The Charlie Kirk Show - Exposing the Ignorance and Evil Behind the “Pandemic” with Alex Berenson
Aired: 2021-12-08
Duration: 43:14


=== Why We Left Government Data (09:40) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk Show, Alex Berenson, author of a very important new book, All the COVID Thought Crimes You Can Fit into One Episode, Vaccines, Lockdowns, Testing, All of It.
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[00:01:36]  Buckle up.
[00:01:36]  Alex Berenson is here.
[00:01:38]  Here we go.
[00:01:39]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:01:41]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
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[00:01:46]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
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[00:01:51]  He's an incredible guy.
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[00:02:40]  Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
[00:02:42]  I have been wanting to do this interview since March of 2020, but good things come to those who wait, I suppose.
[00:02:48]  Alex Berenson is with us, who I am a huge admirer of.
[00:02:51]  He is an honest, courageous, fact-first individual who is the author of a phenomenal new book called Pandemia, How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights and Lives.
[00:03:02]  Alex Berenson, in a prior life, was a reporter for the New York Times, a financial fraud reporter, and author of Tell Your Children the Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.
[00:03:15]  But we are here to talk about pandemia.
[00:03:17]  Alex, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
[00:03:19]  Well, thank you so much for having me.
[00:03:21]  And so, Alex, let's just start with the whole kind of theme of the book and your journey with this topic.
[00:03:25]  Let's start there, which is please.
[00:03:28]  The floor is yours.
[00:03:29]  It's interesting because you mentioned that I wrote about financial fraud for the Times, and I did, but for a number of years, I covered the drug industry.
[00:03:38]  And I think that that actually really informed a lot of pandemia and certainly my coverage of the vaccines in the last year.
[00:03:47]  Because it really taught me about the complexities of what drug companies do and the way they can manipulate clinical trial data and science without lying, but manipulate it in ways that really work to their advantage and to the disadvantage of the public.
[00:04:02]  But even going back before that, because I was a reporter who focused on finance, very sort of numbers heavy, I was not a political reporter.
[00:04:10]  I was not really a personalities reporter.
[00:04:14]  When I started to see stuff that didn't add up in terms of what the government was reporting, and not so much, it's not like I'm saying the government made up data.
[00:04:23]  What I'm saying is the way the data was presented was fundamentally untrue.
[00:04:29]  And so I had the confidence to speak out about that on Twitter from sort of very early on, from late March 2020.
[00:04:36]  And it made me, I guess, a prominent voice in the anti-lockdown community.
[00:04:42]  And it also made me hated by the people who I had worked with at the New York Times because, I mean, honestly, I think they viewed me as a class traitor.
[00:04:49]  I had these opinions that people who, you know, who they worked with weren't supposed to have.
[00:04:54]  Yeah, so let's just start there.
[00:04:56]  I mean, February 2020, you were like investigating marijuana and other things.
[00:05:02]  And then the virus comes and you just decided, I'm going to start looking into this.
[00:05:06]  And I started to come across your stuff on Substack where, you know, Aaron Ginn, who you might know, is another guy that was really into it in the early days.
[00:05:15]  And I was so outspoken about the lockdowns.
[00:05:18]  And I was, we were really into it because I really had nothing else to do.
[00:05:20]  Everything was locked down.
[00:05:21]  And I'm by no means an expert, but just my common sense instincts that something's wrong.
[00:05:25]  And you were so informative and so courageous early on.
[00:05:28]  Walk us through that because you probably never planned to be center stage of one of the most important medical issues that humanity's ever faced.
[00:05:38]  No, I certainly didn't.
[00:05:40]  And, you know, I was working on a book about really about U.S. drug policy that would have been, and I hope to write one day still, a follow-up to tell your children sort of broadly about this, you know, the epidemic of legalization, the sort of very broad campaign to legalize drugs that we've seen, and not just cannabis, but really all drugs that we've seen in the last 10 or 15 years.
[00:06:03]  And so I was working on that.
[00:06:06]  And then, of course, like everybody else, I saw the videos coming out of China.
[00:06:09]  I think we were all pretty nervous back in January and February.
[00:06:13]  And then, you know, in March 2020, and I do, I talk about this in pandemia, I've read that Neil Ferguson report, the Imperial College London report that said, oh, if we don't do anything, 2 million Americans will die.
[00:06:24]  But even worse, if we do mitigate a million Americans will die and we need to really lock down on society.
[00:06:32]  And within days, that started to happen in New York and California and everywhere else.
[00:06:37]  And then amazingly to me, Neil Ferguson totally changed his prediction.
[00:06:43]  10 days after releasing this report that really shocked the world and pushed the United States and Europe into lockdowns.
[00:06:50]  He basically said, oh, you know what?
[00:06:51]  I was wrong.
[00:06:51]  I was wrong by 95%.
[00:06:53]  Did I say 500,000 deaths?
[00:06:55]  I meant 20,000.
[00:06:56]  Okay.
[00:06:57]  So look, the science or the data was evolving very fast around the coronavirus back at that time.
[00:07:04]  And everybody's got the right to look at new data and change their views.
[00:07:09]  But what was shocking to me was that the media was not willing to acknowledge what Ferguson had done.
[00:07:15]  And so I tweeted this out and Elon Musk, you know, who was a coronavirus skeptic from the very first, retweeted it.
[00:07:21]  And then Donald Trump Jr. retweeted it.
[00:07:23]  And all of a sudden, I'd started with 7,000 followers.
[00:07:27]  I think by the end of within a month, I had 100,000.
[00:07:30]  And it just sort of took off from there.
[00:07:32]  And, you know, people I knew, you know, at first they were like, look, you got to just, you know, understand what's happening in New York City.
[00:07:41]  Bad things are happening.
[00:07:42]  You don't want to come across as callous.
[00:07:44]  And very rapidly that curdled into, you're just a jerk.
[00:07:47]  Forget you.
[00:07:48]  We don't want to hear what you have to say.
[00:07:50]  You are burning your bridges with the New York Times.
[00:07:52]  You know, not that I ever plan to work there again anyway.
[00:07:54]  I have been out for 10 years, but good luck getting a job in journalism.
[00:07:58]  It will be only Fox that will have you.
[00:08:00]  And I was sort of like, you know what?
[00:08:01]  I don't care what you say.
[00:08:03]  I know what this data is saying.
[00:08:05]  And I know that the hospitals in New York City are not collapsing.
[00:08:10]  And meanwhile, the hospitals in the rest of the country were empty.
[00:08:13]  I was like, we have numbers on this, and what you're reporting does not match them.
[00:08:18]  And I'm going to just keep saying that.
[00:08:20]  I don't care if you don't like it.
[00:08:21]  Yeah.
[00:08:22]  And so, Alex, let me just ask you a side question with that.
[00:08:25]  Why do you think the media was unwilling to adjust?
[00:08:29]  Is there a, there's a couple explanations from the most cynical to sinister.
[00:08:35]  What's your belief?
[00:08:36]  So I go into this in the book and I think that, you know, there are a couple of legitimate explanations.
[00:08:41]  One is that New York is obviously the home of a tremendous amount of the media, tremendous concentration of media.
[00:08:48]  And New York was hit hardest and first in the United States.
[00:08:51]  And so, and so I think it was pretty scary in New York in late March into early April.
[00:08:57]  And it was, and it was hard for people to see, you know, that it wasn't as bad as it looked, and that some of the wounds were self-inflicted with what was happening in the nursing homes.
[00:09:07]  And that, you know, New York has a pretty terrible public hospital system anyway that's bad at the best of times.
[00:09:12]  And so, so I think, I think that was hard.
[00:09:16]  And then the more cynical explanation is these people knew it was terrible for Donald Trump.
[00:09:20]  It was clear from the beginning that if the epidemic continued, it was going to be very hard for him to be reelected.
[00:09:27]  You know, he, first of all, it crashed the economy.
[00:09:29]  And second of all, it doesn't play to his strengths, right?
[00:09:32]  He's not an empathetic guy.
[00:09:34]  And I say this in the book.
[00:09:35]  He's a lot of things, some good, some bad, but he's not empathetic and he wasn't good.

=== Hillsdale Courses for Parents (02:50) ===

[00:09:40]  And he said some things that really came back to haunt him.
[00:09:43]  And so the media really tried to run up the score on him.
[00:09:48]  And in doing so, they frightened a lot of people.
[00:09:50]  And it was very hard for them to back out.
[00:09:52]  But let's pull back even further.
[00:09:55]  That doesn't explain what happened in other countries.
[00:09:58]  And that doesn't explain why the sort of hyped crisis continued after Joe Biden won and took office.
[00:10:06]  And I think we don't fully understand that.
[00:10:08]  We don't really understand the dynamics at play and why the media has not just given up its watchdog role, but become a propaganda arm of the government and the WHO.
[00:10:18]  And we see it now with vaccines where they won't ask really basic questions about vaccine safety and efficacy.
[00:10:24]  And why that is, I mean, I don't know, Charlie, your guess is as good as mine.
[00:10:28]  I don't want to be conspiratorial, but it becomes hard not to ask that question or not to wonder.
[00:10:34]  Yeah, I'm just processing all this because it's these people have a lot of power and they have a responsibility to tell people the truth.
[00:10:46]  As we celebrate the Christmas season, we often pause to consider our many blessings.
[00:10:50]  Hillsdale College wishes to thank you for standing with them as they celebrate over 177 years of blessings.
[00:10:56]  Since 1844, the Beacon of the North, the last college, Hillsdale College, has held fast to its mission to provide the kind of education essential to preserving free government.
[00:11:05]  And for decades, the college has extended its educational mission on behalf of liberty through a variety of outreach programs.
[00:11:10]  Perhaps you receive in Primus for every month, or have taken one of Hillsdale's excellent online courses or attended one of Hillsdale's free regional events.
[00:11:18]  You know of Hillsdale's refusal to take even one penny of government money.
[00:11:21]  This independence allows the college to focus on promoting its core purpose, learning, character, faith, and freedom without government interference.
[00:11:28]  And no time in our nation's history has there been a greater need for this kind of classical liberal arts education that Hillsdale offers on its campuses and nationwide.
[00:11:35]  So during the season of blessings, Hillsdale thanks you for partnership in extending its mission to the country.
[00:11:40]  To learn more about Hillsdale College and take their online courses, the Aristotle course, the Winston Churchill course, the Dying Citizen course, which I'm about to wrap up with Victor Davis Hansen.
[00:11:49]  It's incredible.
[00:11:50]  Check it out.
[00:11:50]  New Victor Davis-Hansen course.
[00:11:52]  Go to charlieforhillsdale.com.
[00:11:54]  For parents out there, require your children to take at least one Hillsdale course before they get any Christmas gifts.
[00:12:00]  You see, I'm a very big fan of parents withholding good things unless kids do the necessary things.
[00:12:08]  Kids shouldn't just get Christmas gifts because they exist.
[00:12:11]  They should get Christmas gifts because they've earned them.
[00:12:14]  And by earning them, they need to take Hillsdale online courses to learn about Western civilization, learn about God, learn about Genesis, the book of Genesis, the Constitution, and more.
[00:12:23]  Charlie4Hillsdale.com, Charlie F-O-Rhillsdale.com.

=== Millions Died From COVID (08:30) ===

[00:12:30]  So I want to just reiterate the book title, Pandemia, How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government Rights and Lives.
[00:12:38]  So let me ask you a broad question and we can kind of navigate it.
[00:12:42]  Has there been any evidence to show that the death count?
[00:12:47]  Is there a difference of dying with COVID or because of COVID?
[00:12:50]  Is there truth to that line of questioning?
[00:12:54]  So this is an interesting one.
[00:12:56]  And this is one where, you know, I think like because I'm not, you know, sort of a conspirator, conspiracy theorist, my view on this is quite a bit more nuanced than, you know, than it's made out to be.
[00:13:06]  And you, and you may have read or you may have heard, oh, only 6% of people who, you know, died from COVID actually died from COVID, you know, the CDC says.
[00:13:15]  And that's not true.
[00:13:16]  Okay.
[00:13:16]  What the CDC said was there were no underlying conditions in 6% of people.
[00:13:22]  Here's the thing.
[00:13:23]  COVID definitely killed a lot of Americans and people around the world last year and this year.
[00:13:27]  We know that because, and I go into this in the book, overall deaths were up quite a bit last year in the United States and Europe and in other parts of the world.
[00:13:36]  I mean, they weren't up nearly as much as the, you know, as you would think if you'd watched CNN and MSNBC all the time, but they were still up.
[00:13:42]  A couple million people died from COVID last year.
[00:13:46]  And, you know, 60 million people die worldwide, a couple million from COVID.
[00:13:49]  So it's a real killer, but it isn't, you know, it isn't a top five killer.
[00:13:53]  Here's the other thing.
[00:13:54]  And this is the most important lie about COVID that was told from the very beginning.
[00:13:59]  Most of those people were very old and very sick.
[00:14:04]  And many of them who weren't very old or very sick were morbidly obese, meaning their life expectancies, in many cases, they might be three months, six months, a year, two years.
[00:14:14]  The idea that COVID strikes down people, not just in the prime of their lives, but sort of healthy 60-year-olds, is just not true.
[00:14:22]  I mean, look, can it happen?
[00:14:24]  Yes, it happens.
[00:14:25]  But so when people say, oh, you know, there were all these people who had car accidents and they, you know, they're listed as COVID deaths because they happened to have COVID at the time they died.
[00:14:35]  That's not really true.
[00:14:37]  But what people are trying to get at is this idea that most of the people who died from COVID were very sick and would have died soon anyway.
[00:14:46]  And let me give you a personal example of this because my dad last year, he died of leukemia and he was in New York City.
[00:14:52]  Okay.
[00:14:53]  He'd had leukemia for a couple of years and, you know, and as it goes with leukemia, he seemed to be battling it.
[00:15:00]  And then at the end, he took a sharp turn down and he died.
[00:15:02]  And that was in May of 2020.
[00:15:05]  He could easily have contracted COVID in April and he would have been listed as a COVID death.
[00:15:12]  And he would have died from COVID, but he would have died a couple weeks in this case earlier than he did die.
[00:15:20]  And so a lot of that happened in the United States in the last 18 months.
[00:15:27]  And we may never know the number.
[00:15:29]  The problem, though, is that the numbers were being used to impact policy and then create your word.
[00:15:37]  Hysteria is the right thing, right?
[00:15:39]  Because if all of a sudden the legitimate death total is 80% lower, then that doesn't justify the type of reaction.
[00:15:49]  Or if once you understand who's dying, you have to ask yourself, why are we sacrificing children and their schooling and young adults and forcing them to stay home so they get depressed?
[00:16:02]  And, you know, and business owners who've put their lives into, you know, whatever.
[00:16:06]  It could be a small little business that's, but it's theirs, dry cleaning or whatever.
[00:16:11]  And we've taken that from them.
[00:16:13]  And at best, we are helping people who are very sick live a couple extra months.
[00:16:18]  And look, does that mean we should be callous?
[00:16:21]  No, we should not be callous.
[00:16:22]  We should do what we can to protect those older people, but we need to understand the choices that we're making and that the trade-off is real.
[00:16:30]  And we were never having a mature conversation about this, right?
[00:16:35]  We were never having a conversation.
[00:16:37]  We know everything in life is a choice.
[00:16:39]  We know that when you get an automobile, it's a choice.
[00:16:41]  We know if you buy a home with a pool, it's a choice.
[00:16:43]  And those choices are that if you have an infant, that infant might go into the pool and die.
[00:16:48]  That's a real thing that happens a lot in this country, more than people are comfortable with, right?
[00:16:53]  Life is a series of cost-benefit analysis.
[00:16:57]  But the whole conversation, Alex, that frustrated people like me, not a scientist, whatever that means anymore, is that we were never being honest about the risks that are just embedded with daily existence.
[00:17:10]  You're absolutely correct.
[00:17:11]  And you make an interest, I mean, when you say not a scientist, those choices aren't really in the realm of science.
[00:17:18]  They're in the realm of politics and of leadership and of choices we make as a society.
[00:17:23]  Yes.
[00:17:24]  And the analogy that I've used about this, and I don't use it in the book, but I kind of wish I had is, you know, Oppenheimer and those scientist and those brilliant scientists during World War II created, you know, the atomic bomb, but they didn't choose to drop it.
[00:17:38]  Harry Truman dropped it.
[00:17:39]  That was a political and military decision.
[00:17:42]  That's such a great question.
[00:17:42]  Not a scientific decision.
[00:17:44]  And Fauci should never have been granted the power that he was.
[00:17:48]  And, you know, Donald Trump's, you know, his greatest mistake in this was not saying, I'm in charge and these are hard choices.
[00:17:56]  You don't get to make them.
[00:17:57]  I'll make them on behalf of the country.
[00:17:59]  I totally agree with that.
[00:18:00]  And I think that putting Fauci on a committee and just kind of just putting him off the pasture would have been the best thing, right?
[00:18:06]  That you make him one amongst 30, right?
[00:18:08]  Like this is our COVID committee.
[00:18:10]  They don't get press availability and they could issue us a letter, right?
[00:18:14]  I'm not sure, but see, Trump would have had to deal with the fallout, the media fallout of that.
[00:18:20]  And I don't know that he could have.
[00:18:23]  I mean, remember how crazy it got in, you know, sort of March through June.
[00:18:29]  There was a moment when they even tried to sideline Fauci a little bit and the media went crazy.
[00:18:34]  No, I know, but I think I agree with that.
[00:18:36]  All things being equal, outside of, I don't think he should have fired him, just to be clear.
[00:18:40]  I think he could have put him among, make him one among 20, right?
[00:18:46]  That, oh, we now have a whole committee because I think firing Fauci would have turned him into a public relations martyr that would have been on television every day.
[00:18:55]  I told you, I told you, I told you, I told you, right?
[00:18:59]  And so there could have been a strategy there.
[00:19:00]  So I want to ask you another part of this, which is one of the things that I think Trump deserves credit for was his original instincts.
[00:19:08]  His original instincts was about treatments, not vaccines and not lockdowns.
[00:19:14]  And I remember being on the phone with Mark Meadows issuing, you know, a word I'd never heard before.
[00:19:20]  It was called hydroxychloroquine, never heard of it before, right?
[00:19:23]  That it was working other parts of the world.
[00:19:25]  And I wasn't the only one.
[00:19:26]  Other people were telling the White House this.
[00:19:27]  Trump got word of it.
[00:19:29]  He said, and it was very rational question.
[00:19:31]  Wait a second.
[00:19:32]  If there is an anti-malarial that could potentially help, why don't we tell people about it?
[00:19:38]  Alex, talk about how we had one of the most, I would say, nearly diabolical campaigns against the conversation when it came to treatments.
[00:19:49]  So I mean, it's interesting because hydroxychloroquine, unfortunately, probably does not work very well against COVID.
[00:19:55]  But that doesn't mean that there wasn't good evidence to support testing it, you know, and testing it thoroughly.
[00:20:02]  And it's the same thing now with ivermectin.
[00:20:04]  Ivermectin may or may not work against COVID, but it should have been tested by the NIH and by sort of American scientists in a way it has not been.
[00:20:13]  And there's three or four other drugs that I could mention that fall in that category that are older, that are cheap and off-patent and widely available.
[00:20:22]  And there's really no reason that they shouldn't have been tested except that, you know, Fauci seems to be totally in love with vaccines and expensive new therapeutics.
[00:20:30]  And so, and so Donald Trump, it's interesting you say it because, look, Trump, I think actually in some ways, Trump's scientific instincts actually were not bad here, but his political instincts were terrible.
[00:20:41]  So he'd say things like, you know, I don't want to let those people on the cruise ship off because it'll make the numbers look worse.
[00:20:47]  And, you know, he got beaten over the head with that.
[00:20:49]  And, you know, and rightly so.
[00:20:50]  But at the same time, he was saying, I think that the, you know, the death rate is actually lower than we realize because so many people who get this don't get really sick and aren't counted in the case counts.

=== Trump's Scientific Instincts (03:09) ===

[00:21:01]  Guess what?
[00:21:02]  Donald Trump was right about that.
[00:21:04]  And he was right very early about that.
[00:21:07]  And you're right.
[00:21:08]  Like his gut about therapeutics was correct.
[00:21:12]  And it looks to me now like therapeutics.
[00:21:14]  And there's a new Pfizer drug, which if the numbers hold up will work, you know, that it works quite well.
[00:21:20]  That could help get us out.
[00:21:22]  Maybe some of these older off-patent drugs, if we ever test them properly, we'll find they can help get us out.
[00:21:28]  But you're right.
[00:21:28]  Once Trump said hydroxychloroquine, it became, there was a campaign, a coordinated campaign, not just in the media, but in some of the best scientific journals in the world to prove that it didn't work.
[00:21:40]  And in fact, they embarrassed themselves.
[00:21:42]  They published data based on a fake data set, the Lancet, which is again a tough journal 2020, just in an effort to prove that Donald Trump was wrong.
[00:21:53]  So I mean, let me pull back even further again.
[00:21:58]  People on the left say, well, you know, how did this get politicized?
[00:22:02]  Everyone's entitled to, you know, views about masks or everyone's entitled to, you know, we shouldn't politicize a discussion of the vaccines.
[00:22:11]  Okay.
[00:22:11]  I agree.
[00:22:12]  Like people are entitled to their own opinion about masks and people are entitled to look at the data about vaccines and try to make a decision.
[00:22:20]  Hey, maybe this isn't good for my kids.
[00:22:22]  Maybe it's good for my, you know, my elderly mother.
[00:22:24]  I'm in the middle somewhere.
[00:22:26]  I'll try to figure it out.
[00:22:27]  It's not the right that is saying don't have that conversation.
[00:22:31]  The left is saying, we are going to make you do this.
[00:22:36]  They are turning a medical discussion and a scientific discussion into a political discussion.
[00:22:41]  It is the left and not the right that has politicized this.
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[00:23:03]  Proteins responsible for digesting food.
[00:23:05]  Fewer enzymes mean more difficulty digesting food.
[00:23:08]  Even organic foods won't provide enough enzymes to properly digest them.
[00:23:11]  This is especially true if you cook your food because cooking kills enzymes.
[00:23:15]  This is why you have digestion problems even after a healthy meal.
[00:23:18]  Your body just can't produce enough enzymes to get the job done.
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=== Suppressing Dissent on Vaccines (11:28) ===

[00:24:10]  So now I want to transition towards, and you cover this in the book, Pandemia, about the vaccine, right?
[00:24:16]  Because that's a whole separate kind of element to this, which is, okay, we shouldn't have locked down.
[00:24:22]  We should have had honest reporting.
[00:24:24]  We should have had a focus on therapeutics.
[00:24:26]  We should have been honest about legitimate ways to mitigate.
[00:24:30]  We never talked about natural immunity, but then we all of a sudden had the rollout of the vaccine.
[00:24:35]  I was a skeptic from the very beginning for a variety of different reasons.
[00:24:41]  But Alex, you've been so good on actually saying, wait a second, this vaccine might not actually be doing what they say it's doing.
[00:24:50]  There might be some adverse events.
[00:24:51]  Talk just broadly about the vaccine, because this right now is considered to be like the most forbidden topic to discuss in America right now.
[00:25:02]  It is.
[00:25:03]  And frankly, I've been disappointed in the right on this.
[00:25:06]  And I've been disappointed in sort of, you know, the people I called Team Reality who, you know, who are very willing to look and question lockdowns and question masks and question school closures.
[00:25:15]  And when the vaccine came out, it was as if they just, everybody just wanted this to be over.
[00:25:20]  I totally agree with you on this, by the way, 100%.
[00:25:23]  You know, if we have to get a couple shots, so be it.
[00:25:26]  And people, you know, if people are afraid to question science sort of broadly, they're really afraid to question drug development and discovery.
[00:25:33]  And so, and so here's, here's where my being a reporter for the Times and having covered these companies really mattered.
[00:25:42]  One of the most important aspects, and this was very early on, this was before any of the more recent questions about the vaccine.
[00:25:49]  One of the most important things you do as a drug company is design your clinical trials.
[00:25:53]  Okay.
[00:25:53]  And if you have a new product, whether it's, you know, it could be a new antidepressant or a heart medicine or whatever it is, they spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to figure out how to design clinical trials that will make their drug look the best and give it the best chance of approval.
[00:26:10]  And that doesn't always mean, by the way, the most honest design.
[00:26:14]  It means the design that's going to work the best to get the drug approved.
[00:26:18]  And what you saw with the vaccines was the companies, Pfizer and Moderna, ran these huge clinical trials.
[00:26:27]  Okay, that's good.
[00:26:27]  We want a huge clinical trial.
[00:26:29]  But in these 40,000 person clinical trials, 30,000 in the case of Moderna, there were a literal handful of people who were at high risk of death from COVID.
[00:26:40]  In other words, most of the people in the trials were under 65 and a few were between 65 and 75 and a tiny number were 75 and over.
[00:26:50]  Okay.
[00:26:50]  If you want to know whether these vaccines actually protect people from severe disease and death, you have got to give it to these older people who are at high risk of severe disease and death.
[00:27:02]  And by the way, that's why we know the monoclonal antibodies work because we tested those in older people.
[00:27:07]  They went to nursing homes and they enrolled people who could actually die from COVID.
[00:27:13]  And so the companies did not do that.
[00:27:16]  The regulators did not make them do that.
[00:27:18]  And you can go back.
[00:27:19]  Well, you can't go back because Twitter has now banished me.
[00:27:21]  And this is something else in the book about how new media and old media have colluded to suppress dissension, not just around vaccines, but especially around vaccines.
[00:27:30]  But you can go back, or I can go back and look at my tweets from November 2020 and see tweets that are positive about the vaccines.
[00:27:40]  As I said, this looks really good.
[00:27:41]  This table looks really good.
[00:27:43]  And it was only when I realized that there was this fundamental flaw intentionally in the clinical trial design that I started to become suspicious of the vaccine.
[00:27:54]  And unfortunately, my suspicions grew over time as I looked at sort of the preclinical work that had been done, as I looked at the FDA and EMA, the European Medicines Agency briefing books, as I looked at some of the papers that had been written.
[00:28:09]  And then as we saw that congruent with the rollout in Israel, and Israel and the UK were the first two big countries, the first two Western countries to roll out the vaccines, they saw huge spikes in infections and deaths in that first couple of weeks after the first dose, which the media would not talk about.
[00:28:28]  And I thought to myself, look, these things, the overall benefit may still be great for people.
[00:28:34]  Although, even by then, I was really questioning whether or not mandates made sense.
[00:28:39]  But why can't we talk about what's actually happening here and what some of the risks are?
[00:28:43]  And that's where I've really been ever since.
[00:28:46]  And unfortunately, after a brief period of time, which I, you know, on my sub stack, I call the Substack, we haven't really talked about, but it's this platform that I went to following my banishment from Twitter.
[00:28:58]  And I have a newsletter there called Unreported Truths that people can go see.
[00:29:02]  But on my sub stack, I started to call this the happy vaccine valley, that there's this period where after the second dose, where you do have a lot of antibodies and you can see cases and infections go down, you know, basically everywhere.
[00:29:16]  Unfortunately, that period does not last.
[00:29:18]  Within a couple of months, the vaccines start to fail, their efficacy fails.
[00:29:23]  And so that's why there's this desperate push for boosters to sort of temporarily amp up antibodies again, which unfortunately, and the good news is that actually does work to amp up your antibodies.
[00:29:35]  The bad news is nobody, not even the companies, has any idea what the long-term effects of repeated dosing is going to be.
[00:29:43]  So my view has gotten more negative over time, but it really began in December 2020 when I realized that the clinical trials didn't say what they seem to say.
[00:29:53]  And there's so many different components that I'd like to unpack with you.
[00:29:56]  We could go to the adverse events, which are legitimate, that people are experiencing adverse events to these vaccines, and we're not allowed to talk about it.
[00:30:03]  And I just want to be very clear.
[00:30:05]  And just for your sake, Alex, and the audience knows this, I've been completely uninterested in the vaccine topic my entire life.
[00:30:12]  I've always been approached by people with big binders.
[00:30:15]  People were trying to come on my show.
[00:30:16]  It was never for me.
[00:30:17]  Do you know what I mean?
[00:30:18]  It was just like, it's really not a big deal for me.
[00:30:22]  And I've totally changed my opinion on that, obviously.
[00:30:25]  Not that I'm against it.
[00:30:26]  I'm just curious why I can't talk about it.
[00:30:29]  Why is it I know people in my own immediate circle that can't walk anymore after they got the vaccine?
[00:30:34]  People are dropping dead mysteriously.
[00:30:37]  Alex, when I go to a turning point USA event, we just did one in Tucson, Arizona.
[00:30:41]  We did one in Alabama.
[00:30:42]  And I ask the room, I say, raise your hand if you or someone you know personally has had an adverse event, a serious adverse event to the vaccine.
[00:30:50]  Every hand goes up.
[00:30:51]  Now, that's a lot different.
[00:30:53]  Let's pretend half of them are lying, right?
[00:30:56]  That's a scandal.
[00:30:58]  And so talk a little bit about that, Alex.
[00:31:00]  What's going on with the adverse events to the vaccine?
[00:31:02]  Is it overblown or is there something really here?
[00:31:05]  No, I don't think it's overblown at all.
[00:31:07]  I mean, you know, it's the vaccine fanatics, as I like to call them, will say, oh, well, VARES, which is the vaccine adverse events reporting system, which is the U.S. database of adverse events.
[00:31:19]  We don't know.
[00:31:20]  Those are unverified.
[00:31:21]  Anybody can submit, maybe people are making fake reports.
[00:31:24]  There's actually very, very little evidence of any substantial number of fake reports.
[00:31:29]  And in fact, it appears to be the other way around: that this routine adverse events simply are not reported to bears because at this point, there are so many of them.
[00:31:37]  And then, even if you look at really severe adverse events, and this was very interesting because you know, there's this, the Johnson and Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines can cause this very rare, but sometimes deadly, very unusual clotting, especially in young women who get vaccinated.
[00:31:55]  And when the UK, so the UK picked up on this and they had a few cases and they said to doctors, you need, we're going to require, legally require you to report all the cases you see.
[00:32:07]  And within a few weeks, they've gone from, and I, and I don't want to quote the numbers exactly, but it was something like 15 cases to 100 or more cases.
[00:32:16]  And so, what that said to me was, even for this very unusual event that was very serious, that doctors would be inclined to report, there was substantial under-reporting of cases.
[00:32:28]  And the UK system is just like bears.
[00:32:30]  You're supposed to report these events, but it's voluntary.
[00:32:33]  So, you have a system that's a little bit clunky to use, and you have a system that's voluntary for providers and certainly for patients to use.
[00:32:41]  It's not going to pick up on a lot of events.
[00:32:43]  And the truth, Charlie, is we have better systems, okay?
[00:32:46]  We have what you know, the U.S. is not as good at this as countries that have sort of national health care and national identifiers.
[00:32:54]  You know, there's lots of problems with those things, but one thing they do let you do is track hospitalizations post-vaccination better.
[00:33:01]  But we do have electronical medical, I'm sorry, electronic medical records, and we have big databases.
[00:33:06]  And if we wanted to, we could search those databases and really look for what, you know, whether within, let's say, a month of vaccination, there were an excess in heart attacks.
[00:33:18]  Okay.
[00:33:19]  And we could look at a population of 10 million people.
[00:33:22]  You said, so what you do is you say you look at those 10 million people the month before vaccination, you look at them the month after vaccination.
[00:33:29]  Do you see any excess in heart attacks in the month after compared to the month before?
[00:33:34]  And if so, that doesn't prove the vaccination caused the heart attacks.
[00:33:37]  There could be other explanations, but that's a signal.
[00:33:40]  And that work basically is not being done in the United States.
[00:33:45]  And again, it looks, and that's, you know, that's why stories like yours, that's why people I think are increasingly scared.
[00:33:53]  They, they, all they have is these anecdotes, and the media is telling them that what they're seeing with their own eyes is not real.
[00:34:00]  And if we, you know, if we weren't so terrified of doing a real cost-benefit analysis of the vaccines, we could.
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[00:35:02]  Yeah, and that would, again, require challenging this incredible monolith that is these vaccine companies that pay a lot of bills for a lot of important people.
[00:35:13]  They sponsor news segments.
[00:35:15]  They have, they have an incredible, I mean, when you're, when you're able to mandate something for every human being in the Western world, you're going to have a lot, you know, that you could distribute.
[00:35:25]  And so, of course, it's a money incentive, obviously.
[00:35:28]  And here's an amazing fact.
[00:35:30]  These are the most profitable product in the history of medicine.
[00:35:34]  They may be like next to the iPhone, the most profitable product ever made.

=== Weird Psychedelic Properties (07:34) ===

[00:35:39]  And we're not even allowed to question it, right?
[00:35:42]  Which is, which is what's so interesting is that.
[00:35:44]  And I'm open-minded about this stuff.
[00:35:46]  I'm trying not to be dogmatic.
[00:35:47]  I obviously like markets.
[00:35:49]  I like entrepreneurs.
[00:35:50]  I don't like scam artists.
[00:35:52]  Where are all of these, like the Elizabeth Warren types that are trying to like price gouging?
[00:35:57]  And like, maybe they're not saying what they're, their whole shtick is about like corporate malfeasance, right?
[00:36:03]  That's a great question.
[00:36:04]  Where'd they go?
[00:36:05]  I don't know.
[00:36:05]  I don't know.
[00:36:06]  And I've never been on either side of it.
[00:36:08]  I think that anyone could act corrupt.
[00:36:10]  I obviously think generally markets are good, but I just, I would appreciate like a little bit of, you know, like table pounding by the, you know, that whole, you know, anti-capitalist wing of the party.
[00:36:21]  I think it would actually be interesting, but they're totally silent on this.
[00:36:25]  So, Alex, I want to be respectful of your time.
[00:36:26]  It's pandemia, how coronavirus hysteria took over our government rights and lives.
[00:36:31]  I want to get to this five minutes remaining because we have so many parents and kids that are misled on the weed issue, right?
[00:36:37]  On marijuana.
[00:36:38]  They're like, oh, it's so cool.
[00:36:39]  Marijuana is great and all of this.
[00:36:41]  You wrote a phenomenal book.
[00:36:44]  And I got about halfway through it.
[00:36:45]  And it's just terrific.
[00:36:47]  And the title, I want to make sure I get the title right though.
[00:36:49]  You could tell us the title here.
[00:36:50]  It is.
[00:36:51]  Sure.
[00:36:51]  It's tell your children.
[00:36:53]  Tell your children.
[00:36:55]  And let me, before even you ask a question about this, I want to say something about tell your children because I think it's actually very important.
[00:37:00]  And I talk about this a little bit in pandemia.
[00:37:03]  What I saw with the response to tell your children helped me understand what was happening with the media's response to the pandemic, which is to say, look, you can read Tell Your Children and think, you know what?
[00:37:16]  Yeah, there are going to be some people who have bad reactions to cannabis.
[00:37:19]  It happens.
[00:37:20]  Plenty of people drink too much.
[00:37:22]  And sometimes those people get in car accidents and die and alcohol is legal.
[00:37:26]  So be it.
[00:37:27]  You can think that.
[00:37:29]  I don't agree, but you're welcome.
[00:37:31]  I mean, that's a totally natural response.
[00:37:33]  Okay.
[00:37:34]  And you can think, you know what, there's too many black people who get their lives ruined because they got arrested smoking a joint on the street.
[00:37:40]  Again, it's that that's somewhat exaggerated, but it does happen.
[00:37:43]  Let's be honest.
[00:37:44]  Okay.
[00:37:45]  That was not the response to tell your children.
[00:37:47]  The response was, this guy's making this up.
[00:37:50]  He's an idiot.
[00:37:51]  He doesn't understand correlation and causation.
[00:37:54]  He doesn't understand how to read scientific papers.
[00:37:56]  And this was from people who never read the book.
[00:37:58]  And then the second response was, we're just not going to let him off.
[00:38:02]  So NPR had me, you know, scheduled for an interview.
[00:38:05]  They canceled it.
[00:38:06]  The Times where I had worked didn't review the book.
[00:38:09]  Other places, you know, didn't review the book.
[00:38:12]  And so what that told me was: if you step out of line on an issue that is important to sort of the, you know, the propaganda instincts of the media, the a politically important issue on which there's a lot of groupthink, you are going to have an impossible time breaking through, no matter how good the science.
[00:38:34]  I have to interject for a second.
[00:38:35]  What a weird issue to like blacklist you on, though.
[00:38:38]  It's marijuana legalization.
[00:38:41]  Like, really?
[00:38:42]  Like, that's the one that they're going to kick you off NPR?
[00:38:45]  It's not like all of a sudden you were going to go after like the transgender issue, right?
[00:38:49]  I mean, no, I think, well, it's really funny you say that.
[00:38:53]  One of the saddest things that I heard in 2019 was David Remnick, okay?
[00:38:58]  The editor of The New Yorker, one of the great, you know, the great men of American journalism and a real journalist, okay?
[00:39:07]  He's interviewing a New Yorker writer who's about 30 years old.
[00:39:12]  And he's basically kissing her butt about cannabis and sort of giggling when he asked her about it.
[00:39:20]  And I thought to myself, you're David Remnick.
[00:39:23]  You don't have to do this.
[00:39:24]  But like, this is a way for middle-aged white men to make believe that they're cool.
[00:39:30]  And there's nothing.
[00:39:30]  I totally agree with you.
[00:39:32]  There's nothing less cool than saying you don't like pot.
[00:39:35]  You know, it's very weird.
[00:39:37]  Well, no, it's this like weird social currency.
[00:39:40]  Like, I'm going to be allowed into the party because I think all the kids should be able to do psychedelic laced weed at age seven or whatever.
[00:39:50]  So that's true.
[00:39:51]  So in short, we have two minutes remaining.
[00:39:54]  Talk about some of the findings from the book.
[00:39:56]  Is marijuana everything we're told?
[00:39:58]  We're told it's not harmful.
[00:39:59]  It's perfectly fine.
[00:40:01]  You know, it actually has all these benefits.
[00:40:03]  What did your research, not your opinion, what did your research conclude?
[00:40:08]  Listen, 20% THC cannabis, much less the pure sort of stuff you vape or wax or the wax you smoke or the or the or the oil you vape.
[00:40:19]  No, this is an incredibly powerful intoxicant.
[00:40:22]  It has psychedelic properties.
[00:40:26]  And the idea that it's medicine in any way, shape or form is total nonsense.
[00:40:33]  It's medicine the same way alcohol is medicine, right?
[00:40:35]  You know, like you, during Prohibition, there were doctors who would write prescriptions for alcohol.
[00:40:40]  First of all, there were people who were addicted to alcohol and couldn't function without it.
[00:40:44]  But can alcohol help reduce pain slightly?
[00:40:47]  Yeah, it can dull your pain, but it's not.
[00:40:49]  It's not medicine and neither is cannabis.
[00:40:51]  And so that's A. B.
[00:40:53]  So if you're going to use it, know why you're using it.
[00:40:55]  You're using it to get high.
[00:40:57]  As somebody joked to me two years ago, the condition that cannabis treats is called not being high.
[00:41:03]  And so that's A. B, is it harmful?
[00:41:07]  Yeah, it's harmful.
[00:41:08]  Now, it's not physically harmful the way alcohol is, although some people get this very weird syndrome called scrommeting, where they wind up with uncontrolled vomiting after using it for long periods of time.
[00:41:22]  But it is certainly harmful to the brain and it can cause psychotic episodes.
[00:41:27]  I mean, people who use joke about it.
[00:41:30]  You know, I had a bad trip.
[00:41:31]  I wound up in the ER because I got really paranoid.
[00:41:33]  Well, those are psychotic episodes.
[00:41:35]  And if you wind up using a lot, especially if you start when you're young and you have a, you know, you might have a family history of mental illness, you are substantially increasing your chances for real permanent mental illness.
[00:41:49]  And that is devastating.
[00:41:51]  I say this and tell your children, it would be much better to get lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking than get schizophrenia after five years of using pot because schizophrenia is a terrible disease.
[00:42:02]  I completely agree.
[00:42:03]  I don't know if you ever talked to Joe Rogan about this.
[00:42:05]  If you have, I you have?
[00:42:06]  I gotta.
[00:42:07]  Yep.
[00:42:07]  Because I'm sure he has a difference of opinions.
[00:42:10]  I would love to see that clip because he's obviously very pro-marijuana.
[00:42:13]  But what was his reaction to?
[00:42:15]  We should talk to him about it because he, although he likes, you know, he likes using cannabis, he's well aware that can have this effect.
[00:42:21]  Okay, good for you.
[00:42:22]  He's honest.
[00:42:22]  I mean, he's always been team reality on all these issues.
[00:42:25]  And so I would expect him.
[00:42:27]  I would just think he would have a different, I think he'd say, oh, the costs outweigh the, you know, the benefits outweigh the costs.
[00:42:32]  Alex Berenson, pandemia.
[00:42:34]  Also, go buy the weed book.
[00:42:35]  Tell your children, you know, you have one of the great scams happening in America is all these conservatives.
[00:42:41]  You're like, yeah, it's the cool thing.
[00:42:42]  It's not that bad.
[00:42:43]  They have no idea what they're talking about.
[00:42:44]  No idea.
[00:42:45]  It will destroy lives.
[00:42:46]  Pandemia, Alex Berenson, how coronavirus hysteria took over our government rights and lives.
[00:42:50]  Alex, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:42:52]  Can't wait for the next time.
[00:42:53]  Thanks, Charlie.
[00:42:54]  Talk to you soon.
[00:42:57]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[00:42:59]  Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com and come to AmericaFest, tpusa.com slash AMFBSD.
[00:43:05]  Use promo code Charlie for 25% off.
[00:43:10]  For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.