A Deep Dive with Alex Berenson: Covid Fact and Fiction

BUCK: We have been looking forward to this deep-dive conversation into covid, everything going on right now with the vaccines, the mandates, the masks — what works, what doesn’t, what does the data tell us — with the one and only Alex Berenson. You’ve probably seen him on Fox, and you maybe have gotten Unreported Truths downloaded. I recommend you do so on Amazon before they decide you can’t. You can also find him on Substack, Alex Berenson on Substack. He’s just a journalist who’s been asking questions and gone against the consensus when the data told him to and he is here with us now in studio in New York. Alex, great to see you.

ALEX: It’s a pleasure.

BUCK: Clay and I have both been talking to you now about this issue for about 18 months and we’re going to for a long time.

ALEX: Yes.

BUCK: Can we start with this, actually, ’cause we have so much we’re gonna keep you, like I said, for a deep dive so you can actually have time? It’s not a four minute TV hit such as it is. Masks. You got a lot of heat in the beginning. It seems like now finally people understand that this is almost like a religious symbol for most folks. Is the data clear on this one? Before we get into vaccines, can we just get into, “If they had good mask data, wouldn’t we know about it?”

ALEX: Has anybody been alive the last 18 months? Didn’t we all mask up for about 12 of those months and the virus came and went and came and went and came and went. Masks are useless. They are useless. They’re certainly useless to keep you from getting sick, and they are almost as certainly useless to prevent you from transmitting the virus to other people.

BUCK: Are there (crosstalk) that you know, can I ask, who are willing to say that to you offline?

ALEX: Oh, yeah! Absolutely. And, by the way, we’re not talking about what they call respirators, N95. N95s may be largely useful; I’m not willing to be as definitive about that. But when you ask the CDC to present studies showing that masks work, that cloth or surgical masks work to protect their wearers from covid they don’t have any because those studies don’t exist.

CLAY: Okay. This is important, I think, because so many kids are going to back to school. My kids go back to school tomorrow, Alex. Thanks for being here in the studio with us. Does it make any sense at all for kids in particular to be wearing masks in school —

ALEX: No.

CLAY: — or is it madness?

ALEX: No, it’s madness, okay? It’s madness. First of all, they don’t work. Second of all, kids are dirty little creatures who are like constantly touching them and taking them off and switching them with each other. And third, when kids get covid, unless they’re lightning-strike unlucky or they’re really sick, they don’t — I mean pre-existing, like have leukemia or some terrible condition —

CLAY: Yes.

ALEX: They don’t get sick from covid. At most, they get a fever for a couple days. They don’t get sick.

CLAY: And I want to say this. I’m a parent. I’ve got three young kids. You have how many kids?

ALEX: Three kids.

CLAY: Three kids. Okay. So, for people out there, you shared some data before Twitter banned you — or suspended you, I should say, for seven days, which we’ll get to in a minute. But we’re talking to Alex Berenson. You shared some data from England about kids in particular and the impact that this great British study had shown covid has on them, and the numbers were truly staggering.

ALEX: Yeah. No. So there are two, actually, that Lancet published over the last year. One was from I believe last summer or fall, and they looked at some children. They found six children who died in Britain from covid. Three of the six were neonates with severe genetic abnormalities — like babies born just too sick to live — and I think the other three had terminal illness.

And then there’s an updated study from a month or two ago where there were 61, I believe it was, updated people under 18 — so children and teens — who died in Britain. Thirty-six of them I think you could just say were totally wrong. They’re homicide or suicide or something like that.

CLAY: Yes.

ALEX: And then of the others, there were only six who didn’t have trisomies or other really severe genetic conditions who’d be classified as healthy. So that’s six out of 12 million in Britain.

CLAY: I think that’s just significant ’cause so many parents are out there as it pertains to kids and covid. That’s a great study out of England that I don’t think got enough attention.

BUCK: I also want to ask you about the vaccine situation here, ’cause reminded with masks, I have more and more people on the left who are saying things like, “Masks are really now just…” They are a symbol.

ALEX: That’s right.

BUCK: When we used to say they were a symbol it was shut up, it’s science. Now people will you tell you, I’ve had leftists that are people I know or work with will say, “It’s really just about reminding everybody about all the things we have to do. It’s reminding everybody that we all need to go get vaxxed, all that kind of stuff.”

ALEX: Yeah. Yeah.

BUCK: So they’ve transitioned, because otherwise if you look at data it doesn’t make sense. Okay. So we’ll put masks aside for a second but even though the amount of ferocity directed at people like you, me, Clay, for even questioning it, to me, was like a mask mental illness on display. But vaccines. What is going on right now?

People look at the numbers, they look at the data, and come to very different conclusions. And even people that I know, Alex, who have been really supportive of a lot of work you’ve done have complained to me and wanted me to ask you, “He’s too critical. He does not show enough of the upside of the vaccines.” How do you respond to that?

ALEX: Okay. So vaccines are supposed to be permanent, right? That’s inherent in the name. They’re supposed to last 10 years, 20 years, a lifetime. It is abundantly clear these vaccines don’t meet that definition. Okay? They don’t work like traditional vaccines. I’m talking about the mRNA, and the J&J that works differently as well, but it’s essentially the same idea as the mRNA vaccine.

They don’t work like traditional vaccines, and we have now pretty good data on this — the first couple of weeks after you get the first dose, you’re actually more likely to get infected, it looks like. The clinical trial data didn’t show that. It showed there was no protective effect, but the real-world data shows there’s some increase in infectivity. Okay?

Then it takes a couple more weeks and you get the second dose. After the second dose, it looks like you have this sort of Happy Valley. Okay? There’s a couple of months where this thing really does seem to work and it provides protection and you saw that in Israel, you saw it in the U.K., you saw it through the American nursing home data. It’s pretty clear. Okay. The problem is it doesn’t last, and the last month in Israel the data is horrific.

BUCK: Yeah, tell us about this, ’cause people believe… The thing we hear — and Clay and I are looking at this stuff every day from the news cycle perspective. You hear, it’s good at least six to eight months is what they’ve been saying. That’s what the narrative has been.

ALEX: Okay. First of all, let’s say it’s good six to eight months. How did that about something that we all have to take for the rest of our lives?

CLAY: And your point… Sorry, before we get to Israel. Your point based on the data that you are seeing would suggest that instead of being a traditional vaccine like measles, mumps, and rubella, what you’re effectively saying is this is more akin to a flu shot where you’re going to have to get it every year forever, and it provides some measure of protection, but it’s not the equivalent of, “Hey, you’re never gonna get chicken pox, for instance.”

ALEX: That’s right but it’s also much more dangerous than a flu shot. Anybody who looks at the data is gonna agree to that okay the side effects are off the charts compared to the flu shot. Even if you only talk about the myocarditis risk and the venous science thrombosis risk with the J&J vaccine. No 19-year-old dropped dead of venous sinus thrombosis after getting a flu shot. It does not happen, okay? So these are —

BUCK: And that has happened —

ALEX: Yes!

BUCK: When you talk about myocarditis, what kind of numbers we talking about? ‘Cause they’ll say 160 million have gotten the shot in this country. If 50 people got myocarditis, they’ll just —

ALEX: It’s not like that. So, again, we have better data out of Israel.

CLAY: Explain. Sorry to cut you off. Explain that Israel data, for people out there.

ALEX: Okay.

CLAY: What are you seeing? ‘Cause Israel’s ahead of us in terms of vaccinating their people. For those listeners who may not be aware, what are you are seeing from that data?

ALEX: That’s right. So the two countries that were more aggressive than the U.S., significantly more, were Israel and the U.K. And the data is cleaner out of Israel for a couple of reasons. First of all, the U.K. used a lot of AstraZeneca which we don’t use here. U.K. also did this weird thing where they didn’t go with the regular vaccine schedule. In other words, in the clinical trials it was one dose and then a second dose, three weeks later for Pfizer, four week or so later for Moderna.

U.K. didn’t do that. They wanted to get as many people to have one dose as possible. In Israel they only use Pfizer which the mRNA vaccine which more people in the U.S. have gotten and they did it on the… We’ll say correct. They did it on the correct schedule. So the data is more comparable to the U.S. data.

Second of all, Israel’s relatively small, and they’ve been collecting data on a daily basis and releasing it since before the vaccine started. Okay? And they do it in a pretty transparent way. It’s not as transparent as I would like, but it’s pretty transparent. It is far, far more transparent and honest than the data we get in the U.S.

And they’re in front of us. As I said, they started before us. So Israel actually was saying that young men — who are at the highest risk for myocarditis — appear to have about a one in 3,000 to one in 6,000 risk of clinically significant myocarditis. Now, that may not sound like that much, but those young men have essentially zero risk if they’re healthy from covid and there’s a second point. There’s a point that does not get understood here, okay?

It’s not likely that one in 3,000 people is having risk-for-myocarditis bad enough to go to the hospital and the other 2999 are having nothing happen to them. Okay? It is likely that a significant number of people are having changes in their heart function that are real but are not bad enough to send you to the hospital. And we don’t know how many people that might be because the companies didn’t do any work in the clinical trials that might help us with that.

BUCK: Alex, we want to return to this with you in a second, and also I want to pose to you and for everyone listening just the narrative right now from the Biden administration on down is get the shot, you’re fine; it’s over. If you don’t get the shot, you’re a barbarian who basically, you get what you deserve.

ALEX: Yeah.

BUCK: I mean, it’s very clear that’s what they’re saying.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: Okay, Alex, I want to ask you this question. Right now, we are being told that if every single person in the entire United States got the covid vaccine, that covid would be over, that people who are unvaccinated are the only reason why covid still exists. Based on the data that you see in Israel and in England, is that true? And if not, what does the future look like right now?

ALEX: No. I mean, that’s demonstrably untrue. In Israel 95% of people over 80 are vaccinated, 90-plus percent of people over 60 are vaccinated, and 85% of people over 30 are vaccinated. Fully vaccinated, two doses, two weeks. Fully vaccinated, okay? That is above the levels that we were told would lead to herd immunity. It’s as you close to full vaccination as you can reasonably hope for.

The number of infections in Israel has increased more than tenfold in the last month. There are 3,000 to 4,000 a day. This is a country of nine million people, okay? So you gotta multiply that by 30 plus to get to U.S. numbers. That’s over a hundred thousand infections a day, the last few days, the equivalent. More concerning even than that is: The number of people who are in critical care, seriously ill, in Israel has increased tenfold in the last month, to 250. So, again, Israel had this period of time late April through mid-June when basically it looked like the epidemic was over there.

CLAY: It looked like the vaccines were working flawlessly and it was gonna vanish.

ALEX: That is right. They dropped all the restrictions. You can find all the articles from all the people who criticized me talking about how great the situation was in Israel, how this was the future if you got everyone vaccinated. The vaccines don’t last! It is just abundantly clear. The data in the U.K. is the same, although it doesn’t repeat itself; it rhymes. But it’s roughly the same.

BUCK: So in this country right now going back to the narrative that’s all being jammed down our throats all the time by the generally Democrat-aligned corporate media —

ALEX: Yep.

BUCK: — is that the only reason we still have covid-19, really, is because of Delta being more efficient at spread and unvaccinated people. Sounds like you’re tell us that even if they didn’t have those bad unvaccinated — you’re talking to two of them right now, those unvaccinated — people out there, there would still be but is it then the situation that they don’t want to be honest about that with the public because they don’t want to get to 100% vaccination and then tell us there will be boosters? Is that what we’re heading for?

ALEX: I can’t guess at the motive. I’ll say this, okay, when you look at the Israeli data there is one thing that they’re sort of clinging to, this idea that vaccines still prevent or lower the risk of severely illness and death, okay? And it is clear, actually, right now from the Israeli data that people who haven’t been vaccinated are at higher risk of severe illness and death than those people who are vaccinated.

Even though vaccinated people make up far more of the overall number who are severely ill, because that pool is so small of unvaccinated people, those people do appear to be at higher risk. But now I gotta take it down one more level. The people who are unvaccinated in Israel, especially the older people, are probably people who are — or many of them are people who are — too sick to be vaccinated to begin with, right?

So if you’re vaccinating 95% of people over eighty, it’s not like some 88-year-old is saying, “I don’t want this thing.” No, they’re probably just too sick to get it and that means that’s probably why they seem to be at higher risk or at least part of the reason. What I’m saying is you add it all up, okay? The country that did the best job with the mRNA vaccinations has a serious crisis on its hands right now

It is talking about going back into lockdown for the Jewish holidays in September. Okay? That is the fact. However much they want to scream about Mississippi and Florida which has a national average vaccination rate, by the way, how much they want to scream about people like me, they can’t get around that fact.

CLAY: It’s never going away, right? That’s the big takeovers here.

ALEX: It’s never going away. Never.

CLAY: And so this is going to be endemic for years and years to come. That’s what people need to prepare themselves for.

ALEX: Let me tell you one thing. It doesn’t… It looks like if you get it and you recover from it —

CLAY: Which Buck and I both did, by the way.

ALEX: — you are very unlikely to get it again.

CLAY: That’s a shining light in terms of natural immunity.

ALEX: That’s right. Natural immunity appears significantly superior to vaccine-generated immunity, and there’s good biological reasons to think that’s the case: Because your body reacts to the whole coronavirus. The vaccine only tells you about one small part of it. And if the virus changes in that part, your body’s not gonna recognize it.

BUCK: Alex, we’re gonna come back here in a second ’cause I want to talk to you about T-cell immunity. But also we’re here in New York City, and there are vaccine mandates that they’re about to put into effect. This is the tip of the spear of tyranny, unfortunately.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: Alex, Clay wants to establish a lot of things about how you’re not anti-vax, and I want to get that in. Can I just ask you, though: The people who say on the vaccine that you’re wrong. What do they say, and why are they wrong? I mean, get to the criticisms first because right now, as you know, there are people who just know they’re supposed to oppose you.

ALEX: (chuckles) Right.

BUCK: That’s all they think about.

ALEX: So, you know, a couple months ago they had an easier case, right? It was sort of like, “Well, look at Israel. There’s no cases. Look at the U.K. There’s no cases.” So, back then the argument would be sort of about, “Look, there’s all these side effects,” which, by the way, we’re not even talking about side effects any more. We’re just talking about whether this thing works at all, okay?

So that idea that the vaccines are gonna end up the epidemic, that they are going to return life to normal by themselves? That’s gone. I think Delta has ended that. Now, that doesn’t mean we can’t get back to normal. We can get back to normal whenever we want! There is no evidence that this thing is gonna cause — that covid or any of the variants — is gonna cause health system collapse.

That was the whole point 18 months ago, “15 days to flatten the curve,” 15 days so that if you got in a car accident, there would be a hospital bed for you. The day the hospital ships left New York City, New York Harbor in April/late March — or I guess it’s late April — of last year, that argument should have ended. New York was the worst hit city basically major city in the world.

And it was a terrible time, and Cuomo made bad decisions and it got worse because of the nursing homes. It got worse ’cause they overventilated people. Nonetheless, the hospital system in New York City did not collapse. There were no mass graves. There was no people being cared for in tents in Central Park. It didn’t happen. This thing is not bad enough to destroy our society.

Only we can do that to ourselves. Okay? This ends when we say it ends. It doesn’t end because of vaccines. And the problem — and we were talking about this a little bit during the break is there are so many people who’ve been so frightened because all they do is watch CNN. They have no idea who really gets very sick from this. They have no idea who really dies from it.

They have no idea what the numbers really are. They’ve been lied to for 18 months, they were told the vaccines were gonna save them and, you know, get us all back to the hot back summer. Now that’s been taken from them, and they are looking to blame somebody. They are looking to blame me. They should be blaming the people who told them the vaccines were the way out of this, when that was never true.

CLAY: Okay. I think this is significant — and thank you. We’re talking to Alex Berenson in studio, Clay Travis, Buck Sexton. You are not anti-vaccine.

ALEX: That’s true.

CLAY: I want to make this clear, because there is this idea that if you ask questions about the covid vaccine, it means you question the legitimacy of all vaccines. That’s different. You have young children. You just took your kids to go get their vaccines.

ALEX: That’s right. Well, and I said this last week and I wasn’t clear. People said, “You got your daughter vaccinated against covid?” No, I got her vaccinated against MMR and DTaP. That was our two-year well child visit she got the shots.” Let me tell you, she doesn’t like the shots.

CLAY: Yes.

ALEX: She got the shots and now she doesn’t have to worry about those things.

CLAY: Ever again.

ALEX: Basically, ever again. And one of these things people sayis, “Oh, yeah, the measle vaccines fails.” Yeah, after 25 years if you’re exposed to somebody with measles and you’re in the same room with them for an hour, okay? If the covid vaccine did that, sign me up, okay? Unfortunately, it doesn’t do that. We went at warp speed. I said this on Twitter. Now I can’t say anything on Twitter because I’m banned. “You want it bad; you get it bad.” We wanted this bad, and we got something that doesn’t really work as promised.

BUCK: How could we not know if boosters are required?

ALEX: (chuckling) That’s right.

BUCK: There will be a news story that will say, “Booster getting approval, booster here, booster there.” Well, shouldn’t that be known? If we have a strategy to end this thing or if we have a strategy to handle this, if the Biden administration’s doing such a great job which is what we were told, shouldn’t we already know, Alex, if you’re gonna need a booster shot for this? Do they kind of already know but they just don’t want to talk about it? What’s going on with that?

ALEX: That’s a fascinating question. If you look back at Moderna — and the companies have played this so brilliantly. They were talking about boosters back in January. The companies were much, much smarter. I mean they are smarter, they have more money, much smarter than the public health authorities. They have let the public health authorities do the hard work for them the whole time.

So, I mean, if you told people, “Yeah, guess what? You’re gonna be on a treadmill with this vaccine for the rest of your life — and, by the way, we don’t know what the side effects for a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh dose are gonna look like. And, by the way, we don’t know how long immunity is gonna last with each booster.

“Will it get short with each booster or will it get longer with each booster? Who knows! And, by the way, we don’t even know that these vaccines actually reduce deaths, okay?” It’s never been proven in a clinical trial. You can look at the real world data and say, “Yeah, it looks like they reduced deaths for a time,” again, for a time. But it has not been proven in a clinical trial that these reduce deaths.

BUCK: How certain are we on the question of Delta variant versus vaccine failure as the cause of the surge right now? Is it just the unvaccinated are getting whacked with Delta all over the place or what?

ALEX: No. Again — and this is a really complicated. There’s like immunology in this question. There’s a very complicated technical questions here that are sort of above my pay grade. But smart people I talk to say it looks to them like it’s not that the Delta variant is so much worse. It’s that the vaccines happen to be failing now.

CLAY: The timing of it more than anything else.

ALEX: That’s right.

CLAY: Okay. So you are right now suspended from Twitter for seven days.

ALEX: Yes. Yes.

CLAY: This is the first time you’ve been suspended during the 18 months?

ALEX: No, I was… So since the Biden administration had that press conference, since Jen Psaki put the list of 12 names and mentioned that —

CLAY: Yes.

ALEX: — which I don’t think I was on. But since she said that, Twitter has been much, much harsher to me. So Twitter suspended me for 12 hours, they suspended me for 12 hours again, and then last week they suspended me for a week. And they suspended me for a week for a tweet that did nothing but report the results of Pfizer’s pivotal clinical trial about the vaccine. I pointed out — correctly; no one has said my information is wrong because it’s not — that 15 people who received the vaccine died and 14 people who received placebo died in that clinical trial. Not of covid, of all causes.

CLAY: Right.

ALEX: Okay? So if you’re hoping that the vaccine reduces all-cause mortality, that it actually prevents death — which is the whole point of all this, I thought — you cannot find that data in that clinical trial. And that is the trial that is the reason these vaccines got the emergency-use authorization.

CLAY: So what happens? Do you think that Twitter is going to ban you? And if they do, how would you tell people…? Obviously they’re listening to you on the radio show right now. But how would you tell people to be able to consume what you put out?

ALEX: So the best way to find me right now is on Substack. Again, it’s sort of a new platform. It’s called Substack. S-u-b-s-t-a-c-k. You just put my name in, Alex Berenson, and you’ll find me. AlexBerenson.Substack.com. You can sign up for free, you know, almost 100,000 people have now signed up mostly just in the last couple of weeks. People are clearly aware that I’m on very thin ice on Twitter.

You can also pay. Basically, you’re gonna get the same content if you pay or if you don’t. In fact, I’ve been, frankly, shocked how many people are willing to pay. They clearly they think that what I’m doing has some value. And so they’re paying for what they can get mostly for free. Which is —

CLAY: Want to support your work on some level.

BUCK: Full disclosure: I pay for your Substack, so I’m sitting here as one of them; so there you go.

ALEX: Thank you, Buck. So assuming Twitter lets me back on tomorrow, I am gonna figure out what my options are. Because I’m not gonna tweet with a sword hanging over my head. I’m gonna tweet what I want to tweet, and I need to make sure that Twitter’s aware of that. And if they’re not okay with that, then I guess I have to consider my legal options.

BUCK: Another thing that we are told, and it’s one of these… It’s like the hamster hitting the pedal to get the little pellet, you know what I mean? It’s just this is your response that’s supposed to be, “If you get the shot, you’re going to basically just be fine.”

ALEX: Yeah.

BUCK: Even if you show up. ‘Cause originally they did say that it was gonna prevent transmission —

ALEX: Right.

BUCK: — and now they’ve gone back on that.

ALEX: That’s right.

BUCK: That is a fact. That is a reality. This data out of Cape Cod, the big party and the Delta variant.

ALEX: Yep, yep. Right.

BUCK: And now, “Okay. Well, now you can get it,” and in fact, there were headlines a few days ago saying that if you have a breakthrough infection you’re actually as likely to transmit it as somebody.

ALEX: Yes.

BUCK: Which, again, seems like a complete moving of the goalposts on this. But it sounds like what you’re telling us is that it’s just not really provable? I mean, do you believe that it’s not the case that for anybody, that if you get the shot, whoever you are, whoever you may be, you’re much less likely to end up in the hospital and/or die from this from covid? Is that really it? Is that where we are now pretty definitively, based on the data?

ALEX: No. That’s a little bit of an overstatement.

BUCK: That’s too much. Where are we on it?

ALEX: The really smart people who are not, you know, Fauci, are not sort of like you have to get the vaccine tomorrow who look at the data. Where they disagree with me is they would say it still looks like there’s decent efficacy here against severe illness and death. If you look at the clinical trial, what the clinical trial did show is that in this group of people — this group of relatively healthy people who they tested the vaccine on, there were fewer cases of what they called severe illness — which wasn’t actually that severe. It was basically, for most people, having low oxygen. But okay. That’s actually good. That’s good. There’s two problems with that. One is, again, it’s this problem of how long does it last? So you do have this period where you get some protection, protection against infection and everything else.

BUCK: What I meant is, if the vaccine fails, is that then…? Do we know?

ALEX: So my position on this and what I said to them, to the smart people I talk to is, “You’re assuming that you can have partial failure and still have protection,” and I don’t see great evidence for that in the real-world data.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: Buck and I, Alex, have been saying, “Hey,” to our parents, “you should go get the vaccine.”

ALEX: Yes.

CLAY: If you’re over 65 years old, you look at the data, the mortality is much higher for older people. Even with concerns about the vaccine, would you tell people 65 and over to get it?

ALEX: Yeah, absolutely. I said that all along. My mother months ago asked me if she should. She told me she was gonna get it. I said, “That’s good. Go get it. You’re 70…” Well, I’m not gonna say how old she is. But, yeah, she —

BUCK: She doesn’t look a day over 50, by the way.

ALEX: Exactly.

CLAY: I always thought she looks fantastic for her age.

ALEX: (laughing) Exactly. So, anyway, yes. And even now with sort of somewhat depressing data out of Israel, it still looks like the vaccines are a better bet than not for older people. And I’ve never been in this camp these people 5G and graphene oxide and this is a depopulation campaign. One of the reasons the Fauci-ites and my old employer at the Times hate me so much is you can’t dismiss me as a conspiracy nut because I’m not a conspiracy nut.

CLAY: You’re looking at the data and allowing it to tell a story.

ALEX: That’s right.

CLAY: One more question on the data here. We got a lot of this, people reaching out. Why do we not know how many people have natural immunity?

ALEX: (laughing) Yeah.

CLAY: ‘Cause there’s a positive side here which is natural immunity, like Buck and I have, ’cause we both got covid seems to provide the best possible immunity going forward. Yet we don’t know how many people actually have had covid the United States. We have poor studies.

BUCK: Two-thirds basically of Indians have had covid right now.

ALEX: That’s right, and that’s up from like 10% at this time last year.

CLAY: And 92% in England have either had covid or they’ve had the vaccine. We don’t know those numbers in the United States.

ALEX: That’s right. Again, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but that’s one of those questions that doesn’t have a good answer, like why haven’t they told us how many people have gotten this and recovered? We should have been doing those studies. I mean, you can find tweets from me saying we need to it’s called a serology study.

CLAY: Serology studies.

ALEX: Again, 17 now months ago back in April of 2020 —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: I mean, New York back when they did it in, I think it was, June 2020 said it was 20%. And that was now well over a year ago, and that was before the huge wave we had through the winter where we had the all-time records hitting. So clearly there should be a greater interest in that. But I want to know what you think now. Let’s say we could get Alex Berenson to walk into the Biden Oval Office right now and they would have to listen. They would have to hear you out. What do you think they should do right now?

ALEX: I mean, it’s completely clear what they should do. They should encourage the sort of rump of people who are at high risk and haven’t been vaccinated be vaccinated. That’s older people — and, listen, if you’re 400 pounds you probably should. Although —

CLAY: Obesity is a big factor.

ALEX: Oh, it’s a huge factor.

CLAY: And it hasn’t been talked about that much.

ALEX: Yes, that’s exactly right. So, listen. Fauci was around for HIV. And in the eighties, the infectious disease specialists lied. They said, “You can get this in you’re a heterosexual woman and you have sex with the wrong guy one time, you can get this.” They knew they were lying. They were afraid the disease would be stigmatized. And something like that is happening on a much broader level with much bigger consequences right now. So there’s several things we should do. We should encourage those people who are not vaccinated to be vaccinated.

CLAY: The elderly and high-risk. Yes.

ALEX: That’s right. That’s right. We should figure out what multiple doses mean and what they look like, ’cause those people, it looks like, are gonna need to be vaccinated again.

CLAY: A third time and maybe more, maybe years and years.

ALEX: Why would you assume that the third dose is the one that fixes everything for them? Okay. The second thing they need to do is just turn down the fear. Drop the masks! They don’t work. They don’t do anything. Just let everybody live, okay? Fifteen years ago, a really good paper about this by the guy who did more to eradicate smallpox than anyone else in the world, said, “Get back to normal. Communities function better when people have normal life,” and, three, get the schools open normally, period.

CLAY: No masks.