Rand Paul Eviscerates the HHS Secretary on Covid

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CLAY: I gotta be honest with you. We’ve had Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky — a doctor, it’s worth mentioning — several times on the program, for his ability to cut through no ideas as it surrounds all the covid insanity. And there was a Senate hearing yesterday featuring a member of Joe Biden’s cabinet who got absolutely, I would say, from a sort of literary perspective or an argument perspective, essentially disemboweled, Buck. This is Xavier Becerra who was formally, I believe, the attorney general of California, if I’m not mistaken, and he now is the HHS —

BUCK: “Javier.”

CLAY: “Javier.” What did I call him? Xavier? “Javier”? Close enough. He was testifying in front of the Senate, and I want you guys to listen to this evisceration from Rand Paul. Enjoy.

PAUL: Are you a doctor, a medical doctor?

BECERRA: I have worked over (sputtering) 30 years on health policy.

PAUL: You’re not a medical doctor. Do you have a science degree? And yet you travel the country calling people flat-earthers who have had covid and made their own personal decision that their immunity they naturally acquired is sufficient. But you presume, somehow, to tell over a hundred million Americans who survived covid that we have no right to determine our own medical care?

You alone are on high and you’ve made these decisions — a lawyer with no scientific background, no medical degree? This is an arrogance coupled with an authoritarianism that is unseemly and un-American. You, sir, are the one ignoring the science. The vast preponderance of scientific studies — dozens and dozens — show robust, long-lasting immunity after covid infection.

Even the CDC does not recommend measles vaccine if you have measles immunity. The same was true for smallpox. But you ignore history and science to shame “the flat-earthers,” as you call them. You should be ashamed of yourself and apologize to the American people for being dishonest about naturally acquired immunity.

BUCK: Fantastic.

CLAY: How great is that?

BUCK: You told me about this one and I wanted to hear it.

CLAY: You hadn’t heard it yet. I knew you were gonna love it.

BUCK: Rand Paul has been just amazing. At a time when we need somebody who speaks with clarity and precision but also expertise and having somebody like Rand Paul as a senator who is also a medical doctor has been really invaluable. There’s a reason why he ruffles feathers the way that he does.

There’s a reason why Fauci bristles every time he has to answer a Rand Paul question because the stuff that he says is true, and they and where are you presently get away without having to answer for this. Becerra, for example, it’s clear that they decided to downplay — and you could even argue undermine, in a sense, as a policy matter — natural immunity because —

CLAY: They pretend it doesn’t exist.

BUCK: — the game plan was everybody gets the needle in the arm. That was the decision that the HHS, and everyone should remember this. I don’t think this is clear enough. HHS is the umbrella under which CDC sits. So these things are all tied when you’re talking Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease — NIAID, which is also where Fauci is, which is also under the NIH (National Institutes of Health) umbrella.

All these bureaucracies that are taking political direction from the White House have people at the top of them who made a decision than that that is essential for… Clay, the fact that we don’t have… We can sit here and say estimates are 150 million people have gotten infected with covid, something like that. Why isn’t it as of this month, as of last month?

Why aren’t they actually trying to track this with serology studies? They could do this. It’s statistically possible. It’s ’cause they don’t want to know. You’re dealing with a health bureaucracy that is telling people on the one hand, “You are a troglodyte who denies science,” but, on the other hand, we’re going to ignore a critical piece of data.

People are being lied to and that’s one of the reasons why when Fauci went on a different radio show and was asked the question would you step down because of a lack of interest on you — he was on the Hugh Hewitt show — Fauci kept saying, “No, no. I can’t even foresee a situation where anybody would think that I’m a liar.” Well, spoken like somebody who lies a lot.

CLAY: And also someone who isn’t aware of how much attention people have made to those lies. But that’s why I love Rand Paul cutting through the noise there because, Buck, we know of even by the government’s own numbers, 77% of the United States population 18 and up has gotten at least one vaccine shot. Ninety-four percent of people 65 and up.

Of the 23% of adults 18 and up, how many of them have natural immunity? I would bet it’s a substantial portion of that 23%. In other words, this idea that those people are all anti-vax — which is a label that we need to continue to fight, because not choosing to get covid vaccine doesn’t make you anti-vax. I have kids.

They’re all vaccinated. But I’m not going to get them the covid vaccine at young ages, because they have no risk to covid. That doesn’t make me anti-vaccine. That means I’m looking at the science and reasonably assessing the risk particulars of my family which is what we want parents to do.

BUCK: When I was in the CIA and they would send me to some of the places they send me that I can’t even talk about here, I would get shots. I didn’t even know what they were. A lot of people in the military know what I’m talking about. They’re like, “Oh, you’re going to this? You take malaria pills for that.” That can be kind of fun — depends — or it can be really scary.

It depends on what kinds of dreams of you have with valerian and mefloquine. You look at some of these other things you get. I can’t even remember. I think Japanese encephalitis. I was a pincushion. I had to get so many shots for some of these places, and I was like, “All right. Well, I don’t want to get whatever it is my face is gonna fall off and I’m gonna have 110-degree fever so I’ll get the shot.”

So I’m to say I’m anti-vax? I’ve been more vaccinated than, you know, 95% of the U.S. population. But I look at what’s going on here and I look at how this mandate has set a very troubling president for a whole lot of health policy. I think people realize that too. The notion of the collective being able to override the rights of the individual to include a denial of science in the case of natural immunity, which they’ve done.

They’ve denied that natural immunity is a big thing, the only way that we keep asking the question how does this actually end? I think we’re gonna get to a place where there’s gonna be a lot of natural immunity that has built up in America because of so much infection and then also there will be, really, the temporary protection given by vaccines that people will be able to argue:

“Well, for those at high risk this has brought down the mortality curve over a period of time,” and then they’ll turn around and say, “See what a great job we did,” and everyone is gonna say, “Well, hold on a second, the social distancing, the masking, all this stuff, this was really supposed to work? How did it work?”

If the virus ran for two years, which is basically what it will end up doing it looks like now, that tends to be life cycle of new viruses, Clay, all throughout history. So there’s gonna be a lot of debates about that. And there’s the Merck pill, by the way, that just came out. Now I’m gonna get this one wrong. Molnupiravir. Can’t they give it an easier name?

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: Molnupiravir is a pill that helps reduce — according to late-stage clinical trials — severe covid. What’s really gonna happen is they’re gonna get enough different I think therapeutics, Clay, and enough natural immunity that this becomes essentially as dangerous as an average flu over time, and then people calm down. But it’s gonna take more time. We’re looking at another full season of a lot of people going crazy, I think.

CLAY: Well, and don’t forget 2022. The Democrats would love to extend the crazy covid voting rules into the midterm election because it might be the only thing that has the possibility of saving them from an abject disaster as we roll through the new season of voting. And that’s really why I… Look, everybody wants this thing to be over.

And back in May, when all of a sudden masks were gone and it looked like the vaccine was gonna work, it all vanished — and now here we are crossing our fingers and hoping that we don’t have a fall repeat of what we had last year. But I’m not necessarily optimistic.