continue to try to force people to get shots that, frankly, the vast majority of them don’t need.

BUCK: You also have the CDC straight-up telling people, Clay, in this article… This is the kind of thing we’ve been saying all along and it’s not surprising, because if we go back to the origins, people ask, how do guys like you and me…? How did we know early on that Fauci is “full of it,” to put it nicely. It is completely unethical and inexcusable for a public health official to lie to the public because he thinks the lie is good for them.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: That is absolutely inexcusable. Fauci in the beginning of the pandemic, March of 2020, said, “Masks don’t do anything,” and then he turned around very quickly, said, “Actually, they do do things, and I only was telling you they don’t work before because I didn’t want all the good masks to run out.”

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: The fact that people accepted this ever, I was mind-blown. Then when I found out that he was calling Chris Cuomo every night when he had covid to ask, “Are you okay, Chris? Are you…? Do you have a fever?” Chris Cuomo was gonna be fine, right?

CLAY: Of course.

BUCK: There are thousands and thousands of seniors who were in hospitals who could have used some actual attention from the federal health bureaucracy on their plight, but instead he’s calling Cuomo. Anyway, here’s this piece, Clay. “Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the C.D.C., said the agency has been slow to release the different streams of data ‘because basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time.’ … Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted,” she said. This is in the New York Times piece. Clay, they’re holding back hospitalization and vaccine efficacy and virus level and wastewater for our benefit ’cause we might misinterpret it? People should be losing their minds over this.

CLAY: And as a result of the data they’re not sharing, we’re making decisions based on Israeli data, which we’ve talked about with Berenson and on this show for a long time that the incompetence here is so staggering that we are using another country’s data to try to determine what the right decisions to make are for the United States. And I gotta give Alex Berenson credit, and I think we’re gonna talk with him on Friday because, Buck, he said several months ago what would have sounded crazy.

Almost all of his “conspiracy theories” end up coming true. But, Buck, what did he say? He said they’re not telling us the truth as it pertains to the overall data surrounding Omicron, surrounding Delta, infection rates, hospitalization rates, vaccine rates, all of that. And we still don’t have it, and now it appears we’re basically gonna go through ’cause we’re coming up on the two-year anniversary of “15 days to stop the spread,” two years for a federal agency not to have reliable data that they can release to everyone is inexcusable. Many people, frankly, should be losing their jobs and this entire CDC should have to be remade.

BUCK: It’s amazing that this is reported on now when this keeps in line with what we’ve been seeing. This has really been known. It’s not like the CDC just decided to withhold this data, but it now feels safe for some of the journalistic entities out there, because remember what happened here for everyone listening. You recall this. There was a, “Whatever we have to do to get the narrative in a place where people will comply.”

And this is where this notion of public health officials lying for your benefit became acceptable, right, because “we’ve just gotta get everyone to get the shot” was their attitude. And, by the way, as many shots as we say they need to get over time. Nothing else mattered. You were not allowed to have the actual data. Imagine for a moment — take it out of the realm of vaccines — that the government said, “We’re gonna have you take some kind of a pharmaceutical,” and you see all the pharmaceutical commercials on TV.

“Could cause…” and they run through 50 different symptoms. “We’re gonna give you a pharmaceutical. It’s gonna be great for you. It’s gonna prevent some disease. But we’re not actually gonna let you know what the real data is. We’re not going to share the real information.” People would, understandably, right away say, “This is crazy. The paternalism at work here from the CDC. We’re gonna hold back information,” and they pretended, “Oh, it’s so complicated here.”

It’s not that complicated in the U.K. Not that complicated in Israel. Somehow, they’re able to do it. “We’re gonna hold back information because it might go out there and…” What? Conflict with the official narrative and also I think embarrass people. This is the part of it that they don’t want… Even the New York Times has been talking about it. If you’ve been pushing this stuff the whole time, you’ve been firing healthy members of the military who are in their twenties and thirties and forties ’cause they don’t want to get a shot — we’re talking about the boosters — they clearly do not need them based on the CDC’s own withholding. How do you make that sense of anything?

CLAY: Well, also, how about the crony capitalism here? Again, I can’t remember very many times where the federal government has tried to mandate you take a for-profit drug everyone — and not only that you take it, that you take it twice and then you take it for a booster and then you potentially take it for a yearly booster going forward, and they’ve provided complete immunity to all of the drugmakers.

And if you look at their earnings reports, we’re minting billionaires left and right in this scenario time after time after time. And the way it all shakes out is ultimately the CDC, along with much of the federal government, has failed us. The question that is out there — and we had the great study from Johns Hopkins that almost no one cited, Buck. The shutdowns, the lockdowns, everything that we’ve done — according to pretty esteemed scholars at Johns Hopkins who’ve looked at all of the data — effectively had zero impact.

So we have destroyed many people’s lives out there outside of the virus itself with our response, the response to the virus, not the virus itself, and for what? What have we actually gained? It’s the biggest public policy failure in this country since Vietnam, may well be even bigger than that.

BUCK: And when you look at who’s implicated in it, Clay, this is why everyone needs to make sure they don’t let them do what they want to do now, which is move past this as fast as possible. “Oh, great, we’re gonna…” Even in New York, I’m sure at some point they’ll lift the mask mandates. You were just in California, Clay, Los Angeles.

CLAY: Nobody was enforcing it when I was there.

BUCK: It’s gonna be better this spring. It’s gonna be better this summer. There needs to be accountability, okay? There needs to be a reckoning with what has happened here because the implications of this are that the media apparatus in this country — and, also, remember, the global health apparatus is also a thing. Yeah, you have the World Health Organization, but you have all these different government Health and Human Services apparatuses that talk to each other, that communicate, that share policy prescriptions.

And this is a level of wrong that we have really never seen before in our lifetimes from all the people who think that they should be in charge: The media, the Democrat elites, the bureaucrats within governments all over the world. So they’re gonna do everything they can to rewrite this history as fast as possible. We have to not allow that. We have to actually hold up the mirror here and make them look at what they’ve done.