Video: Shanghai Citizens Risk Lives to Protest Zero Covid

CLAY: I think this story is actually being underplayed right now because of what you’re seeing, which is quite a lot of rebellion against a totally unacceptable level of lockdown.

And let’s play this clip for you from Shanghai. This is people screaming out their windows after a week of total lockdown — remember, I mean total lockdown. These people are not allowed to take their dogs for walks, they’re not allowed to go get food, they’re not allowed to do basically anything, Buck.

And what they’re is expressions meaning life and death, they’re asking for death. They are losing their minds psychologically, they are falling party; 25 million people in Shanghai, China. Listen to this.

CLAY: You hear that, Buck?

BUCK: It’s haunting. I mean, it’s haunting. I was in Shanghai in 2019, right before, you know, you know, the year of covid. Shanghai, for those who don’t know it’s an ultramodern megacity. And so you have tower that are, you know, 60 stories high just full of people. It’s a 20 million person city.

CLAY: Second biggest in all of China.

BUCK: It’s like a major U.S. state here would have no one able to leave their homes for any reason whatsoever. And remember in China if you break the protocol, it’s not like here where you’re gonna get a sign, I mean, God knows what they’re gonna do to you. People who are sick have been hauled on off to quarantine camps which are horrifying.

This is happening right now in the second largest economy in the world with the second most powerful military in the world and the single most populous country in the world. So I think, you know, we have this mind-set now of, oh, it’s cool, we sort of move — I mean, we don’t have it but a lot of people I see are, “Oh, whatever covid is so yesterday. ”

The commies are not done with you and the communists in China are really serious about this. What do they do? I don’t just mean the lockdown. They moment they open up they had 25,000 infections a day in Shanghai. The virus is gonna the virus. They’re gonna get a lot of people sick.

CLAY: Well, just in the Gridiron Dinner in Washington, D.C., to give you a sense of how contagious BA.2 and Omicron are, basically one in every 10 people in Washington, D.C., including, I believe, by the way, Dr. Fauci, who went to this event got covid.

Now, almost all of them are going to be a hundred percent fine, but it is wildly contagious. And so you’ve seen in New Zealand, you saw in Australia, they had virtually no covid for a couple of years because of this severe lockdown, but at some point in time they realized they had to return their economy and their country to the global interplay, that you had to be able to fly in and out, and they skyrocketed.

So to your point, Buck, how in the world is covid zero a functional policy when this thing’s not going away. What they’re still acting like is this virus is going to disappear. That’s never gonna happen.

BUCK: It comes from a mentality of totalitarian control. To get to covid zero you have to have a society where the government can destroy all individual freedom, movement, and rights in the name of the collective, which is why — there are reasons why — the more collectivist a place is in its philosophy, the more extreme its covid lockdowns have been all along. We’ve seen this, right?

So even a place like the U.K. which has some tradition of individual liberty is, you know, a little less insane than some other states that are more lockdown happy, that are more collectivist, more socialist in their approach. The U.K. has a socialist health care system. I mean, there’s a lot there. Obviously the U.K. is not China, though, right?

So you can see a hierarchy of how extreme all this may be. And just on the notion of — oh, in New Zealand, a bunch of socialists living out on an island. Ardern, the prime minister there, has effectively said, yeah, I’m not even doing a vaccine mandate anymore ’cause it didn’t work, is the reality. Everyone is getting sick later in this after, after they tried to cut the island off from all folks.

And just to give everyone a sense of this — I was talking to Clay about this before — how contagious– ’cause you said the Gridiron Dinner, ten people, right? This is from the CDC website. So this is just kind of common consensus knowledge, not that there’s really consensus in medicine these days. But measles are so contagious that if you are in close contact with somebody nine out of 10 people without immunity will get it. If you’re in close contact for 15 minutes, by the way, just in a room with somebody and it can spread from four days before symptoms ’til four days after symptoms. Now, measles is different from covid. I get that.

But Omicron is basically as contagious — I mean, you know, you’re starting to see that if you don’t have immunity to Omicron and you’re near somebody with it, you’re getting it. And governments think they’re gonna stop this by — Clay, the airline stewardess at Delta who was yelling at everybody on my plane on Sunday to mask up between bites, I almost lost my mind.

CLAY: Well, and we played you the clip on the last segment — that they may extend that mask mandate and allow that power to continue going forward. We were texting over the weekend — some of the New York City private schools are going to reimplement covid masking and restrictions — and did I see they’re not even gonna allow kids to swim in the swimming pool now? This is not going away.

And so early on China tried to use their response to covid as evidence of why their government was better than all the Western democracies. What I would say as you hear all of those people in Shanghai yelling out their windows as they have been locked up for a full week right now, there’s no way to stop this. It’s going to spread.

And actually China is going to be way more susceptible than almost any other country in the world because they haven’t had a widespread — at least that we know of — a widespread natural immunity. Their vaccines work even less effectively than the vaccines that are being distributed in the United States. So I don’t see any way that China’s ever gonna be able to open up, given what we know about covid and the way it spreads.

BUCK: There was a big study that just came out — I’m not sure if it’s a preprint or if it’s officially published — but the fourth booster is — gives people a nice boost of protection for about four to six weeks.

CLAY: Yep.

BUCK: There you go, folks. That’s a great vaccine, isn’t it? Get boosted and you’re less likely to get severely ill for about six weeks. Oh, okay. Yeah, line up for that shot.

By the way, even Fauci now let this slip in. He’s talked about natural immunity, Clay. He never did before. And now he’s — first of all, he’s saying don’t pooh-pooh getting covid. You should be terrified. It’s super scary. But at the end he says something interesting.

FAUCI: We don’t want pooh-pooh getting infected. I think people sometimes say it’s okay to get infected. So it’s not because there were things like long covid, and there are sometimes people, even though they don’t your hospitalization, they get significantly ill. They may be home, they may require a doctor consultation, but they don’t get hospitalized. That’s not something to pooh-pooh. Again, each individual will have to take their own determination of risk.

BUCK: Put aside the don’t pooh-pooh it and his whole thing is absurd, ’cause what is it — it’s not okay to get infected? Well, then don’t live your life ’cause you’re gonna get covid, everybody, you’re ignore get covid at some point.

CLAY: It’s basically impossible not to get it.

BUCK: Unless you’re gonna live in a cabin by yourself and see no one ever, I mean, you know, maybe listening on the radio right now a couple of folks but generally speaking, you’re gonna get covid.

But notice how he says you gotta determine your own risk at the end. It almost sounds like he’s finally conceding what some of us have been arguing for two years.

CLAY: Yeah, finally.