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July 22, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:00
They’re Going To Tell You To Mask Again. No. | Ep. 1302
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Time Text
The Biden administration considers a new mask push even for the vaccinated.
My answer is no.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alrighty, so we are seeing a new push in the media among the intelligentsia for remasking.
Remasking is the thing right now for the vaccinated and for the unvaccinated.
And this, frankly, is unsupportable.
It is not supportable by the evidence.
The reason that it is unsupportable by the evidence is because the reality is that we do have a pandemic that continues to harm people if you are unvaccinated.
If you are vaccinated, however, then this thing really is no longer of serious concern to you.
It is not particularly dangerous to you.
And we are seeing this in the statistics.
So, for example, here is a chart from the United Kingdom.
Okay, this chart from the United Kingdom.
Shows a large-scale difference between the second wave and the third wave.
What it shows is cases versus deaths over days 1 through 50 of the UK's second and third COVID waves.
Now typically what happens with regard to these COVID waves is that you have a wave of diagnoses and then about two weeks later you have a wave of death because it takes people a little while to die from COVID.
So during the second wave, for example, you can see cases versus deaths over days 1 through 50 of the of the second wave, you saw that on day one, there were 3.3 cases per 100,000 population, and then there was 1.5 deaths per 10 million population. By day 50, about 33 cases per 100,000 population in Britain, and 36 deaths per 10 million population. So you see that the cases and the deaths start to mirror each other fairly quickly.
And now take a look at these stats from the third wave, meaning after there's been mass vaccination in the United Kingdom.
And what you see is that at the beginning, it looks kind of similar.
You have 3.4 cases per 100,000 population and 1.3 deaths per 10 million population.
And then as the cases exponentially increase, the deaths continue to be extremely low.
So by the end, when you get to day 50, Reminder, in the second wave, Day 50, you had 33 cases per 100,000 population and 36 deaths per 10 million population.
In the third wave, you have 33 cases, same thing, 33.6 cases per 100,000 population and 2.1 deaths per 10 million population.
In other words, we have cut down on the death rate in Great Britain by about 12-fold.
Which takes this thing down below the rate of death from the flu.
And the reason for that is because the people who now are getting this tend to be younger, tend to be healthier.
People who are older have gotten mass vaccinated.
This is true in every industrialized country in which vaccination has taken place.
People who are older and more vulnerable have taken the vaccine.
We have people in our office who have not taken the vaccine.
The reason they usually give is because one, they think that they already had COVID, or they were tested and they already had COVID, and so they think they have natural immunity.
Or two, and usually both, two, they're very young.
And so they tend to look around and say, okay, I'm 21 years old.
My chances of dying from this thing are not particularly high.
Okay, so even if they get it, they're really not dying from it.
Not nearly in the same numbers that people were dying before.
Now, in absolute numbers, could you see a lot of death among people who are young?
Sure, because the Delta variant is significantly more transmissible than the original variant.
The wild type variant.
The wild type variant was transmissible, the R was something like 2 or 3.
The R, meaning the reproduction rate on this thing, is like six.
Meaning that, basically, if you're a human being, you have two choices right now.
Any human being, you have two choices.
One, you can get the vaccine.
Or two, you can get COVID.
You are going to get immunity one way or the other.
Okay, so that is up to you because you're a free, independent human being.
And again, we've done a pretty tremendous job in the West of making sure that people who are the most vulnerable have already had the vaccine.
There are people now who are thinking about vaccinating or weren't vaccinating before because people react rationally to risk reward calculations.
And this is what the data show.
Okay, so there's an article today in ABC News about a large-scale increase of cases, hospitalizations being seen in, for example, Northeastern Florida.
According to ABC News, UF Health Jacksonville, in Florida's most populous city, has seen an exponential rise in the number of COVID-19 patients admitted in recent weeks, according to Chad Nielsen, Director of Infection Prevention at the hospital.
The previous record for the highest number of daily COVID-19 patients across both of its campuses, 125, was set in January. The hospital currently has 136 people who are hospitalized, about 40 people in the ICU. Last week there were 75 COVID patients in the hospital, 45 the week before and 20 the week before that. According to Nielsen, we knew it was most likely due to the Delta variant taking a bigger footprint here in the northeastern Florida region because it was so rapid of an increase everyone in town is suffering the same fate that we are.
At the Mayo Clinic's Jacksonville Hospital, there's been a significant increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations over the past three weeks, approaching our previous peak number, says Dr. Ken Thielen, CEO of Mayo Clinic in Florida.
He said this is a five-fold increase in COVID hospitalizations and follows many weeks when we only had a handful of hospitalized COVID patients.
But here are the stats that matter.
You ready?
Among UF Health's Jacksonville's COVID-19 patients, 90% are unvaccinated.
90% are unvaccinated.
In other words, the number of people who are getting the vaccines and then they're having a breakthrough infection is very low.
And the number of people who are getting hospitalized is really, really, really low.
And the number of people who are dying after being vaccinated is super duper duper low.
However, if you're unvaccinated, the disease treats you the same way that it would have treated you back in January or back in November or back in the prior March.
We have better ways of treating you now.
We figured out, for example, that we're not going to vet you.
We figured out that we're not going to put you on your back.
But you are still facing a very similar level of risk to what you were facing in January.
Even though it is now July, you're facing a very similar level of risk if you are unvaccinated the same way you were in January.
The virus has changed a little bit, but it hasn't changed in its deadliness.
It's only changed in its transmissibility.
According to Tom Van Astel, the president and CEO of Ascension Florida and Gulf Coast, which operates a hospital in Jacksonville, over 96% of its COVID-19 patients are unvaccinated.
He says, our median age of hospitalized patients is 49.
It was in the mid 60s in prior waves of the pandemic.
It's a younger demographic who are not getting vaccinated.
Unfortunately, they're contracting COVID.
These cases are requiring hospitalization for treatment.
Now, also the rates of death after hospitalization are way down from what they were at the beginning of the pandemic.
At the beginning of the pandemic, if you went to the hospital, there was a pretty decent shot that you were going to die.
Now, if you go to the hospital, less of a shot that you're going to die.
The movement from hospitalization to ICU to death is a lot more attenuated.
At Baptist Health in Jacksonville, the COVID-19 patients are younger, sicker, and getting sicker quickly, said Chief Medical Officer Dr. Timothy Groover.
In the past month, 44% of COVID-19 patients at the hospital were in their 40s or younger.
Most were previously healthy.
So, what this means is that people are sort of ramping up vaccinations.
They're thinking more seriously about vaccinations.
But again, what the stats show is that we have basically disconnected the case rate from the death rate.
Meaning that we're seeing lots and lots and lots of cases and not an awful lot of death.
There's another chart from the UK that demonstrates this full scale.
You can see it right here on this chart.
This chart right here shows that you can see the waves follow each other.
You can see the wave of death and you can see the wave of COVID.
The COVID wave comes very quickly thereafter.
The deaths come and they chart each other really, really smoothly.
And then now you see a massive increase in the number of COVID cases.
And you don't see the death.
The death just isn't happening in the same way.
Again, because we have done a very good job in the West of vaccinating the elderly.
And so younger people are getting this thing, not older people.
People who are less vulnerable, not people who are more vulnerable.
And so it's important also to take a look at some of the stats that are being bandied about with regard to hospitalization rates, for example.
So in Florida, you're seeing an increase in hospitalization into the Jacksonville area that is on par with what we saw in January, but among younger people who are less likely to die even after being hospitalized than older people like 65 year olds who are being hospitalized in January.
Sometimes the headlines are just completely disconnected from reality.
The Los Angeles Times says, quote, You have to dig down until paragraph four before you get to this.
Even with the recent increase, though, the state's health care system is nowhere near as swamped as it was during the fall and winter surge.
Many health experts are confident California will never see numbers on that scale again, given how many residents are vaccinated.
With the continued spread of the highly infectious Delta variant, which officials fear could mushroom in communities with lower inoculation rates, the next few weeks are key in determining how potent the pandemic's latest punch may be.
Okay, so bottom line is, once again, we're not seeing the same level of hospitalization as we saw, broadly speaking, over the course of countries.
We're seeing huge numbers of cases, fewer hospitalizations, many, many, many fewer deaths, because you are seeing, again, a disconnect between the people who are getting this thing and the people who tend to die of this thing.
Which means that, realistically speaking, many nations are learning to let it go and live with COVID, which, of course, was always going to happen.
Now, there was a case to be made, by the way, that even before the advent of the vaccine, places needed to learn to live with COVID.
Namely, you shield the most vulnerable and you allow everybody else to go out and work.
And there's something that Sweden did, for example, and Sweden was ripped up and down.
Sweden's excess death rate, when you actually chart it to their age, right, you have to actually adjust for age, because if you have a population that's entirely 20 years old versus a population that's entirely 70 years old, they're not gonna have the same death rates.
If you actually chart their excess mortality rates, there have been some studies done on this.
What it suggests is that Sweden's excess mortality rates during the pandemic, over the course of 2020, was an increase of about 1.5%.
It was actually significantly higher in Germany, which locked down very wide.
In fact, Sweden, which was ripped up and down for its COVID policy, now ranks somewhere around 40th in the world in terms of death per million from COVID, and that's not population adjusted for age.
So there is a case to be made pretty early on that shield the elderly, let everybody else go out and do what they're going to do.
And if you want to mask, mask, and if you don't want to mask, don't mask.
That was not actually a terrible policy idea, especially because what we are finding out right now is that natural immunity in some of these cases may be stronger than vaccine-created immunity.
That's what some of the statistics out of Israel are tending to show.
So if you're 21 years old, everybody was treating it as a giant problem and tragedy if you were 21 in January and getting COVID.
But if you weren't dying from COVID, this just meant you were immune from COVID in the natural way before you could get a vaccine.
So it took one person off the board in terms of reproducing the virus and pushing it out to others.
But now that the vaccines are available, there's no question that we should be moving back to a regular life.
There really is none.
Because anything else has no limiting principle.
It's the point I keep making over and over and over.
Once every adult has had the opportunity to get the vaccine, it is now up to them.
The original goal of the lockdowns, the original goal of masking policy, was to prevent people from overwhelming the hospital system.
Right?
That was the entire goal.
Don't let the hospital systems be overwhelmed with COVID patients so that people don't die needlessly.
And so if you flatten the curve, the area under the curve is going to be the same over the course of time, but it's going to be beneath medical capacity.
So that means that no one dies without at least having the treatment that could possibly save their life.
Right?
That was the original goal.
We did that.
We prevented COVID from swamping the hospitals and overwhelming the system.
And that's what the lockdowns were for.
Then the goal changed to, okay, well, you know, we do have these vaccines on the way.
If we can just delay this thing, then maybe if we have lowered the curve, we can actually stop the curve before it rises again.
Right, we can actually stop the death through the vaccine.
So it's a delay tactic, right?
We're going to lock down a little bit more.
We'll mask a little bit more and this will delay.
Because that's really all the lockdowns and masking do.
They delay the inevitable.
Because eventually, you assume, people are going to take off the masks and stop the lockdowns and go out of their homes.
So, the idea now was, delay until the vaccines are available.
Then, vaccines became widely available.
Now, as I keep saying over and over, there's no end goal.
There's no end goal.
Right?
The notion that we are all supposed to continue masking forever, even though the vaccines are now available.
That is asinine.
We are going to have to learn to live with the reality that adults are adults.
We're going to have to learn to live with the reality that if you're vaccinated, you're pretty much safe from the virus, statistically speaking.
If you're unvaccinated, you're just as unprotected from the virus as you were six months ago.
And so that is up to you.
That's now on you.
That is your decision.
And we can't lock down all of society or ask vaccinated people to mask on the basis that they might infect somebody asymptomatically who refuses to either mask or to get the vaccine.
You can't restrict people because other people refuse to do the thing that would protect them.
We don't do this with any other form of disease.
And especially when you're talking about a vaccine that takes the rates of death of this thing all the way down to below the flu.
Again, if people choose not to make that decision, I think it's a foolish decision.
I've said over and over and over on the program, I think that people should vaccinate.
It's funny, there are a bunch of articles.
The media are intent on trying to blame the right for the failure of vaccinations in certain parts of the country.
And some of these media pieces are saying that I, like me specifically, that I have not backed vaccines.
That's of course idiotic.
I've backed vaccines since literally the first day.
I continue to maintain that getting a vaccine is a good idea, that these mRNA vaccines, by all available scientific evidence, are safe.
I'm not going to say that they're safe for children because we have no longitudinal effect with regard to that, but what I will say is that the statistics tend to show that yes, sure, there could be risks from the vaccine, but those risks are below the risk of dying from COVID or getting seriously ill from COVID with long-lasting COVID effect, particularly for adults.
But that's your choice.
You're a free and independent human being.
That is your choice right now.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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So as I speak, I'm looking at the COVID death statistics in the United States.
This is via the New York Times last update about 13 hours ago.
The seven-day average of deaths from COVID in the United States, despite this massive increase in cases in the United States, remains at 249.
249.
As I mentioned, this means that COVID is now not among the top causes of death in the United States on a daily basis.
Heart disease, cancer, Even diabetes and Alzheimer's, like, diabetes is on par with the number of deaths that we are suffering per day from COVID.
Now, COVID is a transmissible disease, obviously.
You could have an uptick in death, but we are seeing a pretty vast disconnect between the amount of death and the number of cases that are being diagnosed, just as we have seen in Britain.
If you go all the way back to March, right?
February, we were having about 60,000 new cases a day in the United States.
Yesterday, we had about 60,000 cases, so we are back to those levels of caseload.
But it's different people who are getting them, thanks to the widespread vaccination of the elderly.
So, the New York Times has a piece about this.
England has removed nearly all coronavirus restrictions.
Germany is allowing vaccinated people to travel without quarantines.
Outdoor mask mandates are mostly gone in Italy.
Shopping malls remain open in Singapore.
18 months after the first coronavirus emerged, governments in Asia, Europe, and the Americas are encouraging people to return to their daily rhythms and transition to a new normal in which subways, offices, restaurants, and airports are once again full.
Increasingly, the mantra is the same.
We have to learn to live with the virus.
Now remember, when I said this last year, That we might have to learn to live with the virus?
I was ripped up and down for this.
How?
No.
No.
Zero COVID is the goal.
Zero COVID was never a realistic goal.
Ever.
There was nobody who was a medical expert last year except for Anthony Fauci who was idiotically out there suggesting that we were going to crush the curve to the point where basically the virus was no longer in circulation.
This is a highly transmissible coronavirus that is literally present in nearly every nation on the globe.
The notion that you're going to cut this thing down to zero was always a pipe dream.
It was never going to happen.
That is not an argument against vaccination.
It's an argument in favor of reality.
According to the New York Times, however, scientists warn that pandemic exit strategies may be premature. The emergence of more transmissible variants means even wealthy nations with abundant vaccines remain vulnerable. Places like Australia, which shut down its borders, are learning they cannot keep the virus out. Well, if that's the case, then why exactly are we arguing about continuing shutdowns and lockdowns and remasking?
Officials are beginning to accept that rolling lockdowns and restrictions are a necessary part of recovery.
People are being encouraged to shift their pandemic perspective and focus on avoiding severe illness and death instead of infections.
Correct.
That's right.
That's why people should vaccinate.
Not to avoid getting infected in the first place.
To avoid dying.
To avoid going to the hospital.
Of course.
But honestly, there's no other disease where we care about case rate.
None.
You don't care how many people get the flu every year, you care how many people die from the flu every year.
Millions and millions of people get the common cold every year.
Have you ever heard that as a public health crisis requiring masking?
Of course not, because people don't die of the cold, right?
So the question is, death rates from COVID, which have been brought down radically.
Now again, that's because on average they've been brought down, meaning that there are people who die, it's pretty binary, there are people who die and people who don't, and the people who die tend to be unvaccinated and the people who don't tend to be vaccinated or have already had this thing with a level of natural immunity.
Dale Fisher, Professor of Medicine at the National University of Singapore, who heads the National Infection Prevention and Control Committee of Singapore's Health Ministry, says, you need to tell people we're going to get a lot of cases.
And that's part of the plan.
We have to let it go.
So we're all now we're doing World Sweden, right?
Last year, it was Sweden is the worst country on planet Earth.
And Rhonda Sampson in Florida, who pursued a similar strategy, worst person on Earth.
Now it's like, well, I guess, you know, we're just going to have to do exactly what they did.
Yeah, we know.
We know.
And that's fine.
Thank God we have a vaccine now that has radically reduced the death rate.
That is a gift from science.
It's a gift from God.
Like it is a wonderful, wonderful thing.
And also you now need to let people live free because otherwise there are no limiting principles to anything that you're talking about.
This notion that we are supposed to continue masking forever and do shutdowns forever is just ridiculous.
I'm sorry.
There is no logical principle that can be held consistently that would not also you to require up for pneumonia.
Or tuberculosis?
Or the flu?
And so, the same logic that is currently being used for arguments about remasking particularly vaccinated people, those arguments, masking kids, right?
Those arguments are equally applicable to a wide variety of diseases, which really says the government should have control until the end of time.
So right now, the White House, naturally, is debating whether to walk back its view on masking.
According to the Washington Post, top White House aides and Biden administration officials are debating whether they should urge vaccinated Americans to wear masks in more settings, as the Delta variant causes spikes in COVID infections across the country, according to six people familiar with the discussions.
Vaccinated Americans, not unvaccinated Americans.
Again, I understand the argument for unvaccinated Americans to wear a mask.
If you don't want to transmit it and you don't want to get it, then presumably get an N95.
Right?
N95s are pretty widely available at this point.
But vaccinated Americans?
So I'm supposed to mask up?
Despite the fact that I can't, even though you have had the ability to protect yourself, I'm supposed to mask up and mask my kid so you don't get it?
Even though you're a free individual human being with the capacity to make a decision?
According to the Washington Post, the talks are in a preliminary phase.
The result could be as simple as new messaging from top White House officials, but some of the talks include officials at the CDC.
Ah, the vaunted CDC, which has blown this every step of the way, who are separately examining whether to update their masking guidance, according to a Biden administration aide and a federal health official.
Officials cautioned any new formal guidance would have to come from the CDC.
They say the White House has taken a hands-off approach, which, of course, is not true at all.
You'll remember that the CDC originally set masking standards in coordination with the White House and only later said, oh yeah, by the way, you can unmask if you're vaccinated.
The high-level discussions reflect rising concerns about the threat of the Delta variant.
One idea batted around by administration officials would be to ask all Americans to wear masks when vaccinated and unvaccinated people mix at public places or indoors.
No.
No.
The answer is no.
I'm not doing that.
I also don't think my kids should be masked.
No.
If you're an adult and you choose not to get masked, it's on you now.
End of story.
Truly end of story, because otherwise, there's no end to this.
Otherwise, they can do this at any time, for the rest of time, for any reason, or no reason.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Alrighty, so last night, Joe Biden was on CNN where he engaged in his usual battles with the teleprompter.
Again, it is a source of constant bemusement that the president of the United States does not appear to have firing synapses at this point.
Here's the President of the United States and Don Lemon trying to bail him out over and over and the President basically just wandering into the cornfield.
The question is whether or not we should be in a position where you are, why can't the experts say, we know that this virus is in fact, it's going to be, or excuse me, we know why all the drugs approved are not temporarily approved, but permanently approved.
That's underway too, I expect that to occur quickly.
Well that means, you mean for the FDA?
For the FDA.
I don't know what any of that was supposed to mean.
Was that in English?
It is, I mean, it's an amazing country where literally anyone can be president.
I mean, they say that America, English is the, there's an argument about whether English ought to be the official language.
No, I mean, we elect presidents routinely in this country who don't speak English.
Anyway, the president of the United States then added, I don't tell the scientists what to do, which is overtly untrue.
I mean, the reality is the White House coordinates with the CDC.
They coordinate with all of the quote-unquote health officials.
And then they issue guidance that very much reflects the political priorities of the administration.
But here's Biden trying to separate off from the mandates that are to come.
When will children under 12 be able to get vaccinated?
Soon, I believe.
Now look, one of the things that I committed to do when I got elected, I said- How soon is soon, Mr. President?
Let me finish the question.
The answer.
Soon in the sense that I do not tell any scientists what they should do.
Okay, so now he says he's not going to tell any of the scientists what to do.
Yeah, I don't believe you.
But this is Biden's way of disconnecting from the fact that he said we were all going to be free and easy as of July 4th, and we are no longer free and easy.
He's now going to say, oh, well, the scientists told me.
The scientists told me.
Except these are political decisions.
I've said from the very beginning of this pandemic, this is not up to Fauci.
It's not up to the scientists.
We elect people.
To balance all of the competing considerations.
And at the beginning, this was considered cruel and terrible.
If you pointed out that hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people, literally tens of millions of people actually, lost their jobs during the pandemic.
And you were accused of making light of death.
If you pointed out there were very, very differential death rates by age group, and this meant that we should have 20-year-olds working but not 60-year-olds working, then this was considered cruel and inhumane.
But that is the stuff we elect people to do.
We elect people to take into account all of those priorities.
If you're a public health official, your goal is always going to be zero deaths.
And the easiest way to prevent death is to lock you in your home forever.
So it is up to the President of the United States to stop all of that.
But the President is not going to stop all of that.
The President of the United States, apparently, is just going to allow the scientists to make public policy.
That is not correct.
They ought to have input into public policy, but it is at the political level when people who are supposed to weigh all the competing factors make the policy.
That's what's supposed to matter.
Here's Biden just abdicating full responsibility and suggesting that the CDC is going to tell kids to wear masks in school.
Remember, the CDC said like a week ago that kids don't really need to wear masks in school and kids should be back in school full time.
Then the American Academy of Pediatrics put out a notice In coordination, by the way, with the teachers' unions, they overtly say that they are doing this in coordination with the teachers' unions, telling you you need to mask up your 3-year-old.
That's asinine.
You don't need to mask up your 3-year-old.
I have a 7, a 5, and a 1.
I don't need to mask my 5-year-old or my 7-year-old.
The reason I don't need to mask them is because I'm not afraid of them getting COVID.
And I'm not afraid of their classmates getting COVID.
And the reason I'm not particularly afraid of them or their classmates getting COVID is because the rates of death for people under the age of 18 in the United States from COVID are so low they boggle- they beggar the imagination and boggle the mind.
The total number of people under the age of 18 in the United States is a cohort of 75 million human beings in the United States, in which we've had millions of diagnosed cases of COVID.
The total number of deaths from COVID in the United States for people under the age of 18 is below 350 out of 75 million people. Okay, that does not bespeak the necessity of masking.
Unless what you're afraid of is that the kids are going to infect the adults.
But if you're afraid the kids are going to infect the adults, we go back to our original logic.
Have the adults had the opportunity to get the vaccine?
If the answer is yes, and they haven't done it, That is now their problem.
And if they have peculiar vulnerabilities that prevent them from getting the vaccine, then we should get them an N95.
We should have them teach from home.
But that's true regardless of what kind of diseases are circulating.
There's always stuff out there that can kill people who have peculiar vulnerabilities health-wise.
Once you've had the opportunity to have a vaccine, it's on you.
And masking up my 5-year-old to protect your 40-year-old ass when you won't get a vaccine is absurd.
It's absurd.
There's no reason we should be doing it.
And if you're worried that those kids are going to come home and take it to an adult, then the adults ought to get vaccinated.
There's a very obvious solution here.
Get vaccinated if you don't want somebody else infecting you, period.
And if you don't care about getting infected, and you don't care about getting COVID, well then, that's on you.
Good on you.
I mean, that's your decision.
You're a rational human being.
Back here is Joe Biden.
Again, the level of top-down control, the level of scorn your politicians have for you in your decision-making is truly an amazing thing.
Did it ever occur to them that there are a lot of people out there who might have reasons that I disagree with on not getting the vaccine, but reasons that are not just simply, I watched Tucker Carlson or I love Trump and I'm not getting it.
There are a lot of people who have rationales that they think are at least a risk reward calculation, and they are allowed to make those risk reward calculations.
Let's say that you are 25 years old, and your chances of dying from this virus are something like 6 in 10,000.
And you say to yourself, okay, well, we haven't had full FDA clearance, right?
We're still working under emergency use authorization.
We haven't had full FDA clearance of the vaccines that say that they are fully safe.
There's been no longitudinal testing.
Maybe I had COVID already, and I'm relying on my own natural immunity.
Okay, well, Fine.
I mean, seriously, fine.
Like, I differ from your assessment.
Again, I got the vaccine.
My wife got the vaccine.
My parents got the vaccine.
But, you are allowed to make that decision in a free country.
But to say that you are allowed to make that decision in a free country, but that I have to mask because you make the wrong decision, is totally nuts.
Or that my kid has to mask.
By the way, it doesn't have a great impact on kids.
I got my kids running around in 90 degree heat with a mask on.
For no reason that I can see.
Here is Joe Biden, however, abdicating his duty to actually be a leader.
The CDC is going to say that what we should do is everyone under the age of 12 should probably be wearing a mask in school.
That's probably what's going to happen.
Secondly, those over the age of 12 who are able to get vaccinated, if you're vaccinated, you shouldn't wear a mask.
If you aren't vaccinated, you should be wearing a mask.
So it's going to get a little bit tight in terms of, well, our mom or dad being honest that, you know, Johnny did or did not get vaccinated.
That's going to raise questions.
Okay, well, um, what if we don't care whether Johnny did or did not get a vaccine when he's 15 years old?
What if that's none of your business?
Really?
Because, after all, he's 15.
And the number of people who are dying aged 15 from the vaccine, really, really, really low.
Really low.
So it's, you know, all of this is kind of madness.
Jerome Adams, who's the Surgeon General under Donald Trump, he said, Based on what?
vax it or mask it, emerging data suggests CDC should be advising to vax it and mask it in areas with high case numbers and positivity until we see numbers going back down again.
CDC was well intended, but the message was misinterpreted, premature and wrong.
Let's fix it. Based on what? Based on what? Again, the whole purpose of masking was to prevent overwhelming of the hospitals in the absence of a solution.
We have a solution.
If you choose not to access the solution, I don't understand why I'm supposed to lead my life, the rest of my life apparently, masking up and covering my face.
Like, as you all know, if you've watched or listened to the show, I was actually a masking advocate until you get the vaccines.
I said the best available science shows that it prevents you from spreading the disease.
And if you have an N95, it prevents you from getting the disease.
I wasn't anti-masking.
Now I'm anti-masking for the vaccinated.
Because what the hell?
What is the point of getting the vaccine if I'm going to have to live the rest of my life in a mask anyway?
You're actually creating a perverse incentive.
It's amazing.
All the public health officials who say that it's right-wing misinformation that is leading to lower vaccination rates.
There are charts.
They demonstrate explicitly that the rates of vaccination in the United States were rising fairly precipitously and then leveling off at a high level.
And then you had the Johnson & Johnson vaccine pause, which was a moronic idea by the federal government in which they paused the distribution of J&J after 7 million doses had gone out because there were six, count them, six cases of people with a rare blood clotting disorder And then people started to get pretty hesitant about the vaccines right quick.
And now you're telling people that even if they vaccinate, they are still going to have to mask up until the end of time because there might be some person down the road who didn't feel like vaccinating.
So you got to protect them.
No.
The answer is no.
Own your decisions.
Here's the thing.
People who are not vaccinated, by and large, they are willing to own those decisions.
So if they're willing to own the decisions and I'm willing to own my decision, what business is this of the federal government in the first place?
And why are you putting on kids?
That's the part that's totally wild.
Yet that is the new going notion.
Here's Dr. Jonathan Reamer on CNN saying every kid should be going to school masked.
Every child from your three-year-old to your 17-year-old should be going to school masked.
Every kid going to school should be masked.
Vaccinated or not.
And I know this angers people who have been vaccinated, but we need to protect everyone and we really can't tell who's been vaccinated and who hasn't.
I think every kid going to school should have a mask on to protect those who just have chosen not to be vaccinated and those who can't be.
Really?
So this is where we're going?
This is where we're going?
Wonderful.
Wonderful.
Okay, meanwhile...
The Biden administration continues to maintain that the big problem here is not its own failures of public health messaging.
It is not its own failures to set some sort of consistent guidelines or end goals.
It's funny, they've done a lot of social science study about what encourages people to do things.
And what encourages people to do things is the notion there's an end line.
If there's an end line, then you tend to do better.
So for example, when you're exercising, if you are running toward the one mile mark, You will tend to pick up your pace as you get near the one mile mark because you know that at the end of the one mile mark, that's the one mile mark.
If, however, somebody tells you run indefinitely, you'll run slower because you are trying to conserve energy, because you are because you don't know when the end line is going to be.
And so it's actually very important to set goalposts.
And then once those goalposts are hit, to move on with your life.
The federal government refuses to meet the goalposts or if they have goalposts, they keep moving the goalposts.
Now, I don't even know where they go.
They disappeared all the goalposts.
Again, there was a case to be made for goalposts that suggested don't overwhelm the hospitals.
Then there was a case to be made that put the goalposts at everybody has the opportunity to get vaccinated.
Now the goalposts have just disappeared.
And this is just your centralized government bosses telling you what you ought to do with your life.
And my answer is no.
My answer is absolutely not.
And you're not going to tell me what to do with my kid either.
Because now there is no externality to consider.
When you're talking about collective action problems, externalities are the thing.
If you can protect yourself, and I can protect myself, the externality question goes away.
So I don't see what the role of government is here.
Okay, we'll get into more of this and the Biden administration side agenda, which is to quash social media.
We'll get to that in a second.
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Alrighty, well, we'll get back to the news in a second.
First, reminder, I have a new book.
It is coming out next week.
It is a really important book, The Authoritarian Moment.
I think it may be the most important book that I've ever written.
It is all about the takeover of the institutions.
You can feel it all around you.
All of the institutions, from science, to education, to Hollywood, to corporate America, all of them are coming for you.
They're coming for your freedoms.
You feel it, I feel it.
But here's the thing, we can fix that.
We can stop that in its tracks.
I talk about all of this in my brand new book, The Authoritarian Moment.
Some people collect trophies, some collect bobbleheads, some collect things of actual value, like signed books that have resale value.
Specifically, signed books by moi.
Lucky for you, I am signing copies of my brand new book, The Authoritarian Moment, Tuesday, July 27th.
As you will read, there's a ton happening right now that I predicted in the book, so you're gonna wanna pick up your copy of The Authoritarian Moment to get a sense of what's to come and how we can stop it.
So, go to dailywire.com slash ben right now, order your signed copy before Tuesday's live signing.
And when you do, you'll be asked to type in a question at checkout.
Then, catch Tuesday's live signing to see if I answer your question and watch me sign your book.
So, what are you waiting for?
Become a part of this exciting event and get your copy at dailywired.com slash ben right this moment.
Also, in a world that never stops spinning, there's no doubt your time is of the utmost importance and should never be wasted on anything but the facts.
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Now, as we've been talking about, the public health establishment has completely failed on every messaging level with regard to the vaccination.
The reality is you didn't really have to message this thing very hard.
You know how I know?
Because everybody who's old got the vaccine.
Because they saw that if they didn't get it, there was a good shot they were going to die.
And so they were like, okay, I'm getting the vaccine.
This is a really easy sell.
People take a look at the risk factors and then they determine for themselves what is going on.
But the Biden administration, because they wanted us to be all done by now and they really don't care about whether individual human beings choose one way or the other, they have decided that the real reason that there is vaccine hesitancy is of course because of right-wing misinformation and because social media refused to quash This is right-wing misinformation.
This is part of a broader media narrative that has been out there for a while in which the media push social media to quash all dissenting information from a bunch of different sources, right?
This is why NPR had an article earlier this week openly saying that Daily Wire should basically lose its traffic because Daily Wire is conservative.
Not because we lie.
Not because we're anti-vax.
Not because of any of that.
Just because they don't like us.
So normally you might expect the media, right, you know, a First Amendment outfit, you might expect them to say to the Biden administration, guys, why is it your job to tell social media what can and cannot be distributed on social media?
I mean, this is just excellent evidence that our media are just the Praetorian guard for the Democratic Party.
They now just mirror whatever is the narrative that the White House wishes to purvey.
So if the White House says it's social media's fault, instead of the media going, wait, social media is a platform, why is the government trying to pressure platforms to remove information?
Instead, the media is like, yeah, social media, why don't you remove misinformation?
Here was NBC Nightly News just doing the same thing that the White House would do, except indirectly.
How does social media influence people's relationship with facts?
So in our research, you know, across different countries, including the United States, what we find is that when people receive most of their information about COVID-19 and vaccination from social media, they're more likely to be misinformed and they're less likely to get vaccinated versus when they get their information from official sources like the WHO or the CDC.
So we actually can identify a clear link between getting your information from social media and having a greater amount of misconceptions about this issue, which in turn is linked to lower willingness to get vaccinated.
Don't you see that you should be getting all your information only from official sources?
Does this sound a little bit fascistic to you?
The only places you should be able to get information about COVID, maybe for anything, is the WHO and the CDC.
Except for how the WHO and CDC have flipped 1,000 ways since the beginning of this pandemic.
And if you'd listened to the WHO at the very beginning, you wouldn't have masked up.
Or the CDC, you wouldn't have masked up.
And if you listened to the WHO up through about five minutes ago, the COVID lab leak theory was totally crazy.
And if you listen to the WHO, at the very beginning of this pandemic, it wasn't even an airborne virus, COVID.
Except for that, you know, it's really only government, only trust the government, is a hell of a take from the press.
From the press, these people who are like, I'm going to hold power to account.
We're going to force accountability from the powerful.
Make life uncomfortable for the comfortable.
Except if they're of my political party, in which case I will say they ought to be the only informational source from which you derive information.
That was NBC Nightly News, not the White House.
Amazing.
You see the same thing from a columnist named Will Aremus over at the Washington Post.
He has a piece titled, Facebook and YouTube's vaccine misinformation problem is simpler than it seems.
His analysis, in the end, is not that YouTube and Facebook ought to just ban information outright.
Instead, he says they should basically just shadow ban it.
Much better.
Much better.
They should just change all of their algorithms so the only things you can see are the things that Joe Biden wants you to see.
Which, of course, is a restriction on free dissemination of information.
Obviously.
That's what it is.
Now, again, when we get to misinformation from the federal government, let me just point out at this point that Dr. Anthony Fauci is misleading you right now.
Okay, so, Dr. Anthony Fauci oversaw the NIAID, which is part of the NIH.
The NIH did give grants to a place called EcoHealth Alliance.
EcoHealth Alliance did give those grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology performed what is in effect gain of function research on COVID-19, or at least on, on, it appears on COVID-19, right? We don't know if it was from the wet market. Now China's saying no.
It is highly unlikely that this was produced anywhere but the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
And since COVID-19 does not exist in bats, but now it does exist in humans, it is highly likely that it was created through gain-of-function research.
Now, that doesn't mean that the EcoHealth Alliance grant was specifically used to produce COVID-19.
It does mean that the EcoHealth Alliance grant from the NIH was used for gain-of-function research in Wuhan.
Now, the slippery way out of this little conundrum for Fauci and the NIH is to claim that technically they weren't funding gain of function research.
Technically, the kind of research they were funding was just about making animal viruses transmissible in humans, not about making it more deadly in humans.
That's a very technical distinction that really makes no difference for purposes of the conversation.
The reality is that Dr. Fauci has been a wide and deep supporter of gain of function research for years and years and years because he likes the idea that gain of function research helps us fight future viruses.
There's a case to be made for gain-of-function research, by the way.
There is no case to be made that gain-of-function research being done under the authority of a totalitarian regime with no incentive for actual health structures ought to be funded by the United States.
You want to say fun gain-of-function research at Harvard?
Go for it, man.
You want to say fun gain-of-function research in China at the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
That's nuts.
Okay, now Fauci was called on the carpet by Rand Paul for this.
And Fauci basically said, we're not funding gain-of-function research.
We had nothing to do with COVID-19.
You don't know whether you had anything to do with COVID-19.
I don't know whether you had anything to do with COVID-19.
What is pretty clear is that you were not cutting off funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was performing exactly the kind of research that would have led to a lab leak, if indeed this was a lab leak.
Nonetheless, here is Anthony Fauci slamming Rand Paul for quote-unquote slanderous commentary.
I don't take any great pleasure, Ari, in clashing with the senator.
I have a great deal of respect for the institution of the Senate of the United States.
But he was completely out of line.
He totally distorted reality.
And he made some inflammatory, and I believe slanderous, remarks.
about lying under oath, which is completely nonsense.
I mean, and some of the things that he says is so distorted and out of tune with reality, I had to call him on that.
I didn't enjoy it, but I had to do that because he was completely out of line.
Totally inappropriate.
Now, you may notice that Dr. Fauci never actually explains what Rand Paul said that was overtly false.
He may not like the implications that Rand Paul is drawing.
He may rely on this distinction between technical gain-of-function research and gain-of-function research on, like, a broad philosophical level.
But nothing that Rand Paul said was actually wrong here.
The NIH director does the same thing.
Again, remember, these are your governmental sources.
Do you trust them?
Well, we're told these are the only people you should trust.
Here's the NIH director defending Fauci.
I'm very concerned when I see probably the most highly respected infectious disease doctor on the planet being treated this way, having these accusations without any basis thrown at him, stirring up all kinds of nasty outreaches to him that require him now to have 24-7 security detail to protect him and his family.
What has happened to us that somebody who's trying to help the public by telling them the truth is turned into this kind of demonized character for political purposes?
It is unacceptable.
Okay, I have a question.
What if Dr. Fauci is not telling us the truth?
That's the question.
Here's Rand Paul asking precisely that question yesterday.
Well, I think it's important to know that Dr. Fauci has a self-interest in obscuring any relationship or responsibility for anything done in the Wuhan lab.
Without question, the evidence we presented in committee yesterday shows that the NIH was funding research in Wuhan.
We showed the exact numerical series of numbers that goes with the grant number.
So yes, they were funding the Wuhan lab.
But you have to realize that Dr. Fauci is not disinterested.
If this virus came from the lab and it becomes clear that he was funding dangerous research, moral culpability, responsibility attaches to him and he does not want that.
Okay, but the bottom line is this.
This really isn't about Fauci, generally.
It's about why should we have endless trust in a public health establishment that has failed us six ways from Sunday?
It is private industry developing the vaccines that did not fail us.
The public health experts failed us.
They give us bad information at every turn.
In some cases, they overtly lied to us.
But the Biden administration idea is that only those people ought to be listened to, and we have to just submit our own personal judgment to the tender mercies of these exact people.
The answer for most Americans is no.
And that means it's time to get back to something approaching regular life.
All righty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
Coming up soon is the Matt Walsh Show.
It airs at 1.30 p.m.
Eastern.
Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Wake up every morning with our new show, Morning Wire.
On today's episode, Senator Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci spar over gain-of-function research, teachers groups gather to discuss race and social justice, and negotiations over the infrastructure bill appear to be wrapping up.
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