Psaki: GOP Wants to Stop Us from Saving Lives

PSAKI: I think we are… We’re working in close coordination with leaders in Congress, Democrats and Republicans, to ensure the government stays open. Uhh, let’s just take a step back and think about the absurdity effect. They’re calling for the government to shut down — prevent essential services from going out to people across the country — because they’re upset about our efforts to save people’s lives. I’ll just leave out there, uhhh, and see if any Republicans on the Hill agree with that.

BUCK: Welcome back to Clay and Buck show. There you had White House press secretary Jen Psaki telling everybody that Republicans are upset about efforts to save lives ’cause that’s really what’s going on here. Sure. That’s the situation. There is some talk now among Republicans that they would be willing to go into a government shutdown to end the Biden vaccine mandate.

Let’s also point out that there have been several federal courts that have stepped in now to say the Biden vaccine mandate goes too far. Using OSHA to force, essentially, a nationwide vaccine mandate is unconstitutional. And one — I believe this was a Fifth Circuit judge, right, Clay? — just came down and put in a (I’ve said the words “universal injunction” a few times in recent weeks) universal injunction across the country not to put into effect the vaccine mandate.

And there’s also the reporting that the Biden administration wasn’t gonna enforce this stuff ’til after holiday, anyway, right? So they were gonna make sure that there was no action taken against federal employees during the holidays, that would seem a little too maybe mandate Ebenezer Scrooge-like. So here we have Psaki saying that they’re upset about people trying to save lives.

Of course, this is the kind of hyperbole that you can expect from Democrats now on this. But keep in mind that I don’t understand, Clay, why as we look at this we don’t have people understanding that the booster is gonna have to be a moral issue for people too, right? So if you think you’re vaccinated and you’re good, no, you’re actually gonna get lectures about how you’re reckless ’cause you don’t have a booster.

CLAY: That’s right. That’s where we’re headed. And who knows exactly where this is going to go before all is said and done, because, Buck, this is kind of crazy. But there’s an expectation now that when you come into the country… This is from CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “Top officials are considering requiring everyone who enters the U.S.,” by the way, everybody except people who come across the southern border, we should mention, “get tested the day before their flight and have all people, including U.S. citizens, test again after returning home, regardless of vax status.”

This is from the Washington Post, and they’re talking about people who come in from out of country having to go to their houses and quarantine for a full week or more. This is crazy. And, Buck, it’s significant in that… You know, we were talking about off air. I was scheduled with my family to go to Puerto Rico around Christmas.

We were gonna get away, go somewhere warm. That’s still the United States, technically, but I’m so concerned about what rules are gonna be put in place that we’re going to Florida instead. I don’t want to leave the continental United States because I think there are gonna be some pretty Draconian restrictions put on.

BUCK: Yeah, I planned my vacation this year which my birthday coincides with —

CLAY: Yeah, your 40th!

BUCK: Four zero, in Florida. I’m not going to some foreign country where they might lock me in some quarantine facility for 10 days. That doesn’t sound like much fun, way to spend a vacation. But, Clay, behind all this there’s also the recognition — they don’t want to talk about this — but the recognition that the vaccines do not stop it. They may lessen. They do not stop the spread of the virus.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: They don’t talk about that very much, but clearly that’s why all these other measures are also necessary, right? If the vaccine was highly effective at stopping all infection… This is about breakthrough infections, now. We still have to say that for those at high risk, those who have comorbidities, it protects at a pretty good, pretty high level from hospitalization and death.

In terms of stopping the spread, we have to get boosters ’cause it doesn’t stop the spread very well, obviously. Now, how well, we don’t really know. But they’re directing policies now based upon the observable phenomenon. You said LeBron James has covid after being double vaccinated.

CLAY: Yep.

BUCK: People are getting it and spreading it who are vaccinated, and not one or two people. Lots of people.

CLAY: Our friend Dr. Makary, a Johns Hopkins physician, shared a story, I believe it was, of a study inside all of prison to compare rate of spread for people who were double vaccinated and people who had not been vaccinated. And they found that the virus spread just as much from the vaccinated as from the unvaccinated. So this idea that we have a pandemic of the unvaccinated or that only unvaccinated people have been causing the spread of covid is a lie that is not supported by any statistical measure of data at all. And that, I think, is fairly significant.

BUCK: Makary will be with us on Monday, by the way, Dr. Makary, to talk about all these issues because this is now… We’re in another phase where the Fauciites are changing not just the narrative but also the policies, and they want you to forget about where we were for the last three months, right? This summer it was, “Whoa, there’s so many cases! It’s all the unvaccinated!” It was a pandemic of the unvaccinated.

CLAY: That’s what they tried to tell us.

BUCK: That was the Biden line, that was the president of the United States and Fauci and all the rest of them. Now it’s everybody get the booster even if you’re vaccinated. Well, gee, why is that the case? I thought it was a pandemic just of the unvaccinated. They’re moving the goalposts again, and we see that this is gonna result in a lot of restrictions because, remember, they’ll do preventative stuff. They’re doing it in New York. By the way, I don’t know if the new governor is worse than Cuomo but it’s getting pretty close these days. I mean, she’s not grabbing at ladies —

CLAY: That we know of.

BUCK: That we know of, yeah, but she is doing bad things like getting rid of hospitals’ elective surges in some places, putting a pause on that in preparation for the Omicron variants, and everything we’ve seen out of South Africa, by the way, doesn’t come from South Africa. It’s already in dozens of countries. It’s all over the place. We don’t know where this thing started.

We don’t know who it began with. We don’t know where it started, obviously, and we’re never really gonna find that out. But they have a pretty rigorous public health system in South Africa that looked at this and identified it. And everything we’ve heard so far is that the Omicron variant is pretty mild as a covid strain, so far.

They can clip this in two months and say, “Oh, my God. Omicron is horrible.” That’s what they’ve told us as of right now. So if that’s the case why are we already ramping up all the other so-called mitigation measures, indoor masking requirements coming in more and more places. Why?

CLAY: We’ve been talking about variants and mutations — I think that’s an important part, Buck, of this discussion — as if they could only make things worse. The reality is most viruses don’t continue to mutate and get worse. They become less virulent over time. So if this new variant out of South Africa — where we at least acknowledge that it initially was recognized.

If it actually is less virulent in terms of creating significant health issues, it actually might be positive ’cause it might start to knock Delta out and lead us to even more herd immunity. We don’t know, but that’s at least what they’re saying in South Africa, the people who have studied this variant the most.