We’re Adults, Dammit, So Leave Us Alone | Ep. 1310
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Democrats and the media grow increasingly rabid about new anti-COVID measures, even though Americans are adults.
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Alrighty, so panic, panic.
Everybody panic.
We have to panic.
It's very important that we panic.
The headlines today betray nothing but panic.
Panic, panic everywhere.
Oh, okay.
Here's the thing.
There's not really a great reason to panic.
So the headline over at Drudge Report, which has basically just become the Huffington Post at this point, This is one of the things that has driven me nuts for the past several months.
Okay, is it really peak COVID now?
Because when I think of peak COVID, I think how many people are dying of COVID, right?
This is one of the things that has driven me nuts for the past several months.
Case counts don't matter.
Hospitalizations and deaths matter.
Even if hospitalizations get disconnected from deaths, hospitalizations don't matter as much as deaths do.
Okay, so it used to be that case counts were really, really closely tied to death rate.
Now, thanks to the vaccine, that has been wildly disconnected.
To the point where 90% of all Americans above the age of 65 are now vaccinated against COVID-19.
And 70% of all Americans above the age of 18 are vaccinated against COVID-19.
And that is not including all of the people who didn't get vaccinated, who already had COVID-19, who probably have natural antibodies or T cell memory.
Which means that in all likelihood, you are looking at an adult population in the United States above the age of 18, in excess of at least 75, maybe 80% of all of those people who Already, you have some level of immunity to COVID-19.
A very shrinking, diminishing percentage of the population is still highly vulnerable to COVID-19, which is why you have seen this wild disconnect between the case rates and the death rates.
We are also seeing an increasing disconnect between hospitalization rates and death rates.
Why?
Well, because at the very beginning of the pandemic, everybody who went to the hospital was 80 years old and had three preexisting conditions.
Now, a lot of the people who are going to the hospital are 25 and have one preexisting condition and are staying in the hospital for say five or six days and then getting out as opposed to staying for two weeks and then dying.
And you can see this in the death rates because who cares about getting diagnosed with COVID if you end up with a mild cold?
I'm seeing sheer panic out there today because, wow, Lindsey Graham announced that he had a breakthrough case of COVID and now he's going to self-quarantine for 10 days.
So, first of all, I'm not even sure that it's worth quarantining if you have COVID at this point.
Like, it's so widespread that I'm not even sure, like on a public health level, whether quarantining is actually going to slow the spread in any significant...
Like, I get it.
I get you're supposed to quarantine if you have COVID.
I do.
I understand.
I understand why they're telling you to do this, because there are so many unvaccinated people out there.
But if Lindsey Graham is dealing with a lot of vaccinated people every day, then really, this should not be, like, of massive concern.
In the same way that many people go to the office when they have a cold, many people go to the office when they are feeling mildly ill, If COVID is now degraded to the level of a mild illness, I don't understand why everybody on earth is supposed to be freaking out that Lindsey Graham got a breakthrough case of COVID that has resulted in the sniffles.
According to the Daily Wire, Lindsey Graham announced on Monday afternoon he tested positive for COVID-19 and started experiencing symptoms on Saturday.
He said he started having flu-like symptoms Saturday night.
He went to the doctor.
He said, I feel like I have a sinus infection.
At present, I have mild symptoms.
I will be quarantining for 10 days.
Okay, why is that even a public health story?
I don't understand.
Being diagnosed with basically very, very mild illness is not a public health emergency.
And so when you see people freaking out about case rates, it makes no sense.
It is just alarmism of the highest order.
So when you have CNBC reporting, CDC says seven-day average of daily U.S.
COVID cases surpassed peak seen last summer.
Yes, but last summer, we were seeing like way more death.
I'm looking at U.S.
COVID death rates right now.
Okay, the seven-day rolling average, according to the New York Times, remains at 362, which is basically where it was about a month ago.
If you want to look at the height of the pandemic, or even if you want to look last summer at the height of the pandemic last summer, you were looking at seven day rolling averages that were at least twice what you are seeing right now in terms of death rates.
Okay, so the sort of insane panic that is being trotted out there, it really is wild.
And by the way, there is some countervailing data to suggest that perhaps the daily average in COVID cases might be going down, actually.
According to CNBC itself, U.S.
COVID cases based on a seven-day moving average reached 72,790 on Friday, according to data compiled by the CDC.
That's higher than the peak in average daily cases seen last summer, when the country was reporting about 68,700 new cases per day.
The daily average in COVID cases, however, has since dropped, falling to 68,326 new cases per day on Saturday and 63,250 new cases per day on Sunday, according to the agency.
Now, there are some data from Johns Hopkins that suggest the opposite.
They show a continued increase in the seven-day average to nearly 80,000 new cases per day as of Sunday.
But again, case rates don't matter.
By the way, you know who's saying case rates don't matter anymore?
The Biden administration.
The Biden administration called up CNN and they said, why are you reporting the case numbers as opposed to the hospitalization and death numbers?
Precisely.
Precisely.
That's what we should be reporting.
Again, the kind of focus in on how dumb Americans are and how terrible we all are and the unvaccinated, they're all going to die.
70 plus percent of Americans are now overtly vaccinated above the age of 18.
Many more have already gotten natural immunity through having COVID.
90% of all people in the 65 plus age group are vaccinated.
That is a massive success story if anybody had the brains to notice it.
And you know what's going to happen with the Delta variant?
It is going to spike and then it is going to wane.
And you know why I say that's going to happen?
Because it has happened in all the countries.
It is happening everywhere.
It happened in the UK.
It happened in the Netherlands.
And yet the panic is just outsized, right?
Everybody panics.
So Leanna Nguyen, who just is on TV every day because she gets to promote panic, she said to Yahoo News, quote, the single biggest mistake the Biden administration made during this entire pandemic response, and I would argue in the entire Biden presidency, was back in May when the CDC said that vaccinated people can take off their mask but did not have proof of vaccination attached to it.
As a result, people understood the pandemic to be over them.
The unvaccinated began behaving like they were vaccinated.
Um, first of all, this is so utterly and wildly not related to reality.
The unvaccinated largely were always acting as though the pandemic was over.
That's why they were unvaccinated.
It wasn't like the unvaccinated waited for Joe Biden to say, vaccinated, you can unmask.
And they went, hey, now I can unmask too.
This has been Leanna Nguyen's bugaboo for a long time here.
She thinks that mask mandates are the be-all end-all.
As we will explore, mask mandates are in fact not the be-all end-all.
Mask mandates have been wildly ineffective by the available data that we have.
That doesn't mean that all masking is ineffective.
It means mask mandates pushed top-down by the government have been extremely ineffective.
Hey, she says, what did we see?
We saw exactly what I and many public health experts predicted at the time.
The honor code did not work.
Surges have happened because of unvaccinated individuals.
Now with the Delta variant, restrictions are coming back, except nobody's listening anymore.
Okay, but that's not, people weren't listening in the first place.
Like, does she know anyone who's unvaccinated?
Seriously, like, has Leanna Nguyen talked to anyone who's unvaccinated?
Has she spent any time in the red states that she likes to crap all over?
I have serious doubts because that's not how people were behaving in the first place.
People who are unvaccinated are significantly less worried about the virus than people who are vaccinated.
Unmasking the vaccinated had zero impact on unmasking the unvaccinated.
This is just madness.
And she says, President Biden absolutely declared a victory too soon.
Right.
Victory.
There will be no more victory.
And Biden himself has now drunk from this.
Well, the only rationale, politically, this is unbelievably stupid.
Politically, what Joe Biden and Biden administration are doing right now is incredibly dumb because all they have to do is wait about three weeks and then Delta will drop.
I'm just telling you right now.
This is not just me saying this.
Marty McCarry of Johns Hopkins University is saying this.
Scott Gottlieb from the FDA is saying this.
Pretty much all the scientists agree.
Looking at the UK, which had a wave that looked very much like this one, and the Netherlands, which had a wave that looked very much like this one, there will be a drop in terms of the daily case rates in the United States.
All Joe Biden has to do is say, go get vaccinated.
Like, this is a very easy message.
If you're vaccinated, you're pretty much safe from the virus.
If you're unvaccinated, Most, by all available data, the best chance is that you will get somewhere between mildly and moderately ill.
A small percentage of you will get severely ill and an even smaller percentage of you will die, but it's a larger percentage than if you got vaccinated.
So you probably should get vaccinated, right?
That is the case for getting vaccinated.
Now, you're an adult, go live your life.
And if you get COVID because you didn't get vaccinated, And if you get a serious case of COVID, it's your decision.
You're an adult.
We're relying on you to make your own decisions now.
This would be very easy for Joe Biden to do, and then it's off his plate.
I mean, just politically speaking, first of all, that would be a better public health message, but put aside the public health messaging of it.
It would get it off his plate politically because then it would be on individual Americans to decide whether or not they wanted to protect themselves.
Okay, but Joe Biden can't do that because the unspoken goal of the entire Democratic Party and the entire media for a year has been zero COVID.
Zero COVID is never going to happen.
And the reason that Democrats and the media bought into zero COVID is because it gave them ultimate control over your life.
If they set the goal at zero COVID, and zero COVID is never going to happen, but in order to achieve the utopia of zero COVID, they get to maintain control.
That is a feature, not a bug.
That is a good thing.
More eviction moratoria.
The CDC today, by the way, issued guidance that allowed Joe Biden the excuse of continuing to expel migrants who are crossing the southern border illegally.
There is a rule that was put in place by the Trump administration that allowed for quick expulsion of illegal immigrants who tested positive for COVID.
The CDC came in, the Biden administration planned to throw that out.
The CDC came in and they trumped it.
The CDC is a bureaucratic organization.
They don't have plenary power over immigration, but Now they do, because the magic of public health emergencies, like any other emergency, is it gives inordinate power to small groups of unelected bureaucrats.
Democrats are very, very happy about this.
So the emergency mentality will continue until morale improves.
That is the basic strategy here.
And Joe Biden apparently is all in on it.
This is so dumb politically.
Here is Joe Biden saying, get ready for more restrictions.
Should Americans expect more guidelines coming up, more restrictions because of COVID?
In all probability.
By the way, we had a good day yesterday.
Almost a million people got vaccinated.
About half a million of those people for the first time.
I'm for the second shot.
And so I'm hopeful that people are beginning to realize how essential it is.
Okay, but I also really enjoy how the public health officials who have completely botched the public messaging with regard to vaccination are now taking credit for more people vaccinating.
You know why more people are vaccinating?
Because more people are scared of COVID.
End of story.
Which demonstrates, once again, adults do risk allocation all the time.
They do risk-reward allocation all the damn time.
They don't require doddering old fools like Joe Biden to force them to do it.
And Jen Psaki, she said, well, you know, we're probably not going to do more shutdowns, but I'm not going to say that anything is off the table at this point.
Here's Jen Psaki from the White House yesterday.
We've been clear we're not going back to the shutdowns of March of 2020.
We are not going back to the economy shutting down.
We've made too much progress.
Too many people are vaccinated.
There's been too much progress on the economic front.
But again, he has said from the beginning that we are going to be guided by the science, guided by our public health experts, and we're not going to take options off the table of what they may recommend.
Okay, so this is wild.
The whole point here is that elected officials have to balance all of the competing interests, from the economy to freedom.
But now, there she is basically just saying, we'll let Dr. Fauci and Rochelle Walensky decide.
A very, very bad idea.
And by the way, it is resulting in dramatically decreased poll numbers for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
On a political level, you know, keep going with this, guys.
Really, let's see how it works out for you.
We'll get to that in one second.
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Alrighty, so all of this is just not only bad policy, it is terrible politics.
There is a reason that opinion polls are showing that Americans are really pessimistic right now, and it's because if you set a goal like zero COVID and it is unreachable, and then you don't reach it, and then the media freak out every time everybody gets a cold, people are going to get very pessimistic very quickly.
Right now, Kamala Harris's numbers Are really, really bad.
Her unpopularity is at 49%.
Her popularity hovers about 45% according to a YouGov America poll.
She's particularly unpopular according to Economist and YouGov with younger voters.
Only 36% of people aged 18 to 29 view her favorably.
Joe Biden apparently is moving in the wrong direction.
A new Rasmussen Reports poll shows at least 52% of likely voters now disapprove of Joe Biden's work in the White House.
42% say they strongly disapprove.
Only 26% say they strongly approve of Joe Biden's presidency.
And even if you see polls that are more positive for Biden, they're way worse than they were just a few weeks ago when it comes to optimism and pessimism about the country.
People are way more pessimistic than they were just a few months ago.
One of the reasons is because of the alarmist idiocy being pushed by the media.
I mean, it is an amazing thing that now you are seeing officials from the White House who are chiding the media for their coverage of COVID.
Because the media and the Democratic Party, they are the same.
They are a unity.
All the media at this point basically are a loudspeaker for whatever the White House wants them to be.
And so when the White House are chiding the media, guys, you're too panicked.
Stop with the panic already.
This demonstrates how far the media have gone in pursuit of the panic.
Because of this panic, which again is rooted in a misunderstanding of the difference in cases and deaths, it's rooted in a misunderstanding of the trajectory of the Delta variant, which again we have already seen in the UK, we have already seen in the Netherlands, because it is rooted in a basic misunderstanding of the possibility of how people actually spread this thing from vaccinated to unvaccinated.
The media have been covering it like, if you're vaccinated, you are just as likely to pass this thing as if you are unvaccinated.
Like all of this, these are bad headlines and bad data being pushed forward by the media.
And many of the people responsible for this bad data, frankly, are members of the public health establishment, the Fauci's and Walensky's of the world.
This has resulted in some incredibly dumb public health recommendations.
So, for example, you've heard a lot about masking up.
So, San Francisco Mayor London Breed declared yesterday that everybody in San Francisco, vaccinated and unvaccinated, needs to mask up.
Which is totally crazy.
Okay, I'm looking right now at the San Francisco COVID rates.
San Francisco, COVID cases, right now, their cases are up.
They're up to about 1,000 cases a day.
The San Francisco rolling death rate, August 1, 2021, their rolling death rate, seven-day average, zero.
Zero.
Again, San Francisco is masking up again, and their seven-day rolling average on deaths is currently zero.
Okay, the population of San Francisco is somewhere in the neighborhood of 900,000 people.
Okay, this is madness, of course.
Now, Bill de Blasio didn't go quite as far.
He said he was going to reject an indoor mask mandate for the vaccinated, but he then came out and said he wanted to recommend that everybody wear masks in indoor settings, even if you're vaccinated, which of course does not make a lot of sense.
The whole point here is that if you're telling the vaccinated to mask up, you're actually telling people that the vaccines are not Effective.
Unfortunately, that is the message that people are taking away and that is the wrong message.
Vaccines are extremely effective because what vaccines are designed to do is prevent you from the dead.
You are not supposed to die if you get the vaccine.
They're really good at this.
They're not as good at preventing you from giving a mild cold to somebody else vaccinated or transmitting to somebody who's unvaccinated, then they get really sick.
That's why you're an adult.
If you want a vaccine, go get a vaccine today.
They're available everywhere.
Really, you can't run down the street now without running past some place that is offering a vaccine.
If you want the vaccine, go get the vaccine.
If you don't, then bear the consequences.
But here's Bill de Blasio telling the vaccinated maybe they should consider masking up.
We want to strongly recommend that people wear masks in indoor settings, even if you're vaccinated.
Now, this is particularly true, of course, if you might be around anyone unvaccinated.
If you don't know the people you're around, if you're not sure if they're vaccinated or not, or if you know some are unvaccinated, absolutely crucial to wear a mask, even if you are vaccinated.
Okay, now you notice that he's holding a cloth face mask, correct?
And this is the go-to is the cloth face mask.
Now, there's been a lot of debate in public health circles about just how effective the cloth face masks are.
There are some studies that suggest that these are these are lab studies.
These are not real world studies that suggest that there may be some mild effectiveness to cloth face masks.
N95 seem to be significantly more effective, but you're supposed to actually get a new N95 every day with pretty much no one does.
The real world studies on masking are somewhat conflicting.
To just be straight with you, there are some studies that suggest a level of efficacy.
Those tend to be lab studies where it says that a barrier is better than nothing.
Fair enough.
And then there's some real world studies which suggest that masking is not quite as effective as people think it is because people tend to mess around with it because there are air pockets, people will move their mask, they'll take a dirty mask, put it in their pocket, put it back on their face, and all the rest of that sort of thing.
So the record is mixed.
One thing that is indubitably true, and obviously true, is that mask mandates have had no real impact.
Okay, let's begin in Sweden.
Okay, right now, according to RT.com, mask-free Sweden nears zero daily COVID deaths, as chief epidemiologist warns against far-reaching conclusions against the Delta strain.
Remember, Sweden was ripped up and down for its approach to COVID, which was basically protect the people who are most vulnerable, let everybody else go live their life.
There was no mask mandate in COVID.
There hasn't been since like July, since last July.
Or rather, Sweden dropped its last remaining... They had very mild mask recommendations for public transport, but they dropped that on July 1st.
They supported some social distancing measures, but Sweden was very wide open from the beginning of the pandemic.
And right now, Sweden is experiencing pretty much zero COVID deaths on a day-to-day basis, and that is despite the Delta variant still being the chief variant in Sweden, just like it is everywhere else.
So are the masks the solution?
Vaccination is the solution, guys.
Vaccination is the solution.
Masks were never going to be the solution.
And that's why it was so absurd when you saw people in the federal government telling you that you should rely more on your mask than on vaccinations, that masks were... Literally, Robert Redfield said this in Senate testimony.
He said, masks protect you better than the vaccine, which is just crazy.
That's just crazy talons.
Also, when it comes to mask mandates, these have not been successful nearly anywhere.
There is no evidence that mask mandates, I'm not saying masks, mask mandates, government top-down directives that you must wear a mask, that these have done anything to dramatically decrease either transmission rates or hospitalization rates or death rates.
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Alrighty, so you've seen members of the media who are in full-scale panic mode say that the solution to this is new mask mandates.
Force all the vaccinated to masks that they don't breathe or cough, even asymptomatically, on people who are unvaccinated.
Which again, is really stupid for a variety of reasons, including the fact it makes unvaccinated people feel more protected than they actually are when the actual solution for them is to go get vaccinated.
But for example, Mika Brzezinski is uber mad at Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida because DeSantis has said he is not in favor of mask mandates and he's not in favor of masking children in schools.
Here's Mika Brzezinski going nuts on DeSantis.
What is going on in Florida?
I know Governor Ron DeSantis supports the vaccine, but this masking non-mandate, or whatever you want to call it, seems very counter to the science.
And also we've had a governor who's been flouting Fauci, making fun of the top doctor in the United States.
I feel like he's sending a very mixed message to his constituents.
At what point is the Florida government liable for what is happening in Florida?
Okay, no, he's not sending a mixed message.
The message he has been sending consistently and openly is that there's a high likelihood you're going to get COVID.
And either you're going to get it or you're going to get vaccinated.
That is the message that Ron DeSantis has been sending, which is why the vaccination rates in Florida have been rising continuously.
Florida ranks somewhere in the middle of the pack in terms of vaccinations, but Florida has already vaccinated all of the olds in Florida, which is a lot of people in Florida.
By the way, Dr. Michael Osterholm, who is an advisor, he's a COVID advisor to Joe Biden.
He came out yesterday, he said cloth face masks aren't effective at Delta variant.
I wonder if he's going to get banned from YouTube for pointing this out.
We know today that many of the face cloth coverings that people wear are not very effective in reducing any of the virus movement in or out, either you're breathing out or you're breathing in.
And in fact, if you're in the Upper Midwest right now, anybody who's wearing their face cloth covering can tell you they can smell all the smoke that we're still getting.
We need to talk about better masking.
We need to talk about N95 respirators, which would do a lot For both people who are not yet vaccinated or not previously infected, protecting them as well as keeping others who might become infected, having been vaccinated, from breathing out the virus.
Masks.
Then what we really should be talking about right now is everybody go back to normal except people who are particularly vulnerable and can't get the vaccine.
Right?
People who have serious underlying conditions who should have the N95s.
But, you know, they're still calling for mask mandates is the point.
Like broad mask mandates.
By the way, again, the record on mask mandates sucks.
It's really bad.
Like here, for example, is a chart from Austria.
You can see Austria started requiring masks fairly early on in the pandemic.
This would have been like March of 2020.
They started requiring it after they had their spike.
Things remained low.
Then they got to winter.
The mask mandate was still in place.
Boom, huge spike.
Germany, same exact thing.
Germany, you can see they put in their mask mandate mid-April of last year.
They were already on the downside of the mountain.
Things remain low.
Boom, fall spike.
Same thing in France.
They had like a mild uptick and then a mild downtick in terms of COVID cases per million.
They implemented a mask mandate in May.
Fall, boom, spike.
Same thing in Spain.
I mean, over and over, it's the same exact pattern.
Spain, Britain, Belgium, wherever there was a mask requirement, it was usually done after there was already the major spike, and then afterward, there was another major spike.
So the notion that you can just have government tell people to mask up, and this is going to prevent COVID, the record on that is really, really poor.
Again, that is not saying that masks are completely ineffective, although, again, there is a wide variation between cloth masks on small children, which is what most little kids are wearing, which, Again, I fail to see how any studies that suggest that that is wildly effective for small children and N95s on adults.
My wife, as a doctor, was trained in the use of PPE, personal protective equipment.
Were you?
And by the way, in the hospital, when you're working with severely ill patients who have very transmissible diseases, you use an N95.
You don't use a surgical mask.
You may use a face shield.
You don't use a cloth mask.
But people have started treating the masks as sort of a totem of religious iconography, which is At least it was sort of somewhat understandable on an emotional level when there were no solutions.
Now there's a vaccine.
There's no rationale for treating masks as the be-all end-all at this point.
Okay, but the panic continues apace.
So here's the thing.
The public health establishment needs another reason why we need to have these shutdowns and centralization of power in the bureaucracy.
Because if what I'm saying is true, Namely, adults are adults, and adults get to make adult decisions, and there's a solution right here.
And if you don't want to use the solution, that one's on you, which means public health experts are now basically back to what they were before, which is they go back to their laboratories, and they go back to their organizations, and they leave the rest of us the hell alone.
They have to have some way of forestalling their return to anonymity.
The way that they've forestalled the return to anonymity is they do what they've been doing sporadically throughout the pandemic.
They say it's about the kids.
It is not about the kids.
The data on the Delta variant demonstrate this thing is more transmissible.
There is no data whatsoever suggesting at this point, data, not anecdotal stories, data, suggesting that Delta is more deadly for kids.
Hey, you know who says this?
The Washington Post.
There's a good article in the week, just last week, about the risk to children from the Delta variant.
Professor Emily Oster has said exactly the same thing.
Professor of Economics over at Brown University.
She points out that for children, there's higher kid infection, but the risk of serious disease remains very low.
You know who else is saying this?
Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, who again is a doctor inside the Biden administration.
She says kids are not being harmed by Delta in large numbers.
Thankfully, for children, the risk of severe COVID remains still very small.
The risk of hospitalization remains very minimal.
Death, even for the complication people might know as MIS-C.
But again, you know, you're a parent and so am I. Every sort of case that can be prevented, we want to prevent.
Okay, so she is herself admitting that there's no data to suggest this thing is highly deadly for small children.
And yet the kids, as always, are being used as the excuse For more top-down public health controls.
So, for example, you have a doctor on MSNBC, a guy named Red Leonard, the Irwin Red Leonard, who's saying, we haven't done enough to protect kids in schools.
We haven't done enough.
We need to do more to protect kids in schools.
Kids in schools were never the main vector of transmission, particularly kids under the age of 12.
By the way, in the United States, emergency use authorization has been extended for every single person above the age of 12 in the United States.
This is true internationally as well.
Small children are never, they've never been the main vectors of transmission.
Small children are not dying from the virus in any sort of statistically significant numbers.
The number of children who have died without any pre-existing conditions from the virus is so low it beggars imagination.
In fact, there was a Johns Hopkins study recently and it found, I believe, zero COVID deaths among healthy young children.
Thank God, thank God for that.
But that's not stopping people from freaking out because again, politicians, the incentive structure in our society is so loaded against people allowing you freedom.
If you're a politician and you are active and intervening in somebody's life, even if the intervention is stupid and counterproductive and makes your life worse, then we give the politicians credit for trying.
Hey, that is precisely the opposite of what we should be doing with our politicians.
Politicians should be given credit for leaving us the hell alone and only intervening when necessity calls for it.
Necessity does not call for this.
But people are so reliant on the government playing Big Brother and playing God.
I have to say, there's an almost religious quality to what people want from their government actors at this point.
There's a religious quality to how people treat Anthony Fauci, and there's a religious quality to how people treat the government in general.
Oh, death is coming.
The government will save me.
COVID could, you know, I know that it's really not damaging the kids.
I know that the masking procedures they are recommending are not going to be particularly effective, but at least they're doing something.
At least they're doing something.
The government cannot protect you from life.
That is not the government's job.
The government is designed to protect you from externalities that are created by other people acting in dangerous and irresponsible fashion.
That is not the same thing as you have the ability to protect yourself now.
The game fundamentally changed when vaccines became available.
Period.
End of story.
Nonetheless, you have Dr. Redliner saying kids are at risk.
Kids are not at serious risk of COVID.
We have known this for a year.
Children are at risk, Garrett, and they will be continuing to be at risk, and maybe greater risk than they are right now.
So RSV is a virus that causes, a very common virus that causes respiratory illness in children.
And before the pandemic, we would see a lot of this in very young children.
Now we're seeing a rise in the RSV.
It's called respiratory syncytial virus.
We're seeing a rise in that along with a rise in COVID cases among children.
This does not portend very well for what's going to happen when we start opening schools and have, of course, children all over the country going back into the classroom without necessarily even mandating that teachers and other adult workers in schools get vaccinated.
Okay, by the way, RSV is a different virus than COVID.
RSV is a different virus than COVID.
So we're seeing an RSV spike, and we're using that to now suggest that we need to lock down on the basis of COVID.
It is a different virus.
So, like, this is just madness.
It's just madness.
And all of this is driving government actors, who are more activists, to say, yeah, you know what?
We've got to mask up our kids.
We need to mask.
The data on masking kids is nil.
Okay?
In many countries, they don't mask kids.
The notion that masking kids has ever been highly protective of the surrounding society is ridiculous.
And yet Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio, he gets points for trying because he says that we should mask up kids at schools.
I'll tell you what we have done.
We came out last week with recommendations.
They are recommendations.
We leave it up to the local schools.
600 and some local schools.
We leave it up to them, but we have a strong recommendation that because the population in school, kids in school, most of them are unvaccinated.
Obviously, we can't get anybody 11 and under vaccinated yet.
So most of these kids are unvaccinated.
And we had great success last winter, last school year.
We saw virtually no spread in the classroom when all the kids were wearing masks.
So we recommend, strong recommendation to our schools, That they do that now some will do that some will not but it's clear the evidence shows that that's a way to really slow down spread In the school.
And we think it's very important.
Okay, is that what the evidence shows?
Because we've been operating on the basis of almost no evidence with regard to public health measures since the beginning of this pandemic.
To take the most obvious example, we still have governors and senators and public health officials saying that we need a social distance at six feet apart.
Do you know where six feet apart came from?
I don't.
You know who else doesn't?
The CDC.
They've been asked directly where the six foot guidance comes from.
And the answer is nowhere.
Literally nowhere.
Okay, the WHO has been saying that three foot minimums were the standard.
This is as of last year.
They were saying a three foot standard was the minimum because there were studies that were like a hundred years old about droplets.
There's only one problem.
This virus is not a droplet driven virus.
It is aerosolized.
It's in the air.
Once you speak, it is out there.
There are studies suggesting that if you really want to socially distance from somebody with COVID, you need about 30 feet.
30, not 6.
So we've been operating on the basis of just bad data throughout this entire pandemic, and it just feels like immature people grasping at straws to try and control things that they frankly cannot control very well.
And now...
In the middle of the thing, you get it.
Again, in the middle of the thing, when you are grasping at straws, you get it.
But I'll tell you when I don't get it, I don't get it when the solution is there, and when everybody's had the opportunity to avail themselves of the solution, and people are still insisting on this crap.
Now, there are people who are taking advantage, right?
Randi Weingarten over at the American Federation of Teachers, who's one of the more malevolent forces in American public life.
She's already signaling that the schools might shut down again.
Because the chief goal of so many of these teachers' unions is to make sure their teachers never have to do a jot or tittle of work.
Here's Randi Weingarten, one of the worst people in the United States.
Schools will be open.
They need to be open.
We need to make sure that they are safe and healthy.
The next question about will they stay open, that's where we worry.
Because when you have lots of kids, particularly every child under 12 has not been vaccinated, we see the Delta variant being very transmissible.
So what?
So what if a bunch of five-year-olds give each other the Delta variant and they all get cold?
Guess what?
That's called being five.
Have you ever had a five-year-old?
Okay, I have two kids who are between the ages of five and eight and I have a one-and-a-half-year-old.
The one-and-a-half-year-old has basically never been sick because she's never seen human society because of COVID.
The other two, and that's not by choice, now she's out there and she's circulating and all this and she gets a cold every so often because kids are just petri dishes.
I don't care if my five-year-old gets a cold.
I don't care if my seven-year-old gets a cold.
No parent cares about this.
This is this bizarre, idiotic notion that kids are never going to get sick again.
And that Randy Weingarten is deeply worried for your child unless they're vaccinated against a disease that to date has killed 340 people under the age of 18.
Those are the CDC stats yesterday.
And apparently, according to Johns Hopkins, zero of those kids were perfectly healthy at the time when they got COVID.
She is saying that we're going to shut down schools again.
The level of control that unelected bureaucrats want to hold over your life is unending, and that's why they need an unending pandemic.
We'll get to more of this in just one second, because again, there are exceptions to every rule.
The exceptions are that the specials themselves don't have to follow any of the rules.
We'll get to that in a moment.
First, this past weekend, you saw that there were vaccine passport protests in Berlin.
They turned violent when police decided to start batoning women and children.
The media have turned a blind eye.
You haven't seen that covered very much.
Why?
Well, it hurts the narrative that they have been spinning, which is that the only thing that matters is the lockdowns.
Authoritarianism has been on the move.
You're seeing it from the government.
You're seeing it from public health experts.
You're seeing it in your corporate life, where your boss is telling you what to think and what to believe.
You are seeing it at your schools, where your schools are telling your kids that they have to believe that America is a terrible place and that based on their color, they are steeped in the sins of the past.
This is why you need to pick up a brand new copy of my new book, The Authoritarian Moment.
The book does a deep dive into the history of authoritarianism in the United States, how it is creeping into our own government, what we can do to stop it, And looks at every institution in the United States and looks at how the left renormalized those institutions and weaponized them against you.
In order to reverse that, you have to understand how we got here.
The Authoritarian Moment details that and, more importantly, how we stop it.
It has an actual action plan in The Authoritarian Moment about how to stop what is going on right now.
The Authoritarian Moment, it is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or any other major bookseller.
Go get your copy right now.
Leave a five-star review.
Let others know the book is worth their time.
Thank you.
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So, this is not, none of this, none of the realities are stopping people on the left from engaging in a sort of full scale hypocrisy.
So, You have Andrew Cuomo in New York who killed all the old people in New York, which is, you know, pretty amazing that he's still the governor and apparently no one cares.
Remember that time when he was embroiled in all these sexual harassment scandals and then those just kind of went away because he's a Democrat?
Yeah, that was fun.
Anyway, Andrew Cuomo, he said yesterday that private businesses should ban the unvaccinated, which is unbelievably stupid.
Again, these are all public health measures that are likely to achieve the opposite of what people who are pushing them supposedly want to achieve.
If you push all of the unvaccinated into one area, And you push all the vaccinated into the other area, which is what Andrew Cuomo is now proposing.
What do you suppose happens inside the unvaccinated area?
You think things spread slower or faster?
The answer is a lot faster.
If you want a higher case count, make sure that you separate the vaccinated from the unvaccinated.
That's precisely what Andrew Cuomo is pushing because, once again, Our politics reward people for DOING SOMETHING!
Even if that something is setting your hair on fire and then running directly into a tree.
You get rewarded for that in politics so long as you're DOING SOMETHING!
If you just say, listen, not much we can do here.
Live your life.
Be on your own.
Then the media are like, how dare you watch?
Let people die!
Death, Santas!
Here's Andrew Cuomo setting his hair on fire and then running directly into a tree.
Private businesses, I am asking them And suggesting to them, go to vaccine-only admission.
Go to vaccine-only admission.
Oh, well, if they do that, then that would probably fix everything.
Except for how it's not going to.
The good news is that if you're a high-profile Democrat, you don't have to pay attention to any of this.
So here is CNN's John Berman defending maskless Muriel Bowser attending a wedding.
It's good times.
If you're Muriel Bowser, you are so special, the rules don't apply to you.
This has been true throughout the pandemic, right?
If you're Chris Cuomo, you don't have to pay attention to quarantine rules.
And if you're Lori Lightfoot, then you get to go get your hair done.
And if you're Nancy Pelosi, you get to do the same thing.
The rules just don't apply to you.
You're one of the special people.
Here is CNN's John Berman defending Muriel Bowser attending a wedding maskless indoors.
We were criticizing politicians for wearing masks still, where the science was telling them, oh, they didn't need to be.
You know, we kept on asking the White House, why is Joe Biden still wearing a mask when the mask guidance, you know, has changed?
And now, of course, we're saying, She should be wearing a mask even though she was still following the guidance.
Look, I get it.
If you're a politician, you don't want a picture that raises questions.
That's bad politics.
The question is, you know, whether or not she did anything functionally, policy-wise wrong, and I don't know.
Well, you know, no, no, I mean, we were, yes.
It's her standard.
She's the one who just put a mask mandate in place.
Again, all of this is about control.
It is incredible how all of the right-wing fears about people taking advantage of the pandemic to grab control have now been basically justified.
And this is coming from somebody who, again, was perfectly willing to suspend judgments on that particular question when we didn't know anything about the virus.
I didn't say that people shouldn't wear masks.
I was not rabidly anti-mask.
I didn't say at any point that people shouldn't take vaccines.
I've been rabidly pro-vaccine.
But the point here is that now they're still grabbing power.
This is an amazing, it really is a low-key amazing story that people are just ignoring.
So according to USA Today, the CDC has now extended a policy that allows migrants to be expelled over COVID concerns.
So the Biden administration wants to reject all of Donald Trump's immigration policies.
They've done that on the southern border, and we've gotten an unprecedented flood of people washing across the border and citing Joe Biden's policy as a rationale.
So, that's a bad headline.
They don't really want to openly walk back their own border policies, so instead, they've now empowered the CDC to do it for them.
We have giant bureaucracies who are simply empowered to do the thing that the president kind of wants to be done, but he doesn't have to do it in a way that he's answerable for.
So, the Biden administration extended a Trump-era policy on Monday that allows migrants to be expelled to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in holding facilities.
I'm sure that part of this, by the way, was a bunch of pictures that were coming out of those holding facilities in which thousands of COVID-positive people We're waiting in lines.
And then reports that a lot of those people were just being released into the interior of the United States.
The CDC said in a statement that Title 42 quote, shall remain in effect until the CDC director determines that the danger of further introduction of COVID-19 into the United States from covered non-citizens has ceased to be a serious danger to public health and the order is no longer necessary to protect the public health.
Title 42 allows CBP, that's Customs and Border Protection, to expel undocumented migrants to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in holding facilities.
Some children and families are exempt from the policy.
DHS said in a statement, So, let's just get this straight.
but a public health authority and its continued use is dictated by CDC and governed by the CDC's analysis of public health factors.
Okay, so let's just get this straight.
Over the course of the pandemic, the CDC, which again stands for Centers for Disease Control, has now been put in charge for purposes of centralizing power of federal eviction moratoriums, right?
Which again, they have no constitutional or statutory power to do.
They do not have the power to simply reject the ability of homeowners to collect rent and apartment owners to collect rent.
No one gave the CDC that authority.
They just took it.
The CDC does not have plenary power over immigration.
Apparently, they now have been given plenary power over immigration.
And now they are doing this in the midst of what is a non-crisis.
We do not have a crisis in this country.
Be unvaccinated?
I've made a decision not to be vaccinated.
I can't say this enough times.
Okay, a crisis requires two things.
One, a bad thing to happen, and two, for that thing to be relatively unpreventable.
What is happening right now is not only not unpreventable, it has largely been prevented by the vast vaccination of the American population.
And yet we're still doing this routine.
And so, like, I really wonder if Ameri- There's so many Americans who apparently are just willing to give up their freedom on the basis of pretty much nothing.
Nothing.
The entire population of San Francisco, apparently, is going to go along with masking up despite a seven-day running death average of zero.
Apparently, Washington, D.C.
gonna do the same thing.
They have a running day, seven-day death average in Washington, D.C.
of zero.
And they're all masking up again.
And so, this does lead me to wonder, in a very serious way, what is the future of this country?
Seriously, what is the future of this country?
Because so long as you can sufficiently scare people, you can get them to give any amount of power to the government, apparently.
Endless amounts of power to the government.
You can imagine a situation in which, a few years from now, The weather continues to get wonky out there because we are experiencing, yes, a warming of the globe that is going to take place over the course of the next century.
And human beings have an extraordinary capacity to adapt.
But you can see our political boss is saying, disaster will strike and you and your family will die unless we lock you in your house for three months a year without air conditioning, right?
What will people be willing to do?
What sort of inconvenience will they be willing to go along with in order to prevent the slightest chance of a bad thing happening?
We used to be a rather hardy people, liberty-seeking people, and I wonder whether we are now two peoples.
One group of people who are willing to undertake risk, rational risk, and one group of people who are utterly unwilling to countenance any risk and are willing to give unending power to a centralized authority to prevent themselves from even having to make the decision.
That's the question on my mind these days.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of The Ben Shapiro Show coming up soon.
The Matt Wall Show airs at 1.30 p.m.
Eastern.
Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
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On today's episode, an Olympic update, the eviction moratorium expires, and the Taliban seizes control of half of Afghanistan.