Berenson: Vaccines Have NEGATIVE EFFICACY vs. Omicron
BUCK: We have our friend Alex Berenson with us now as promised here on the Clay and Buck show. He is author of Pandemia, which is a best-seller, despite Big Tech trying to make it tough for him, ’cause it’s a great book. I’ve got my copy at home. Also subscribe to his Substack. Lots of reporting and analysis there. Mr. Alex Berenson, great to have you as always.
BERENSON: Thanks, Buck. Where’s Clay? Is he watching college basketball or something?
BUCK: Oh, he’s betting it all on lucky number seven in Vegas.
BERENSON: (laughing)
BUCK: He’s out there doing some sports stuff and he said, “Buck, I’m gonna throw you the keys to the Ferrari. You’re gonna drive it today solo.” And I said, “Sir, yes, sir.” So, here we are.
BERENSON: (laughing) All right.
BUCK: So, tell me this one. Because I see this; I got mixed feelings. On the one hand, Fauci as reappeared, as we just discussed before you came on, and he’s already saying, “You know, we’ve gotta be ready to go back to whatever level of mitigation,” and I just want to start screaming profanity when I hear that. I honestly want to completely lose my mind — and anybody who goes along with this, I want to yell at them too.
But here’s what we’ve got. Let’s look at the data. I know you sent this out in your most recent Substack and analysis of this. This is the New York Times: “In South Korea, a spike in covid cases meets a collective shrug — South Korea has reported its peak daily coronavirus infection number at 621,328 cases in a country of 50 million people.” So this would be like a few million cases in one day in America. What is going on here, Alex? ‘Cause they’re 90%-plus vaccinated in South Korea, they were so strict on the masking and everything, and now they’re having their, I believe — correct me if I’m wrong — all-time high caseload for South Korea for covid in one day.
BERENSON: Yes. And I mean and not just that, as far as I can tell — and you know I follow this pretty closely — this is the highest number that any major country has ever seen in terms of a percentage of its population in a single day. So, it’s the equivalent of four million cases. And this is not like, oh, you know, we grouped a month of testing and we reported in one day.
No, no. They had 400,000 the day before, they had 400,000 the day before that, then they had 600,000. They are — they are… Everyone in the country is getting Omicron. Okay. Here’s what’s happening. It’s very simple. (laughs) The mRNA vaccines not only offer no protection against Omicron after, you know, maybe two months after that, you know, you get your second dose, you get your booster dose.
It’s now pretty clear that not long after that they actually accelerate the transmission because they reduce your — they reduce your — protection from infection. So protection actually goes below zero, meaning you’re more likely to be infected if you’ve been vaccinated than not, with Omicron. And we could talk about why biologically that is, but (crosstalk)
BUCK: Can you put that…?
BERENSON: (crosstalk)
BUCK: This big thing, Alex… I got so many things. Can you try to put that in layman’s terms for us how that could possibly, because you hear that, I’m sure people’s heads are exploding. How could that even…? Let’s just assume — I mean, I’m sure people would argue and everything else. Let’s assume that’s true. How could it be true that the vaccines have negative efficacy?
BERENSON: Okay. So — and it is true, okay, the data is not just from South Korea or New Zealand or Canada or Britain or even the United States or Denmark. It’s from all these places. Okay? People who are vaccinated are getting infected more rapidly with Omicron. Okay. The reason probably is, almost certainly is the vaccines are very powerful. Okay?
They make you produce antibodies to the spike protein of the coronavirus. That’s what they do, okay. You get this RNA, your body produces all these spikes, your body then recognizes that there are these spikes in it and it needs to produce antibodies to it. Great. That’s what they do; that’s what they’re supposed to do. There’s only one problem. The spike has mutated.
The coronavirus has mutated. It has probably mutated directly as a result of the fact that the vaccines are so powerful in this way. So if you’re the virus and you’re not thinking this but you’re doing it anyway, you evolve away from the antibodies that all these vaccinated people have. So the Omicron spike is different. It looks different. You know, they can do this essentially modeling of what it looks like in a very, you know, complicated way.
It’s this tiny little thing, but they can predict what it’s gonna look like, and it doesn’t look the same. That means that the antibodies that your body has made, not all of them work as well against it as they did against the original spike, okay, if you’ve been vaccinated. And you don’t have any other antibodies. Here’s the other thing, Buck.
If you’re not vaccinated against the coronavirus and you get the coronavirus, once you beat it, your antibodies can spike. You also have antibodies for other parts of the coronavirus. That’s how natural immunity works. None of those people who got vaccinated have antibodies to the other parts of the coronavirus until they get infected with the coronavirus itself, and maybe not even then because these vaccines have wrong-footed our immune system.
BUCK: That’s a stunning… I mean, obviously people are going to flip out about this, Alex, but you’re no stranger to that. But I would want to know. I mean, let me just… So everyone listening to this can have a sense, a full-spectrum sense of the argument, try to tell us — and I know this is… (laughs) I almost can’t say this out loud. Fauci and the rest are talking about the need — forget about mitigation measures for a second, but there’s still a talk about shot number four.
And you just had I think it was Moderna, shot number four emergency authorization for everybody. How can they tell us — when South Korea is over 90% as an entire country vaccinated and somehow hitting an all-time high caseload for covid right now — that the shots are a good idea at this point? Like, what’s the Fauci explanation?
BERENSON: So, so, they’re gonna say two things, okay? And the things are true, but they don’t change the overall picture that I’m painting for you. They’re gonna say, A, “If you get that fourth shot your antibodies are gonna go back up.” That’s true. Okay, so what happens is you get the first shot and the second shot and after the second shot you have a ton of antibodies, more antibodies than that you would have and you’d be infected and recovered.
Your body actually doesn’t want to have that many in your body so it very rapidly cuts them down, and in a few months, you don’t have to more antibodies than you would have after natural infection — and again, you don’t have the same diversity to anybody, okay? So then they boost you; your antibodies go back up. If they boost you again, they’ll go up again.
The problem is the same thing happens again. Your antibodies go right back down. Okay? And you don’t get another kind of protection in the same way following vaccination. You don’t get what’s called cellular immunity, okay? You don’t get the same breadth of T-cell response. Again, it gets really complicated, but your listeners are gonna have to believe me on this. There’s tons of data on it.
So what these people will tell you is, we think/hope that if we give you another shot, it’s gonna improve the… (sigh) what’s called the efficacy of your antibodies, they’re gonna become more mature, they’re gonna become better at attacking all kinds of spikes. That earns really good evidence for that. It’s more a hope that they have. Okay. They have to tell you something. What’s really…
What they’re really trying to do is just buy a couple months, okay? They’re really just trying to jack your antibodies up again so that if you’re infected in the short term, you have so many antibodies that even though they’re not sort of optimized against this spike, enough of them will work against the spike that you’ll have some protection against serious disease and death. That’s really all they are hoping to do at this point, and anybody who says otherwise is essentially lying.
BUCK: Here is also from this New York Times piece about South Korea having a huge spike in cases right now, everybody, just so everyone’s on the same page here. “‘Everyone used to be hush-hush about getting infected, like you were causing a nuisance,’ said … a bartender who owns two cocktail bars in central Seoul… He added: ‘The perception is it’s like getting a cold.'”
Okay. This is in the New York Times. So I know they’re just citing some random person, but the perception in South Korea and they’re choosing to highlight this is it’s like getting a cold at this point. Well, if that’s true why are they still…? I mean, New York City has employment mandate shots still, and they’re talking about bringing back more shots in the fall.
BERENSON: Right. So all these people, they’re sort of caught between all the lies, okay. So Omicron… The one thing they have going for them is that Omicron is less virulent than Delta was or the original wild-type virus was, okay. So a lot of people — especially younger people, healthier people — they, yes, get it. Everyone gets it. I think we all know that now. Everyone, boosted or not, vaccinated or not, gets Omicron.
Most of, if you’re young, you basically don’t have much problem with it, right, most of the time. And these people want to pretend that’s because of the vaccines. It’s not true. It’s just because most — and when I say young, I really mean under 70 or so. If you’re not morbidly obese, you’re not gonna have that much trouble with Omicron, okay? So the smart thing to do would just be essentially to let this fade out, okay?
To do what the South Koreans are doing, just to say, “You know what? Everyone’s gonna get it, and there’s not much we can do about it at this point.” But for whatever reason, they’re — Fauci, these people, they’re — not there yet, and it’s partly their own fault. It’s largely their own fault, because… Because the vaccines don’t work, there’s so many cases right now worldwide and in the United States, there’s still a lot of deaths.
They’re at a level that we were told was unacceptable when Donald Trump was president. So they can’t just say, “You know what?” like, “Yes, 30,000 people a month are dying with/from covid — and, yes, there’s all these infections. But, no, we can’t do anything about it. We tried, we failed, we just have to live with this going forward.” They’re not… I guess politically it is impossible to say that.
So they’re promoting this thing so that anybody who looks at the data in a broad way can see does not work. Okay? You have to look at the worldwide numbers, and you have to look at countries that are really highly vaccinated. Whether it’s South Korea or Denmark or the U.K., there’s a lot of countries that are more highly vaccinated than the United States, and they have tons of infections and lots of deaths right now. The mRNA vaccines have failed.
BUCK: Wow.
BERENSON: They were a nice idea, but they don’t work biologically as we hoped.
BUCK: Alex Berenson, everybody, subscribe to his Substack and get your copy of Pandemia. Alex, always appreciate it. We’ll talk to you again soon.
BERENSON: Let’s talk soon, Buck.