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July 29, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:05
The Covid Misinformation Is Coming From Inside The White House | Ep. 1307
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Time Text
The Biden administration seeks new mask and vaccine mandates as they wildly misconstrue the data on the Delta variant surge.
And Joe Biden's got a huge inflation problem.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alrighty, so we have a serious case of institutional mistrust that has broken out in this country with regard to the CDC, with regard to the NIH, and that mistrust is well-founded.
It is well-placed.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky of the CDC is garbage at her job.
Dr. Anthony Fauci is garbage at his job.
They are just purveying misinformation at this point.
Now, the narrative you have been told is that the misinformation on COVID is coming predominantly from the right.
If that were true, then presumably there would be this huge partisan gap, an unending partisan gap between Democrats and Republicans.
Now, there is a partisan gap in vaccinations between Democrats and Republicans.
However, a huge percentage of the people who are unvaccinated at this point are in fact Democrats.
And that includes a disproportionate number of Black and Hispanic citizens who certainly are not watching Tucker Carlson.
So why is this happening?
The reason this is happening is because the same people who are telling you to get a vaccine are simultaneously telling you the vaccines don't work.
The same people who are telling you that you need to mask up after having a vaccine are simultaneously telling you that you're an idiot for not getting the vaccine in the first place.
And this is ridiculous.
It is.
You don't trust your institutional actors because at this point they're not showing you the data.
You know what a good scientist does?
Shows you the data.
I feel like Cuba Gooding Jr.
in Jerry Maguire at this point.
Show me the data.
That's all.
I'm more than happy to take whatever precautions you recommend so long as the precautions are steeped in data and backed by data.
I'm not going to listen to Dr. Rochelle Walensky because she's the head of the CDC.
I'm going to listen to her if she makes a convincing argument.
But she is saying things right now that are just not factually true.
And the same thing is true of the vaunted and sainted Dr. Anthony Fauci.
And yet the media's take, of course, is that it is solely mistrust bred by the right that is causing the vaccine hesitancy in the United States.
Here's Chuck Todd of MSNBC making that case yesterday, for example.
I fear that the reckoning is here.
This is the reckoning.
The campaign of mistrust that was waged against those of us in mainstream journalism by what's happened in the right wing for the last decade.
Unfortunately, our reckoning is in an ICU way too close to many of our lives.
Okay, so first of all, let's just talk once again about the death from COVID stats, okay?
Because I think it's important for you to know where we currently stand.
Right now, the seven-day rolling average of death in the United States remains at 316, according to the New York Times.
Okay, that is up from about a month ago, but it is not up from two months ago, when it was about that.
Okay, so we've essentially been pretty flat.
In terms of the number of diagnosed cases in the United States, the diagnosed cases in the United States are up pretty wildly.
The seven-day rolling average is about 51,000 cases.
But are we in crisis mode if we're having 300 deaths today from COVID?
First of all, there are plenty of good epidemiologists, including Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who's been former head of the FDA.
He's been out there saying that he thinks a couple more weeks and the Delta variant is basically blown through the system and we're kind of done.
Hey, but panic has set in in the Biden administration and they're seizing control of the means of production, essentially.
So and they're doing so by purveying bad data.
So they've now said that you need to mask up your kids, that if you're vaccinated, you still need to mask up, which is which is wild and anti data.
And they're doing this on the basis of bad or no data.
Okay, the data I'm about to present to you are from the CDC.
The data that I'm about to present to you are from actual studies in places like the New England Journal of Medicine.
The things that Dr. Walensky is saying right now, and Dr. Fauci is saying right now, are not evidenced.
So for example, Rochelle Walensky, she says, you know what?
Maybe we, you know, the real reason that we need to mask up the vaccinated, the real reason that we're recommending that vaccinated people mask up, is because vaccinated people could get breakthrough.
And she's asked, at what rate?
The rate you're about to hear Rochelle Walensky trot out for vaccinated people getting breakthrough cases is off by a magnitude of about, let's see, 500, I believe, is the number.
Here she is, just giving a stat that is completely wrong.
If you're a vaccinated person, and you're in one of those areas, as you said, a sea of red, a sea of COVID, you have a reasonable high chance, if nobody's wearing a mask, to interact with people who may be infectious.
And so for every 20 people, one or two of them could get a breakthrough infection.
For every 20 vaccinated people, one or two of them could get a breakthrough infection.
They may only get mild disease, but We wanted them to know that they could bring that mild disease home.
They could bring it to others.
Okay, so she said right there, 1 in 10 or 1 in 20.
It's like 10% of people who've been vaccinated will get a breakthrough infection, according to Dr. Rochelle Walensky.
A 10%?
What is the actual percent of people who are going to get breakthrough infections in the United States thus far?
This is according to the Centers for Disease Control.
She's the head of it.
Okay, this is according to the CDC.
I'm quoting her own agency now.
Quote, with more than 156 million Americans fully vaccinated nationwide, approximately 153,000 symptomatic breakthrough cases are estimated to have occurred as of last week.
That represents 0.098% of those fully vaccinated.
Okay, so there's a rather large difference between 10 in 100, 1 in 10 vaccinated people getting COVID symptomatically, and 1 in 10,000.
Okay, that is what the stat is right now.
Right now, one in a hundred, not one in a thousand, one in 10,000 people in the United States who have been fully vaccinated have gotten some sort of breakthrough infection, symptomatic breakthrough infection.
By the way, how many of those people have actually been hospitalized?
According to the CDC, about 6,000.
About 6,000 people out of 160 million vaccinated.
So one in every 25,000 people or so is gonna get a symptomatic breakthrough infection so bad they have to be hospitalized and much lower than that in cases of death.
But she's using this in order to argue that you need to mask up.
That is COVID misinformation.
Is she going to get tossed off of YouTube?
Is she going to get tossed off of Facebook?
She is a vaccine denier.
She is anti-vax.
She's giving you bad data.
She's not even quoting her own agency.
You know why they're doing this?
The answer is they think you're an idiot.
That's really why they're doing this.
They think that you're a fool and you can't do risk assessment.
And so, for some reason, they think that it is a good idea to tell you lies about the efficacy of the vaccine in order to get you to take the vaccine, which doesn't even make sense as a tactic.
If you want people to get vaccinated, what you tell them is the truth.
The vaccines are unbelievably effective.
They are a medical miracle.
And if you get it, you're largely protected and you can go back to life.
That's how you get people to get vaccinated.
You know how you don't get people to get vaccinated?
You know, if you get vaccinated, you're going to have to wear a mask the rest of your life.
And by the way, your danger factor is still pretty high.
Like, what in the world are they doing?
Maybe they just feel like if they control your life at every turn because you can't control your own life or do your own risk assessment, they're better off.
But it's dictatorial, totalitarian crap based not in any sense.
I mean, that's just that is anti-evidence, anti-evidence.
On that basis, where Shovelensky says, let's mask the children.
Again, children, the evidence that children ought to be masked is really, really skimpy.
Hey, children are bad at wearing masks.
Children are uncomfortable in masks.
Children should not be wearing masks in 95 degree weather outside.
You know, he used to know this Dr. Fauci like as of last year.
Under 350 kids under the age of 18 have died from COVID this entire time in a subpopulation of 75 million people.
And here she is saying you need to mask your kids, presumably to protect the adult who won't get the vaccine while dealing with infectious people.
Like, again, that is your choice.
You don't want to do that, that's fine.
But I'm not going to mask up my three-year-old.
I have a seven to five and a one.
I'm not going to mask up any of those kids in order to protect you if you don't want to get the vaccine.
And by the way, here's the amazing thing.
I have not met a single unvaccinated person who is trying to request that I mask my child to protect them.
It is only controlling totalitarians like Rochelle Walensky who say that I need to mask up my child so that a 45-year-old who doesn't want to get vaccinated can feel safe.
Which, as we'll see, is really just the talk of the teachers unions.
Here's Rochelle Walensky saying mask your children.
What we're now seeing with this transmissible Delta variant is, you know, 12 to 17 year olds now, we still have about 30% of those vaccinated.
So we haven't seen the vaccination rates in those people.
We now have a very high transmission.
The majority of people in our schools right now will be unvaccinated just by virtue of the numbers.
And we felt that it was really important to lean in and try and have our children back to school in the safest way possible.
And that would mean masking.
By the way, they're not going to bring the kids back to school.
They're just not going to.
In fact, Randy Weingarten, I mean, the CDC wrote its school standards at the behest of the American Federation of Teachers run by Randy Weingarten.
Here's Randy Weingarten yesterday, who won't commit to reopening the schools.
Remember, 40% of all school teachers in New York City, the epicenter of the epidemic, are still not vaccinated.
They don't want to go back to school.
This is all political.
Here's Randy Weingarten saying openly, well, you know, maybe they won't go back to school.
Maybe they just won't be school anymore ever again.
First of all, fine.
You want to do this?
I am more than happy to keep my kids in private school and we should be setting up school voucher programs where all the money that we were going to spend at the public school to follow the school should be spent on the kid.
Just give the money back to the parents so the parents can send their kids to a parochial school.
Here's Randy Weingarten refusing to say whether they're opening this.
It's so political and so non-data driven.
Kids not being able to get vaccines 12 and under has really thrown this curveball that says that while vaccination is the number one gold standard, that we need to bring back our masks for schools.
So the bottom line is, We're going to keep kids safe.
We're going to keep our members safe.
And we're going to try to open up schools and we're going to try to move through this political battlefield.
No, you're not.
Your political battlefield is, how do I get my teachers paid without them ever having to go to work again?
The teachers are directly opposed in these unions to the interests of the students.
Meanwhile, I got Dr. Anthony Fauci, the greatest of all doctors outside of Dr. Joe Biden, saying that you should wear a mask even though you're vaccinated.
Remember, two weeks ago, he was saying that if you're vaccinated, you don't need to wear a mask.
And two weeks before that, he was saying you should wear a mask if you're vaccinated.
As we will see, he denies that he has ever flip-flopped because he's a liar.
Here's Dr. Fauci.
The recommendations and the guidelines have been changed to say that if you are vaccinated, even though you are vaccinated, you are in an indoor public setting in an area of the country with a high degree of viral dynamics, namely the red and orange sections on the CDC chart, then you need to wear a mask even though you are vaccinated.
Okay, and then he says we're not flip-flopping on this.
And because they lie to you.
I mean, that's all I can say.
He's lying. This is not true.
Something has changed and what has changed is the virus.
The CDC hasn't changed and the CDC hasn't really flip-flopped at all.
What's happened is that when that earlier recommendation was made, we were dealing predominantly with the Alpha variant.
However, now we are dealing with the Delta variant, which is really quite a lot more transmissible than the Alpha variant.
Okay, so he says that the data have changed, except that the data have not changed.
The data have not changed.
The main vectors of transmission in society are not the vaccinated.
And then Fauci backs this up by saying, well, you know, what we're seeing is that viral loads are really high from the Delta variant.
As we will see, there are no data to back this up.
He's just saying this stuff.
When you go back 60 days of the two months ago, when you look at the level of virus in the nasopharynx of a person who's vaccinated and gets a breakthrough infection, it was considerably less than the level of virus in the nasopharynx of an unvaccinated person.
The data were clear.
Now that we have a Delta variant, that has changed the entire landscape.
Because when you look at the level of virus in the nasopharynx of a vaccinated person who gets a breakthrough infection with Delta, it is exactly the same as the level of virus in an unvaccinated person who's infected.
Okay, but the problem is, he does not make it clear whether the viral load being carried by the vaccinated person is as infectious Okay, it is not merely a question of viral load.
It's whether this is infectious viral load.
So, people dug into the actual CDC stats here, and here is what they found.
They found that the CDC had cited an Indian study to support this idea that the viral load was really high in breakthrough infections from the Delta variant.
There's only one problem.
The study was done.
First of all, it was retracted.
The study itself was bad and it was retracted.
Second of all, the study itself was done on the basis of a vaccine that is not legal to use in the United States.
It was the wrong vaccine and the study was retracted.
I mean, this is nuts.
According to STAT, which is a news source, quote, an administration official speaking on the condition of anonymity told STAT, health experts do not have studies proving that fully vaccinated people are transmitting the virus.
Rather, the official said, the updated guidance is based on studies showing that vaccinated people who contract the Delta variant have similarly high levels of virus in their airways, which suggested they may be infectious to others.
With other variants, vaccinated people had substantially lower levels of virus in their noses and throats compared to unvaccinated people.
Okay, so they know that there's a higher viral load, but they don't know whether that's infectious viral load.
All of which is prompting the Washington Post to ask, where is the data?
The Washington Post is asking, where's the data?
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, let's talk about the fact you don't want to go to the auto parts store today, or pretty much ever.
Why?
You're gonna stand in line, finally get to the front, answer a bunch of questions, and then they'll be like, you know what?
We don't have that in stock, but we can order it for you and we can upcharge you.
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Go to rockauto.com.
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Write Shapiro in their how did you hear about us box.
So they know that we sent you.
Again, no reason to stand in line, get upcharged, have to wait to get the part in the mail anyway, go back to the store.
Instead, just get the part you need at the best available price.
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Great American business.
Head on over to rockauto.com right now.
See all the parts available for your car or truck and write Shapiro in there.
How did you hear about us box?
So they know that we sent you.
Okay, so.
Here is what the Washington Post writes.
Even the Washington Post is like, guys, this is coming from nowhere.
New recommendations from federal health officials this week on when vaccinated Americans should don face masks came with a startling bolt of news.
People who have had their shots and become infected with the Delta variant of the coronavirus can harbor large amounts of virus just like unvaccinated people.
That means they could become spreaders of the disease and should return to wearing masks indoors in certain situations, including when vulnerable people are present.
Okay, so first of all, even if vaccinated people are infectious, That still does not mean that vaccinated people should be wearing the masks at this point.
The reason I say this is because it is now your responsibility as an unvaccinated person to take into account the risks in life.
When people have the flu, many people stay home.
Some people don't.
When people have a cold, a lot of people go to work with a cold because you can work through a cold.
Do we mandate that everybody mask up at all times?
I mean, that's really the limiting principle here.
If you could infect somebody with anything, do you have to mask up for the rest of time?
Is this the new rule?
Because the vaccine is now available to all the adults.
If you are vaccinated, let's say that you're vaccinated and let's say you can even pass this thing.
But everybody around you has the ability to protect themselves by getting a vaccine.
Is it your obligation to wear a mask to prevent somebody who doesn't feel like getting vaccinated from getting vaccinated?
Is that how we are going to operate?
I mean, serious question, is that how we're going to operate in the United States?
But put that aside, is there even evidence to support this notion that the vaccinated are main vectors of transmission, that they get breakthrough infections at a 1 in 10 rate, as Rochelle Walensky falsely says, and that even if they have those breakthrough infections, they're now transmitting the virus at the same rate as the unvaccinated?
Here is the Washington Post.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not publish the new research.
In the text of the updating masking guidance, the agency merely cited, quote, CDC COVID-19 response team unpublished data 2021.
Some outside scientists have their own message.
Show us the data.
Greg Gonsalves, an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health, who is not a conservative, says, they are making a claim that people with Delta who are vaccinated and unvaccinated have similar levels of viral load.
But nobody knows what that means.
It's meaningless unless we see the data.
According to a federal official knowledgeable about the research but who is not authorized to be a spokesperson for the government, quote, the data will be published imminently.
The data were alarming and recently presented, the official said, we saw the data and thought it was urgent enough to act in the context of a steeply rising preventable surge of COVID-19.
Because tests showed similar levels of virus in the vaccinated and unvaccinated, the CDC inferred the Delta variant can be transmitted by people with breakthrough infections.
Fauci said, I think the implications are that people who are vaccinated, even when they're asymptomatic, can still transmit the virus.
But!
But!
Okay, here's the big but, as MC Hammer might say.
Here's the big but.
Fauci noted there is not yet clinical data on what the high viral loads mean in terms of disease transmission.
Let me read that again, slowly, for those of you who are Listening to Positive America.
Fauci noted, there is not yet clinical data on what the high viral loads mean in terms of disease transmission.
That means, even if you have a high viral load, we don't have any data on whether that high viral load is being detected and whether that high viral load is actually transmissible.
You could still be carrying a high viral load, but it's not particularly transmissible because your body did a good job of killing off the virus.
Fauci said you can make a reasonable assumption that vaccinated people can transmit the virus just like unvaccinated people can.
Can you make reasonable assumptions?
He says, it's just a question.
He says, I have a reasonable assumption.
That reasonable assumption is that, for example, if you've had COVID-19 and then you get over COVID-19, your body has developed a level of immunity.
Fauci won't make that assumption, but he'll make the assumption that if a vaccinated person has a high viral load, it's exactly the same as an unvaccinated person having a high viral load.
What's the evidence to back that up?
He presents none.
It's a reasonable quote-unquote assumption.
Three senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the new research convinced health officials it was time to update the agency's guidance.
That's not true.
OK, well, what happened here is that you were seeing an uptick in communities and you have health actors who don't trust the American people.
And so they say everybody needs to mask up again.
This was not driven by new data.
This was driven by the pure panic button controlling top down mentality of people in the public health establishment.
When scientists compared viral loads in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals infected with an early variant of the virus, the alpha variant, there were considerable differences in the amount of virus each carried.
The CDC did not answer questions Wednesday about whether it relied on outside sources of data or the number of patients examined in its outbreak investigations.
Okay, this is one of the questions, because as I mentioned, the CDC seemed to rely on an Indian study that was retracted in their internal paperwork.
The medical and scientific community has generally endorsed the change in CDC mask guidance, The questions about viral loads is among many unknowns surrounding SARS-CoV-2, including the frequency of breakthrough infections and whether they play a significant role in the recent rise in cases.
Robert Wachter, Chair of the Department of Medicine at University of California, Berkeley, he said, if we're seeing more breakthroughs, is it just because the virus is better and the vaccines don't hold up quite as well?
Or is the efficacy of the vaccines beginning to wane independent of Delta?
And then Walensky says, the big concern is that the next variant that might emerge just a few mutations away could eventually evade our vaccine.
Okay, so there is no end point here.
There is no end point here.
And I guess that's the idea.
You're supposed to listen to them.
They don't have to release the data.
They don't have to tell you why they're doing what they're doing.
They don't have to present evidence that even if there are higher viral loads, that those viral loads are as transmissible as for the unvaccinated.
They don't have to do any of that.
They can just tell you what to do.
And you have to listen.
And then they will label you an idiot.
Label you an idiot if they don't present you with an actual argument on the back of all of this jibber jabber about how everyone is going to die of the Delta variant.
And again, let me remind you, these vaccines, it's amazing.
I'm like the opposite of a quote-unquote vaccine denier.
I think these vaccines are incredibly effective.
In fact, according to researchsquare.com, they put together a really cool chart showing how much a risk is lowered from COVID-19 after taking the vaccine.
Basically, number one, if you are below the age of 30, you are less likely to die of COVID unvaccinated than every other age group in the United States vaccinated.
So we should start with that.
We're talking about like at a rate of 0.0001.
0.0001% of people who are unvaccinated under the age of 30 will die of COVID.
Those are very, very low numbers.
Nobody stops their life to prevent the chance of a 0.0001% chance of dying.
Nobody does that.
Okay, but how effective are these vaccines?
If you are at the age of 30, then your risk from death of COVID-19 goes from 0.001%, which is one in about Let's see, 1 in 100, 1 in 1,000, 1 in 10,000, 1 in 100,000.
About 1 in 100,000, if you are at the age of 30, below the age of 35, it goes from that to 0.0001%.
If you're 35, it goes from 0.005% all the way down to close to zero.
If you are at the age of 30, like below the age of 35, it goes from that to 0.0001%.
If you're 35, it goes from like 0.005% all the way down to close to zero.
And now if you go at the higher you go, the more the risk is higher at the baseline and then the more the risk is reduced on a percentage basis.
If you're 55, you had a nearly 0.1% chance of death from COVID-19 before vaccination.
And now you're down to like a 0.005% chance of death from the vaccine, post vaccine.
So that means that your risk factors have dropped by a factor of about 20.
The vaccines are incredibly, incredibly effective.
But we are now supposed to, we're now told that vaccines are less effective, which is a terrible pitch for people to get the vaccine.
Hey, so this has led to a sort of box canyon for a lot of the members of the left.
On the one hand, they keep downplaying the efficacy of the vaccine.
On the other hand, they want to force you to get the vaccine.
Hey, you wouldn't have to force people to get the vaccine if you just made clear how effective the vaccine is.
You wouldn't.
And if people chose to get unvaccinated and go about their daily business, that would be their choice.
Instead, you got this box canyon, as I say, of we are going to not give you any data.
The data we give you are going to be wrong half the time.
The data are going to be wrong in the direction of saying that the vaccine is less effective rather than more effective.
And also, now we have to force you to get the vaccine.
This is where Bill de Blasio comes in, the idiot mayor of New York City.
Here he was explaining that it's time to mandate vaccinations.
We've got to shake people at this point and say, come on now.
We tried voluntary.
We could not have been more kind and compassionate as a country.
Free testing everywhere you turn.
Incentives.
Friendly, warm embrace.
The voluntary phase is over.
We can keep doing those things.
I'm not saying shut it down.
I'm saying voluntary alone doesn't work.
It's time for mandates because it's the only way to protect our people.
Or you could theoretically just say, number one, if you're vaccinated, you're protected.
And number two, you could stop lying about how the vaccinated are the real vectors of transmission.
And the vaccinated are like they've split the message.
And in splitting the message, they've undermined their own trust.
And not only that, they've undermined confidence in the power of the vaccine in the first place.
Nancy Pelosi is doing the same thing.
She announced a mask mandate in the House again.
Now, here's the thing.
I believe every Democrat in the House has had the vaccine at this point.
So I'm not sure exactly what she's worried about.
But this is about control at this point.
When people don't give you the rationale for why they are doing what they are doing, when they won't give you the rationale for why you must follow their rules, that means that they are authoritarian.
This is authoritarian nonsense.
Here's Nancy Pelosi announcing that everybody in the house is going to mask up again.
Everybody in that, again, the entire Senate, I believe every single Senator in the U.S.
Senate is vaccinated at this point.
Every Democrat in the House is vaccinated.
I believe most of the Republican House members are vaccinated.
If they're not, that's their problem.
But here's Nancy Pelosi saying that she's going to mandate masks on the House floor again.
Consistent with the newly updated guidance from the Office of the Attending Physician related to the increased threat from the Delta variant of the virus, the Chair wishes to inform all members and staff that masks will once again be required in the Hall of the House.
Members are reminded that under House Resolution 38, the Sergeant-at-Arms is authorized and directed to impose a fine against any member acting in violation of this policy.
So they're gonna find people now.
At this point, it is just about the control.
So Kevin McCarthy said, okay, our guys aren't masking.
Like, we're not doing that anymore.
We're done.
So Nancy Pelosi called him a moron because this is, so much of this right now is about not convincing people.
So much of this is not about getting people vaccinated.
It is not about restoring people's freedoms.
It is not about giving people freedom of choice and respecting them as individual human beings.
It is about control and othering and treating everybody who thinks differently than you as a bad person.
The masks have become a sign that you are a grade-A student.
You're the kid who gets the gold star in class, as my friend Jon Podhoretz said on the Commentary Magazine podcast.
For people who are wearing the mask at this point, vaccinated particularly, this is just another sign that you adhere to the regime that knows best for you.
You listen to the quote-unquote experts.
Here's the thing, if the experts don't present you data, they're not much kind of expert.
And if they've shifted their position a thousand times based on the same data, they're not super expert, are they?
But here's Nancy Pelosi saying that anyone who won't mask up, including the vaccinated, is some sort of moron.
Mask mandate, Speaker Pelosi, any response to the backlash?
Other response?
That's the purview of the Capitol position, the official mandate from him.
I have nothing to say about that except we honor it.
Leader McCarthy says it's against the science.
He's such a moron.
He's such a moron, says Nancy Pelosi.
McCarthy responded by saying, weird, because you weren't wearing a mask like in the middle of the pandemic when you're getting your hair cut.
Correct.
The mask is now the sign of virtue for a lot of people.
The mask is the sign of virtue.
You're a better person if you wear the mask.
The mask is just a tool.
The mask is just a tool that you are supposed to use in certain circumstances in order to prevent transmission when there's no vaccine available.
You want to encourage people to get the vaccination?
Tell people that they are on their own and they get to make free decisions and then they can do risk assessments.
You know how many people have come up to me who are unvaccinated in the past couple of weeks thanks to the uptick in Delta and said they are now thinking about getting vaccinated?
A lot.
You know why?
Because they're afraid of getting it.
Because that's the way that people assess risk.
But they don't want you to assess risk.
They don't want you to use individual judgment.
They don't want you to make judgment based on science.
They want to tell you what to do and not tell you why they are telling you what to do.
That's what they want.
And that's ugly, and it's un-American.
It really is.
Present the evidence for why you are recommending what you are recommending, and then I'll take it seriously.
Otherwise, shut the f*** up.
Alrighty, we'll get to more on this in just a second.
We'll get to the bipartisan infrastructure bill in just a second.
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Okay, so final note on the supposed Delta spike that's going to kill us all so much so that the vaccinated have to remask.
So Britain is a few weeks ahead of us on this.
Britain had this major COVID spike, right?
So if you look at the case rate in Great Britain with regard to COVID, about two weeks ago, they were up at, even a week ago, they were up at like 50,000 cases a day, which was up near the height of where they had been during the worst of the pandemic for them last January.
They were up like 60,000 cases a day, their seven-day rolling average about that time.
Again, just as of last week, there are up to about 50,000 cases a day.
There's only one problem with the narrative that this continues forever and that we're going to have to mask up in all of this.
And that is the Delta variant stopped in Britain.
According to the Washington Post, quote, this is a puzzler.
Coronavirus cases are plummeting in Britain.
They were supposed to soar.
Scientists aren't sure why they haven't, but I've been told the scientists know everything.
They know everything.
And that is why you have to listen to them.
The daily number of new infections recorded in the country fell for seven days in a row before a slight uptick on Wednesday when the country reported 27,734 cases.
That's still almost half of where the caseload was a week ago.
The trajectory of the virus in Britain is something the world is watching closely and anxiously as a test of how the Delta variant behaves in a society with relatively high vaccination rates.
And now people are asking if this could be the first real-world evidence that the pandemic in Britain is sputtering out after three national lockdowns and almost 130,000 deaths.
Public health experts alongside the government predicted that cases would be rising in Britain at this point, perhaps even exponentially.
The highly contagious Delta variant of the virus first detected in India accounts for almost all new cases there.
On July 17th, cases reached 54,600, the highest since January.
Two days later, dubbed Freedom Day by the press, Prime Minister Boris Johnson's government ended all government mandates in England for mask wearing and social distancing.
And everybody on the left lost their bleep.
They lost it.
They said he was going to kill everybody.
The Delta variant was going to murder everyone in Britain, all because of that evil Boris Johnson and his crazy hair.
Some of the best infectious disease modelers on the planet, who weren't totally wrong last year when they said that 2.2 million people would die in the United States like Neil Ferguson, the always wrong epidemiologist from the UK.
Some of the best infectious disease modelers on the planet warned 100,000 new cases a day this summer could be expected.
However, the trend since then has been on a sharp decline.
Scientists have theories.
Maybe it's the sunshine.
There was a week-long heat wave.
Yeah, probably it's that.
Schools have closed for the summer break, so children are not spreading the virus as much.
Test and trace might be working.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Test and trace ain't working in a country with 50,000 new infections a day, guys.
Nope!
It's also possible people have stopped getting tested, because if they test positive, even if they are fully vaccinated, they are asked to quarantine for 10 days, even if they are about to travel abroad for their holidays.
Or maybe Britain has reached an immunity threshold.
More than 70% of adults here are fully vaccinated.
88% have had a first dose, one of the best vaccine uptakes in the world.
Among those who remain unvaccinated, many have had COVID or asymptomatic infection.
Paul Hunter, professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, says Britain could be approaching population immunity with people immune either from vaccinations or natural infection.
By the way, we should check those stats in the United States.
Vaccination plus natural infection in the United States?
We have got to be closing in on herd immunity at this point.
If you look at how many COVID vaccinations we have done in the United States, We have done, at this point, I'm looking up the population stats.
Right now, in the United States, approximately 58% of the population has had at least one dose, and 49.8% of the population, 164 million people, have been fully vaccinated in the United States.
You take that 50% of the population, and then you gotta add on top millions and millions of COVID infections that have already happened, many of whom didn't get vaccinated afterward because they believed they had natural immunity.
We've got to be approaching herd immunity in the same way that the UK does.
Martin McKee, professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said he doubted Britain was reaching population or herd immunity, in part because that wouldn't explain regional differences.
I don't have a simple answer.
None of us do, he said.
But hospitalizations and deaths are rising in Britain at a far slower rate than during previous waves.
More than 6,000 COVID patients are in the hospitals in Britain.
That's the highest figure since March.
On Wednesday, Britain reported 91 new deaths.
91 new deaths in a country of approximately 67 million people.
That is not a big number.
And we're seeing the same.
So again, the media coverage here is just egregiously bad.
If you look at the situation in Israel, for example, there are people in Israel.
Oh, my God, it's crisis time in Israel.
Like, wow, so many people in Israel having serious hospitalizations.
And it's really it's really a problem.
I'm looking.
We're going to keep doing this.
We're going to keep doing this.
We have to keep doing this because there's no end point.
One. According to Johns Hopkins University.
One.
But we're gonna keep doing this.
We're gonna keep doing this.
We have to keep doing this because there's no end point.
There never was an end point.
And this pisses me off. It really does.
Because for those of us who were data-driven this entire time, who were willing to do what it took to keep ourselves and our families safe, all we asked was some sort of rationale for why you are doing what you are doing.
You know, if you're going to ask me to restrict my liberty, I want an explanation of why my liberty ought to be restricted.
If you don't give me that explanation, and you demand that I continue to restrict my liberty, No.
The answer is going to be no.
And I think more and more Americans are saying no.
I think this is... I think we're done.
I mean, the American people.
I don't think we're going to tolerate this.
Maybe they will in places like New York, where apparently they love having idiot bureaucrats in control.
Or LA, where you need Barbara Farrar, who knows as much about science as my seven-year-old, figuring out how many people should mask.
But it is maddening.
It's absolutely maddening.
Okay, meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to dotter around.
It is incredible how we are, the Democratic Party is now completely reliant on the continued durability of a man who clearly is losing it.
Here was the President of the United States yesterday saying that he ran for three reasons but he can only remember two.
I remember when this killed Rick Perry's presidential campaign when he did something similar.
But apparently it's no problem when sitting President of the United States can't put things together.
When I said I was running when I announced my campaign, and not many people took it seriously, I said I was running for three reasons.
One, to restore the soul of this country, a sense of decency and honor.
But secondly, to rebuild the backbone of the country.
Hard-working, middle-class folks who built this country.
Okay, so, um, that's great.
He can't remember basic things.
Also, polls show that Joe Biden is in a bit of trouble.
As he should be.
According to a brand new poll, 6 in 10 Americans say that they blame Joe Biden for trouble on inflation.
According to Mediaite, 20% of voters said his economic policies were somewhat responsible, according to this new study.
Conducted for Politico by Morning Consult, another 39% said the policies were very responsible.
12% said they didn't know.
Only 28% of Americans said that Joe Biden's policies were not too responsible or not responsible at all for the surge in inflation.
Inflation has continued to surge.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated food prices increased significantly in the month of June alone, including the cost of beef, which is up 4.5%, eggs, 3.1%, milk, 0.05%.
Home prices have also increased, setting a record year-over-year growth of 17% in May.
In fact, Jerome Powell, who is the head of the Federal Reserve, he said, yeah, by the way, you know, we were saying that inflation is transitory and all of that.
What we meant was it's not transitory.
Here's Jerome Powell.
The process of reopening the economy is unprecedented, as was the shutdown at the onset of the pandemic.
As the reopening continues, bottlenecks, hiring difficulties, and other constraints could continue to limit how quickly supply can adjust, raising the possibility that inflation could turn out to be higher and more persistent than we expect.
Oh, well, no big deal, though.
It's all good.
Everything's good.
In fact, the New York Times has an entire piece today about how isn't it magical that when we just give people money that we alleviate poverty?
They have a big, big piece in the New York Times by Jason DeParle today, quote, pandemic aid programs spur a record drop in poverty.
The most comprehensive study yet of the federal response to the pandemic shows huge but temporary benefits for the poor and helps frame a larger debate over the role of government.
See, here's the thing.
According to the left, the way you solve poverty is you just drop bags of cash on people.
According to the right, the way that you solve poverty is you incentivize people to make better decisions for their family that allow them to climb the rungs of success.
That's permanent.
You want to get people out of poverty?
You incentivize them to get jobs.
You incentivize them to get educated.
You incentivize them to make responsible financial decisions.
According to the left, the way that you make people not poor is you drop fiat money on them and inflate the currency.
And apparently this is supposed to... By the way, there are consequences to that.
Here is one of the consequences.
The brand new Q2 GDP growth stats are out today.
They were expected to be 8.5%, right?
Record, massive growth.
That was the expectation, 8.5, 8.4%.
The economy instead grew at a pitiful 6.5% in the last quarter.
So the economists only missed by 25%.
There are 400,000 initial jobless claims.
6.5% in the last quarter.
So the economists only missed by 25%.
There are 400,000 initial jobless claims.
That is a huge GDP miss.
It is a huge GDP miss.
you And that GDP miss, the Democrats are going to blame that on the COVID uptick?
It is not due to the COVID uptick.
It is due to the government botching COVID, and it is due to the public health messaging, and it is due to the fact that you are paying people to stay home, and it is suppressing economic growth.
You're inflating the currency, you're inflating prices, demand is starting to decline because you have inflated the prices, and because productivity is not ramping up to meet demand.
All of this is policy.
Policy is what is doing this right now.
If you just left everything, it's fine.
The entire Democratic Party was going around shouting, build back better.
We got to build back.
You know, that's the thing.
Build back.
You didn't even build back to regular.
When they say build back better, what they mean is, what if we use this pandemic as an excuse to dismantle all of the institutions of success that had created a historically prosperous economy in March of last year?
What if we just dismantled all of that and then built it back better?
Instead, here's what you get.
You get my seven-year-old building a beautiful structure with her blocks, and then my one-and-a-half-year-old coming in, wrecking it, and then stacking two blocks and being like, I built back better.
This is what you have done if you are the Democratic Party at this point.
That is a terrible miss.
6.5% growth versus 8.5% growth?
Not even close.
8.5% growth? Not even close. Not even close. And this is because of the Batchary.
It is because they've blown money into this economy at unbelievable record rates that were unnecessary.
You know, most people in America ended the pandemic with more in savings than they started the pandemic with.
That's how much money we spent.
And Joe Biden's plan after that was instead of telling everybody to get back to work, His plan was, what if we just keep giving you money?
Like forever.
And the New York Times is there cheering it on like good little idiots they are.
quote, A huge increase in government aid prompted by the covid pandemic will cut poverty nearly in half this year from pre pandemic levels and push the share of Americans in poverty to the lowest level on record, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet of a vast but temporary expansion of the safety net.
The number of poor Americans is expected to fall by nearly 20 million from 2018 levels, a decline of almost 45%.
The country has never cut poverty so much in such a short period of time.
And the development is especially notable since it defies economic headwinds.
The economy has nearly 7 million fewer jobs than it did before the pandemic.
Yes, because the way that you solve poverty, according to the left, is you just shovel meaningless dollars at people, which is not a medium or long-term solution to poverty.
It has never been a medium or long-term solution to poverty, to just shovel money at people.
It exacerbates over-the-long-haul systemic poverty.
It creates incentives for people to make worse financial decisions.
It reduces growth rates.
It gets rid of incentive for entrepreneurs to create new businesses and better products and services.
Joe Biden is going to feel the burden here.
He really is.
The Democratic Party has blowback coming.
2022 is going to be a very bad year for them.
It's the reason why they're so reliant on the January 6th commission.
Because if at any point the American people look around and realize that we shouldn't be in a slow growth mode here.
We should be in the fastest growth probably ever thanks to the artificial coma the economy was put in last year.
And now it's being blown by the incompetence of a spend first, tax later administration.
Yeah, the American people are not going to react well to this in any way, shape, or form.
All right, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content coming up soon.
It is The Matt Walsh Show.
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Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
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Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro show.
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On today's show, the Biden administration moves to impose federal vaccine mandates, Canadian churches are targeted by arsonists, and the Supreme Court agrees to hear a case that could impact Roe v. Wade.
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