BUCK: We’ve got our friend Alex Berenson with us right now to make sense of the latest data and numbers — the man who is right no matter how much they claim otherwise — author of Pandemia, a great book you should pick up and please subscribe to his Substack. I am a subscriber as is Clay. Thanks so much for being here, Alex.
BERENSON: Always a pleasure Buck.
BUCK: Okay. So Clay just read something out right before you came on to add into all this which was all-time high in nationwide hospitalizations for covid. Now, we know that the hospitalization data is funky and has to be looked at to begin with. That’s been talked about openly recently. But the fact that it’s an all-time high is also a big indicator of something. What the heck is going on?
BERENSON: Well, we are. It is a very confusing moment. There is an enormous amount of Omicron out there. It is not clear how understated the testing is right now, but it’s massively understated. So one place you can look is actually wastewater. Not to be too graphic about this, but covid is found in wastewater, and the amount of it rises as more and more people get infected. And one city that looks at this or one region, state that looks at this pretty hard is Massachusetts.
And the Massachusetts wastewater data is off the charts. It is incredible how many people are infected with Omicron right now, and that makes the hospitalization data really hard to figure out in some ways because so many people are getting incidental diagnoses. If there were a really, really serious problem with Omicron, you’d see the hospitals be overrun. Not just the covid numbers going up but the hospital as a whole.
And we’re not seeing that, right? What we’re seeing is that there are staffing shortages in hospitals and that some hospitals returned sort of temporary pressure, but we’re not seeing the idea that hospitals are collapsing. So that’s a good thing, right? It suggests that there’s a ton of Omicron out there but that the system is still functioning. But there’s other data that that’s also confusing. There’s just… There is a lot right now. We’re kind of in the middle of this unprecedented surge, and I think it’s gonna take a little while to go to the where we wind up.
CLAY: There’s a bunch that we need to unpack, Alex. Thanks for joining us. But I want to start here. Did you see — I imagine you did — the Pfizer CEO come out and effectively say that there was no benefit whatsoever to the first and the second shot of the covid vaccine against Omicron? I think his quote was limited, if any, protection against Omicron.
BUCK: Against infection.
BERENSON: I did (chuckles), and in fact, I wrote a Substack about this which I published this morning because it’s fascinating what he said, okay? He actually said even more than that. He said that protection against the hospitalizations and the severe disease was, quote-unquote, “reasonable right now” if you’d had a third dose.
CLAY: Yes.
BERENSON: Okay? So he’s not saying it’s effective against hospitalizations and severe disease if you’ve had a third dose. He’s saying it’s “reasonable right now,” and then simultaneously — this is really fascinating — he said, “We need to see about a fourth dose.” So what’s he saying? He’s saying, “You know what? To the extent this protects you at all” and I’m talking about a third dose” it’s probably not gonna protect you for very long.”
(cell drops)
CLAY: Did we lose Alex there?
BUCK: Oh no.
CLAY: I think we might have lost him there for a minute.
BUCK: Is this some kind of Fauci conspiracy? Is he (impression) “pulling him off the air”?
CLAY: Are we gonna have to quiz the FBI like Ted Cruz did to find out whether they were involved in knocking our boy Alex off the air?
BUCK: This is what happens when you question the science, Clay.
CLAY: It might have been Pfizer. He’s laying out the Pfizer vaccine from the CEO and next thing you know we lose Alex. And, by the way, we should reiterate, for those people who are out there: A new covid hospitalization record has been set. We’ll get Alex back in a minute. You know that they’re running scared, Buck, because I talked to you about this off air. CNN reached out to me — we’ve got Alex back — to fact check some of my covid tweets.
BUCK: You can tell CNN they can reach out to me on your behalf, and I have one finger to extend in their direction.
CLAY: (laughing)
BUCK: But, Alex, what’s going on?
BERENSON: So, yeah. So the Pfizer CEO — and I don’t know where we got cut off — is saying, “Even a third dose doesn’t work very well. Two doses doesn’t work at all. But I’m not gonna promise you that you should get a fourth dose.” Now, why on earth would he say that? My suspicion is he’s saying that because he’s worried about the side effects of repeated dosing because there is now data — good data — out of the U.K. showing that the myocarditis side effects double with each dose in young men.
And if that continues, at some point that’s gonna be obvious to everybody. There are other side effects that we’re concerned with that may also be dose dependent. So if you’re Albert Bourla, you made a lot of money selling the first and second dose. You made a lot of money selling the third dose. Now you have a drug, an antiviral, that seems to work pretty well — and you have a strain that seems less dangerous.
So what you might want to do at this moment is try to pivot out of the vaccine business in a gentle way so that you don’t get gored by side effects. And it wouldn’t surprise me at all if you hear a lot more about this from Pfizer in the next few months. Now, the other vaccine companies are all-in on vaccines. They don’t have any other products, but Pfizer has lots of other products.
BUCK: We’re speaking to Alex Berenson, author of Pandemia. Recommend you get this book while you can before they tell you, “You can’t read it!” They might ban it for being too accurate. Alex, the data right now — and we’ve been talking about it. You’ve been on with us; we were talking in July. You would say things, quite honestly, I’d say, “Ah, might get that one dinged on Facebook.” You’d say the vaccines don’t work very well.
And at that point there were very few people willing to say that. And people can go back and check our work on this from July and August. You were very open about this. Certainly, in August you were very open about this. And here we are now with the Pfizer CEO being like, “They don’t work that well,” like the guy all of a sudden telling us what we’ve known for a long time. But the data on hospitalization, the CDC right now is…
I can’t remember the exact number, but it’s effectively saying that vaccinated and boosted there’s almost no chance that you die from covid and a very, very, very small chance you’re getting hospitalized. But that doesn’t seem to track with what we’ve seen in other places. Are they playing games with full vaccination including booster versus just the two shots? How effective against hospitalization and death is this stuff really so far?
BERENSON: That is a great question, and the answer is (laughs) they are playing. They are playing games, yes. The number one game they’re playing… So they make in adjustment to the data. They adjust by the age of the vaccinated person. And their defense against this is — or their reason, their stated reason for doing this is — “We know if you’re older, you’re much, much more likely to die from covid,” which is something, by the way, that they completely lied about for the first year but now they admit. Okay. You’re much, much more likely to die from covid if you are older. Being older and morbidly obese, those are your risk factors of death from covid.
(cell drops)
CLAY: Did we lose him again?
BUCK: What is going on! The Fauci conspiracy continues, Clay.
CLAY: Let’s go to break here, Buck. We’ll bring him back and ask a couple more questions of our boy Alex Berenson, assuming that he hasn’t been put inside of a hood and tossed into the back of a car.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
CLAY: I believe we have with us right now Alex Berenson, unless Dr. Fauci has got him in the back of his car inside of the hood driving as fast as he can toward an offramp into the ocean.
BUCK: (impression) “Berenson has the right to remain silent.”
CLAY: Alex, by the way, I should mention this.
BERENSON: Buck your CIA is showing.
BUCK: Yeah. (laughing)
CLAY: Yeah. I should mention this, by the way, that Pfizer clip — Buck and I were talking about this off the air. The Pfizer clip — and we may have talked about it on air too — that I mentioned where it says it offers limited protection, if any. They made a copyright claim, so the video is no longer up on Twitter. I just went to check and see, and they have pulled the CEO’s comments that the vaccine provides limited protection if any. So if that’s not shady, I don’t know what is.
BERENSON: So, there’s always so much to talk about. I think this is a really, really crucial point, ’cause you always see these charts being put out about how protective the vaccines supposedly are, and you never see the raw data, okay, in the U.S. You cannot get a raw number on how many vaccinated people have died in the United States anymore — and that is a crazy, crazy fact. Okay, you just…
The CDC and the state health authorities put out these charts that seem to show the vaccines are really protective. And what I’m telling you is, they are making an adjustment that makes that essentially untrue, okay? What they’re doing is they’re adjusting by age and saying, “Well, so many more people die. Lots of vaccinated people are dying, but they’re all really old.”
But they’re not making a second adjustment that is even more important, and that is adjusting for the health status of the people or are or are not vaccinated, and what I am telling you — and this is very clear from the British data and places that are more honest about this — is that a lot of people who are not vaccinated and dying are extremely old, and they don’t get vaccinated because they can’t. They’re in hospice or they’re near hospice and they cannot be vaccinated. And those people bump-up the death number of the unvaccinated. And that is the number one lie, the number one way they lie with the data.
CLAY: Alex…
BERENSON: I keep saying this because it’s so crucial, and no one else will acknowledge it.
CLAY: Alex, yesterday — I’m sure you read it — the Wall Street Journal had an incredible editorial that dealt with whether the covid vaccine mandate should be upheld by the Supreme Court. But buried inside of that article was a paragraph — and I know you’ve talked about this a little bit — that there are preliminary studies that suggest that the vaccinated are actually under more risk to get Omicron than the people who are unvaccinated. In other words, we may have a pandemic of the vaccinated as opposed to a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
BERENSON: Yep.
CLAY: What do you think about that data? Does it comport with what you had seen, and how much legitimacy are the early numbers to be given from your perspective?
BERENSON: Yeah, no. I don’t want to pound my chest too much, but I actually think that the two guys who wrote that probably read my Substack (laughing) because the four papers they mentioned are four papers that I mentioned in a Substack article last week. So there’s data from Denmark and there’s data from the U.K., and it all points the same way. Actually, the Danish data is the worst. The Danish data says that you’re more than twice as likely to be infected with Omicron if you’re vaccinated more than 90 days prior. So that’s called negative efficacy. It means that the vaccine is driving infection.
BUCK: Alex, how could that even theoretically be possible? Just so we understand, how could it be? That just feels like that defies belief. People hearing that, I’m hearing them saying, “Wait a second.”
BERENSON: So the reason it’s possible is that the vaccine makes your body make a version of the spike protein, but that version of the spike protein is not the Omicron spike protein. The Omicron spike protein has mutated, and it looks a little bit different. So what that may mean is so then your body get exposed to Omicron, and it starts making a lot of antibodies, okay — a lot of different kinds of antibodies that hook up to that spike protein.
But if they hook up in a way that doesn’t exactly fit exactly as well as the antibodies would have fit on the original spike protein, they can actually help the spike protein enter your cells, okay? The worst version of that is called antibody-dependent enhancement. And that can mean that you’re actually getting much more serious disease, okay. Right now, we don’t have evidence of that. But we do have evidence that there’s some version of this happening where your protection against infection is actually negative. This is not science fiction. This is a real risk that was discussed months ago before it happened.
BUCK: Can we say for a second, Clay, imagine the implications of what that would mean: A forced mass vaccination campaign that might have made — might and possibly, we are couching all this — some people are more susceptible to infection. Not necessarily severe disease but infection.
CLAY: Which we might happen know about fully, Buck, for years, right? Because if this is true, it’s going to be something that they try to cover up to the best of their ability for years and years to come, certainly as long as Biden is in office.
BUCK: And it’s amazing to watch all this continue to unfold, and there’s still not really a particularly honest discussion about this. Alex, I want to ask you… I know we’ve only got a couple more minutes with you and you’re having some comms issues here on the line. But Fauci today was testifying, Walensky was testifying. Fauci was literally pulling his mask up and down depending on whether he’s answering or listening.
BERENSON: (laughing)
BUCK: Walensky is double masked up there. She’s triple vaxxed and double masked, and she’s alone speaking to the Senate. These people look like utter morons to anyone who can think for themselves, and I’m seeing now that the CDC is under serious consideration to mandate N95 masks, which is crazy — and, by the way, we know Germany did it and it did nothing. But what the heck is going on?
BERENSON: (laughing) Look, they’re like Inspector Gadget now. They’re just like slamming the control panel. It’s all a cartoon. Okay, I walk around in New York City, in New York state with no mask on anywhere and nobody says a word to me. Okay? You go down to Florida, it’s over. All we can hope is that Omicron, the people who are infected with it, do develop sort of long-term immunity to future variants whether or not they’ve been vaccinated.
Hopefully that will be the case. And if that’s the case, it doesn’t matter what they say. And especially if the vaccine companies and Pfizer — which is the most powerful of all — are concerned enough about sort of the risk of future shock that they don’t push them. This will all come to a crashing halt any number of months.
CLAY: Where do we go in the next month? That’s the question I think a lot of people have, Alex.
BERENSON: Well, yeah. So I gave you the best-case scenario.
BERENSON: The worst-case scenario is that the vaccines actually do interfere with development of natural immunity and that politically Biden and these idiots in the public health authorities will not let go. So I don’t know which way we go. But there definitely is an optimistic scenario here where Omicron is the end of this.
BUCK: I certainly hope so. Alex, where can people go to continue to support your work, read what you’ve been doing, and we do encourage everybody, go back to ClayandBuck.com in our transcripts. Go listen to what Alex was saying back in at least August if not July about this. But, Alex, where should folks go?
BERENSON: Yeah, go to Substack. You can sign up for free. You can pay but basically get the same product. I’m not in this for money. I’m in this to get as many people reading and getting to the truth as possible. And Pandemia is available on Amazon, on B&N.com. The book came out at the end of November. It was a best-seller, even though the only people who would talk about it are you guys and Tucker and Laura. But I do think the truth is getting out there. I think there are a lot of people out there who have gotten sick after being vaccinated and have seen their family members get this, and it’s pretty hard to trust that the vaccines work when you see for yourself that they don’t work. So, yeah, Substack or the book is called Pandemia.
CLAY: Outstanding stuff from Alex Berenson. Thanks to him, as always.