BUCK: “15 days to slow the spread.” Clay, I remember this, but I didn’t remember it as well as I thought I did. First of all, we’ve talked so much about Fauci. There was Dr. Birx.

CLAY: Oh, yeah.

BUCK: — who was, you know, run off into obscurity because she did the whole everyone should mask and not see their family members for Thanksgiving. But, I mean, I’m gonna go see my family members for Thanksgiving. And at that point I think ’cause maybe she was around for the Trump administration, she hadn’t attached herself enough like a barnacle to the Biden vessel. So she decided to get out of there.

But I want to remind everybody, two years ago I believe to the day today.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — here is what she said about “15 days to slow the spread.”

BIRX: We’re saying that same sense of community to come together and stand up against this virus. And if everybody in America does what we ask for over the next 15 days, we will see a dramatic difference and we won’t have to worry about the ventilators and we won’t have to worry about the ICU beds because we won’t have our elderly and our people at the greatest risk having to be hospitalized.

15 days to slow the spread, 730 days later. pic.twitter.com/LKgDBan0pO

— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) March 16, 2022

BUCK: Completely wrong. The initial promise here was just give us 15 days, it’ll just be 15 days and you’ll see a dramatic improvement. The 15 days turned into what, how many months, effectively two years?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: But 15 days turned into two years, and there was no benefit, Clay.

CLAY: No benefit —

BUCK: — whatsoever.

CLAY: No benefit at all, Buck. Do you remember how slow all of those days seemed back during March of 2020 during that “15 days to slow the spread”? It felt like March of 2020 lasted like 10 years and then April to — and unfortunately where I was by mid- to late April we were basically back to normal.

But I remember going to a restaurant and I remember having a conversation and, by the way, this is still a conversation you could have because there are more covid cases now even today than there were in March of 2020 when we shut down, at least that we know about. And I remember going into a restaurant and the restaurant owner there saying, “I’m so glad to be opening back up,” but he said, “There’s way more cases now when the state of Tennessee is opening back up than there were when we shut down.” And that didn’t get talked about enough because what the when Fauci used to walk out all the time, Buck, and he would always make his hands and he would say what we’re trying to do is avoid a peak and kind of spread the plateau out.

BUCK: Oh, gosh. He was like one of these weatherman who stands in front of the green screen, you know (impression) “If you do what I say you’ll hit a plateau through mitigation. We don’t want to see a surge so we could sigh a drop-off if mitigation measures are something that we all could collectively admit to with the droplets.” I remember all this. He was wrong.

CLAY: On everything.

BUCK: — every single time. This guy was wrong all the time, and libs were obsessed with him.

CLAY: Isn’t it crazy? Because I just sent out a tweet about this ’cause I — that Fauci’s nowhere to be seen on this two-year anniversary. This was the beginning of Dr. Fauci as the throw pillow is it I think Gretchen Whitmer, right, Buck, the governor of Michigan has, like, a Fauci throw pillow, there’s all these people who are still enamored with Fauci. And what’s wild is, he’s gone — like, where is he? Wouldn’t you think on a two-year anniversary here that there would be some interview that he was doing or some retrospective that would be talked about?

The Biden administration — I don’t know if you buy into this as much as I do, Buck — I think the Biden administration is leaning so hard into the Ukraine story because it distracts from all the disasters going on with domestic policy. I’m not sure whether it’s gonna impact things in terms of Biden’s overall popularity, but that story is a far better one to be telling than the covid mess, than the murder rate skyrocketing, than inflation at probably double digits by the time we got analysis in March. And so they’re leaning into this. But Fauci is just vanished. I mean, it’s kind of crazy to me that there aren’t retrospective stories being done today on the two-year anniversary of “15 days to slow the spread.”

BUCK: I think more than anything else he just has gone beyond his political usefulness expiration date.

CLAY: Well, that’s certainly true.

BUCK: He’s not even getting the invitations, I’m sure. I think everyone needs to be clear on this. It’s not that Fauci and those like him, but Fauci of his always really in a class by himself, and he was a little megalomaniac, never once showed contrition, never once said, guys, we got this wrong, we really need to take the politics out of this, this is about getting it right. It was always (impression), “Be scared, listen to me, I’ve got more things to say about how you can’t live normally yet.” That was every single time. He somehow managed — and this was always the tell, this was always the giveaway. He never said anything in two years, not once did he really upset the MSNBC-watching, Brooklyn and northwest D.C. crowd that loves all this stuff and thought that, oh, my gosh. Two masks and I take it so seriously and the whole thing. Never upset them. They were his constituency. He was really the high priest, really the pope of a religion that he created around covid, and now he’s not even getting the invitations from CNN.

He’s not even being asked, I can guarantee you, to appear to talk in these places because, what are they gonna say? The vaccine program worked so well to stop the spread? We hit all-time highs, after a vaccine mandate ripped this country apart, after Joe Biden ran around talking about a pandemic of the unvaccinated and how they were a threat to other people, here’s the reality. Their promise that if you got the shot you’d be done was a lie. And in some ways even worse than that, their demand that you get the shot or else you’re a threat to other people was also a lie because whether you got the shot or not, you were spreading it all over the place.

CLAY: Totally true. And you pointed this out, and it is so incredible, not once in two years did Fauci ever say, “This is too much.” When they went and filled up all of the people who like to skateboard in California, when they filled up the skateboard parks with sand, did you not say it was too much. When they put crime scene tape around playgrounds for young kids, when they arrested a guy on a paddleboard out in the ocean, hen they shut down every trail and park all over the state of California, when they wouldn’t allow you to go outside, never did Fauci come out and say, hey, you know what? We got this wrong.

And Marty Makary, be who we talked to in the first hour, Buck, in his piece points out, how much time did Fauci spend telling people, “Hey, you need to, like, Lysol all your mail and Lysol everything that comes into your house,” when he was continuing to spread the idea that covid was something that was living on objects and would spread that way, as opposed to all the evidence supporting the fact that it was aerosol.

BUCK: Clay, we were forced to obey the dictates of the psychologically destabilized masses because Anthony Fauci and those around him gave a veneer of scientific credibility to this, when it was obvious that this was absurd. And beyond that, there has been a vindictiveness now that you’re seeing. And it certainly is the case here in New York City. You know, New York there’s still — you asked — we talked about this — I don’t even really know what the exact —

CLAY: I’m not sure if I’m allowed to come into the studio. That’s why I was asking, like, if I’m in New York.

BUCK: New York City still has an employer vaccine mandate in place. Like, no one’s going out and getting the shot right now, obviously. No one really — I mean, very, very, very few people, no one really — except for the people, like, “I want my eighth shot, I need another shot, where’s my next shot,” people get all excited about this like it’s gonna — it doesn’t make you Superman. You can’t fly after you get covid shot number nine. But there are people that act like that.

But here we are in New York City. I think there are two things happening. One is that they want — if you were living in New York and you had managed to get this far, which you wouldn’t ’cause you wouldn’t have been able groceries — yeah — but if you were living here, they — and managed to go this far without complying with the vaccine mandate, they want to continue to punish those people at some level because the employer mandate is the one where they really have the most leverage.

So they want to continue to agitate and punish people, but beyond this — this is why I was asking Dr. Makary about whether there’s been a real change in sentiment from the medical community — they’re leaving in place the structure of ramping it up again.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: They’re leaving — okay. We’ll leave the employer mandate in place as long as we can, and then it will come back in the fall. What do you mean? No big deal. Just like the measles, mumps, rubella shot or the flu shot, they’re going to say. This is what they’re gonna be telling us, which is why, as we said, it’s not over.