Tucker Carlson and Alex Berenson expose COVID-19 policy failures, comparing them to the Iraq WMD debacle, where lockdowns and mandates—pushed despite $60B+ in wasted vaccine doses—went unpunished while figures like Fauci and Bourla faced no consequences. Berenson’s 2022 warnings about mRNA risks, including IgG4 antibodies, were ignored as the Biden administration enforced mandates on low-risk groups, possibly to distract from Afghanistan’s collapse. The CDC’s push for pediatric vaccines amid minimal threat and emerging side effects like seizures underscores systemic ethical collapse, with Berenson’s lawsuit targeting suppressed communications. Both question whether authorities acted out of malice or institutional inertia, framing the pandemic response as a cautionary tale of unchecked power and wasted lives. [Automatically generated summary]
In 2002, you may remember, all the smart people in Washington assured us, in fact, commanded us to believe that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, chem, bio, maybe nuclear.
And the next year, on the basis of those claims, we invaded Iraq.
But it turns out those claims were false.
Saddam did not possess those stockpiles.
But here's the interesting thing.
The people who told us that, who commanded us to believe them, never apologized.
There was no contrition.
There was certainly no punishment.
And because there wasn't, those people continue to ascend the hierarchy within Washington.
They now run the federal government.
And as a result of that, these same unwise people have led us down the same unwise paths again and again in the 20 years since.
So that doesn't work as a management strategy.
Letting people get away with massive screw-ups and then promoting them.
You'd hate to see something like that happen after COVID. You would hate to see the people responsible for the lockdowns and the vaccine strategy dividing the nation on the basis of medical status.
You'd hate to see those people go unpunished, indeed be rewarded.
And so in an effort to prevent that from happening, we're going to speak today to someone who called it right and was not rewarded for it.
I think the guilty should be punished, not mercilessly, but fairly, in the way that you would spank a child.
And that the virtuous should be rewarded.
And on this topic, you are the virtuous.
So I just want to frame this conversation around a conversation that we had in January of 2022. And that conversation was described by the Washington Post as the most dishonest And dangerous segment ever to air on our show.
I have not said this to you before because I'm pretty careful and I'm pretty careful with the data.
But these vaccines, these mRNA vaccines, the mRNA COVID vaccines need to be withdrawn from the market now.
No one should get them.
No one should get boosted.
No one should get double boosted.
They are a dangerous and ineffective product at this point against Omicron.
The spike that they make your body make that you then produce antibodies to is not the Omicron spike.
Earlier today, Tony Fauci said, we're not going to give people monoclonal antibody products, the first-generation products, because they don't work against the Omicron spike.
The same logic applies to these mRNA vaccines, and giving people boosters, even if in the very short term it knocks down infection rates, there's a boomerang effect, and that's what they're seeing in all these countries.
It turns out that the overall picture is a little bit worse than I thought because even when you give people, you know, what are quote-unquote Targeted mRNA vaccines that are supposed to be targeted to the new variants, which is the strategy we follow now, those don't really work very well in terms of making your body produce antibodies to the new variants either.
So there's really no mRNA product that you can give at this point that is going to be useful.
Probably at all, certainly for more than a couple of months.
The mRNAs also come with side effects that look worse than they did at that time, when I said that to you in January 2022. And there's something that we didn't know about at all, which is really the biggest, to me, long-term risk with the mRNAs, which is that they appear to make your body produce a kind of antibody.
That it normally only produces in response to an allergen, like bee venom.
There's a specific subclass, it's called the IgG4 antibody, that people who've been repeatedly given mRNA, it looks like three shots is sort of where the switch comes on.
If they're then infected, a number of these people will produce this IgG4 in volume.
And frankly, I would say even immunologists and virologists have no idea what that means long-term.
Now, I don't want to overstate the risks here because we don't know what they are.
And Omicron is very mild in general for most people.
Most people shake it off after a few days, certainly a couple of weeks, even if they're not particularly healthy.
I mean, these products were nowhere near reaching the market before COVID. They were rushed onto the market supposedly as the answer to COVID in December of 2020 on the basis of large, let's acknowledge it, very large clinical trials, but clinical trials that had only lasted a few weeks, only generated a few weeks of safety data after the second dose.
They appeared to work in early 2021. They certainly do cause the body to make a lot of spike protein and thus a lot of antibodies to the spike protein.
And in the short term, you get a decrease in infections.
To me, the real...
I'll say mistake because I don't want to impute anything more than that, but let's say the real mistake was made in the summer of 2021 when it was very clear that the vaccines were not working as promised and infections were starting to go up.
And we talked about this a lot in the summer of 2021. We saw this in Israel in the summer of 2021 before anywhere else because Israel had vaccinated more of its population more quickly than anybody else with the Pfizer mRNA vaccine.
And so what happened was instead of everybody pausing and saying, you know, let's take a breath here and let's see what we might need to do next.
Should we try a different type of vaccine?
Do we need to move away from vaccines because this is a respiratory virus that mutates quickly and maybe an intranasal vaccine?
Maybe there's something we can do.
The Biden administration, and most of the rest of the world, but really led by the Biden administration, said two things.
We're going to give people a third shot, a booster, which had been tested on I believe at that time, a couple of thousand people worldwide.
And there was no, not even medium term safety data about the booster.
And that upset two of the senior scientists at the FDA who regulate vaccines so much that they announced their retirement within a few days after the Biden administration said, we're going to do this booster in mid-August.
And the second thing, which to me is even more incomprehensible and wrong, was they said, we're going to have mandates.
We're going to force essentially all working-age Americans that we can reach to be vaccinated.
And one of the things that I've concluded is that one reason the Biden administration may have done this is because Uncle Joe, as I like to call him, looks so terrible in the aftermath of the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.
So that's the other thing that's happening in the summer of 2021. We leave, and a month later, the Taliban are in Kabul, and there are Afghans hanging off of airplanes.
And the United States looks as bad as it has since probably Jimmy Carter in 1980. Okay.
So Joe Biden needs to prove he's doing something.
Now, the reason that I've reached this conclusion is let's take the Biden administration's theory about the vaccines at face value, which is not enough Americans are being vaccinated, and that's why we're having this Delta spike, and the unvaccinated may be a danger to the vaccinated, which, by the way, is not a great argument for vaccines, if it's true.
So you're the Biden administration.
You think you've got to get Americans vaccinated.
Okay, who dies from COVID? Tucker.
Very old people and, you know, people who are really sick if they're younger, okay?
The vaccine mandates were workplace mandates.
They only covered Americans who were healthy enough to be in the workforce.
Almost definitionally, those people are very, very low risk from COVID. The people making this policy were not stupid.
They knew that.
They had to know that even if the vaccines worked as advertised, which they knew they didn't work as advertised, you weren't going to be able to reach whatever tiny rump of unvaccinated elderly people there were with these mandates.
That's one of the great, you know, sort of lies of the, you know, the elite media is that there were a lot of unvaccinated elderly people in red states.
It's not true.
The differential is in people mostly under 65. So even if the vaccines had worked as advertised, and even if the mandates hadn't been unconstitutional and wrong, they wouldn't have reached the people.
If you'd wanted to save people, using the Biden administration's theory, it should have been, if you want a Social Security check, you need to be vaccinated.
That's what would have gotten whatever few unvaccinated elderly people there were.
And so when you make a decision that's that bad, even taking your incorrect policy assumptions into account, there's got to be another reason for it.
For most of early 2021, the Biden administration was saying no mandates, no vaccine passports.
You know, there was this discussion of private vaccine passports, of state vaccine passports, a few states- Well, they attacked anyone who suggested that they might institute, including me.
There was this idea that federal government's going to be hands-off and we're certainly not going to require mandates.
I mean, Biden said that explicitly.
And at some point in- In July 2021, this started to be discussed.
In a matter of weeks, without a congressional hearing, without a policy roundtable, without anything, it went from, this is not something we're going to do.
We're just going to give people a shot and a beer.
There were all these sort of ridiculous incentive programs, which to me were completely wrong too, because you're essentially trying to bribe people into taking a pharmaceutical product.
But those are better than mandates.
It went from We're never going to do this, to we're doing it.
We're doing it to...
I mean, Biden didn't say punish, but he did say, I'm frustrated with the unvaccinated.
Seriously arguing whether unvaccinated people deserve to be sort of pushed to the back of the triage line if the hospitals overflow, which of course they never did.
By my best guess, about 5 billion doses were made by Pfizer and Moderna and about 3 billion were used.
And all those other doses were paid for or will be paid for when there may be a few more still to be delivered in the next couple of years to the EU. So that's 2 billion doses, probably about $40 billion just literally poured down the drain.
Now, that's an estimate, but it's an estimate based on the publicly available data.
Because what happened was, So remember, the initial course is two doses.
In April of 2021, the J&J vaccine, which is a different delivery system, it's not mRNA, it's a different biotechnology, comes under pressure.
It can cause this very unusual but terrible side effect where you get blood clots in your brain, and no one wants blood clots in their brain.
So J&J, which was viewed sort of as an easier vaccine to administer, only one dose, didn't need to be refrigerated the same way.
There was this idea for, let's say, for homeless people or for people who maybe you were going to have a hard time convincing to take a second dose, or for poorer countries where the refrigeration was an issue, J&J was going to be a good alternative.
J&J sort of came off the table after April 2021, and there was this huge push.
We're going to get everybody in the world two mRNA doses.
And then the booster, we're going to get everybody in the world three RNA doses.
Even after it became obvious to me that this wasn't working, the fights in the fall of 2021 were, should the US get a booster before some African country gets its first dose?
This is such a great technology.
Who's going to get these supplies?
So the companies ramped up and they made a ton and they sold it.
You know, they basically said to the governments that wanted it, if you want it, you've got to pay for it before we make it.
You know, not like you have to cut the whole check, but you have to agree contractually.
So you're saying that all of this proceeded for a full year in the face of overwhelming evidence that it didn't work and that it harmed people because it was a political diversion.
That may be true.
I have no way of knowing.
I do, however, have sympathy for the people who say, wait a second, there's something else going on here.
I mean, and I know they're easy to mock, but this is a lot to take attention away from Afghanistan.
The evidence that the vaccines don't work has been around since, depending on how you want to argue it, since the summer or fall of 2021. The evidence that they're dangerous is slower to develop and the risks are more subtle than the people...
So let me give you a counterexample, which is there's a military, you know, the military obviously was very highly vaccinated, and the military reports its healthcare statistics by year.
You know, at a pretty granular level.
And I've looked at those, okay?
Because once I found that, I was like, wow, if there's a signal, it's going to pop out here.
By the way, I'm not saying that the vaccines can't kill people, that they don't have autoimmune, that they don't cause autoimmune problems in some people, that they don't cause strokes in some people, that they, we now have evidence they cause seizures in some little kids, which, which...
Which I wrote that story about three weeks ago on Unreported Truths on my website or on my substack.
And two, about a week later, the New York Times wrote the story and they quoted people saying, quoted doctors saying, oh, well, you know, the vaccines are going to cause fevers in some kids.
So we would expect this.
You would expect this?
You didn't tell any parents this until the FDA published a paper where they had to admit it.
I mean, because what you're describing, I'm just using your descriptions, which are highly informed since you do this for a living, you're describing something that's horrifying and evil, and just the facts that you stated.
I'd say that's evil.
So where are the CDC employees who are saying, like, I'm not participating in this?
Interestingly, it's not changing as much as people on either side would say.
Because Americans, I think, generally feel they've had good experiences with vaccines pre-mRNA.
Now, of course, there's a group of Americans whose children developed autism and they blame that on the vaccines.
I don't see strong evidence there, but I know that's a very controversial topic.
I will say I don't see strong evidence there.
But in general, Americans...
Again, despite what both the anti-vax community and the sort of vaccine fanatic community says, have been generally, over the years, pretty willing to listen to the CDC's recommendations.
Now, there's some evidence that the mRNAs, what's happened with them, has made overall vaccinations a little bit less common.
But what it's really made is mRNA vaccinations a lot less common.
So people, one of my core beliefs is that people are not stupid.
And people differentiate between these two new vaccines that came out from Pfizer and Moderna based on months of testing and were promised to fix COVID and didn't and everything else.
But this is science, and science is based on truth, period.
That's what it is.
It's the pursuit of truth.
And if we get something wrong, we admit it immediately, or else it's not science.
But they're not admitting it immediately, therefore it's not science, therefore it's like some weird witchcraft thing that I don't want anything to do with.
So what these people would say is, in 2021, the vaccines did some good.
Since then, we don't know so much.
But they'll point to charts.
There's this one chart, it's the bane of my existence, that appears to show that vaccinated people, you know, die from COVID, even now, at much lower rates than unvaccinated people.
The problem with that is the two groups are not comparable, okay?
And I don't want to spend 15 minutes boring you and your audience with the science behind this, but the two groups are not comparable.
The reason we do clinical trials, a clinical trial is an artificial...
Experiment, but it generates the only data you can truly trust, okay?
You take a group of people, you split them in half, you have a computer, make sure that the two groups are completely equal or as close to complete.
So, you know, if you're in one, then someone who's just like you in terms of smoking status and age and gender and history of heart disease, whatever, goes in the other group, okay?
You take a big group, you split them up, you give...
You give one group the vaccine or the drug.
You give the other group a placebo, a sugar pill, or a saline shot.
You follow them.
Nobody knows who got what.
And at the end, you can say, okay, this...
Benefit came from the, you know, vaccine or this injury, you know, the safety problem came from the vaccine.
You need that data.
The truth is we never really got that data about the mRNAs because we blew up the clinical trials much too soon.
And so we're all arguing on the basis of incomplete information and the people and the people who understand this are mostly on the pro vaccine side.
They mostly Either indirectly or directly get money from Pfizer or the federal government or people with a giant stake in vaccines.
And I should just remind our viewers who maybe haven't followed your career in the detail that I have, that you waited a long time before even addressing questions about vaccines.
I mean, you originally were just pointing out the disparities between what they were claiming about COVID and what the data were showing, as I remember.
But one common sense question that no one's ever adequately answered in my view is why weren't physicians in the public health community encouraging people to be healthier?
We don't want to stigmatize obese people, people who don't take good care of themselves.
So we're going to lie about where the risks are.
We're going to pretend that some 25-year-old is at real risk from COVID. And I think the other argument that they would make and did make at the time was, we think there's a real risk of hospital overrun.
So if this spreads too quickly, remember, wait two weeks, flatten the curve.
One of the things that I think wasn't widely understood was the people promoting that weren't saying we're not all going to get COVID because at the time they didn't realize how quickly they could rush a vaccine to market.
Of course, we all got COVID anyway because the vaccine didn't work.
But the idea was we're going to get COVID over time so the, you know, when people, the hospitals won't be overrun.
And that was sort of the number one concern back in March 2020, was hospital over.
So to do that, you had to convince everyone to stay home, in their view.
You had to lock down everyone.
And so that meant you had to lie about who was at risk.
That was the original sin, right?
The original sin of COVID was that.
The original sin of the vaccines was pretending that they had been properly tested.
For public health authorities to be promoting it and stopping people from getting on the treadmill, that's if you're like- I don't know if they were- They literally were closing- Yes, they were closing gyms.
So that's the point where it's like, look, I'm not some kooky internet conspiracy guy, but how many signs do I need that you're trying to kill me before I say you're trying to kill me?
Look, I don't understand what happened during COVID, but I, at all, and the last thing I'm going to do is going to speculate or say anything, you know, that I can't say.
I do, but on this, like, as to motive, it always makes me uncomfortable to speculate, though, of course, I do do it, and I regret it every time I do it, because you can't know another person's motive.
Andy Slavitt was the senior advisor for COVID response under the Biden administration in early 2021. And Scott Gottlieb is the former head of the FDA, who left the FDA and three months, I believe three months of the day later, which was the earliest he could, joined the Pfizer board, where he's a senior board member of Pfizer.
He also is on CNBC all the time, where he always manages to say something good.
About Pfizer's products.
So three of these four men, not Tony Fauci, are defendants in my lawsuit against the Biden administration and Pfizer for their unconstitutional efforts to silence me and get me thrown off Twitter in 2021. So can I just...
Even the novels would be better if they were a little bit less reported and a little bit more flights of fancy.
That's my one regret as a novelist is that I could never, you know, not that I was, I mean, I'm writing about Islamic terror and, you know, in various, there are spy novels about modern events, but a really great novel, whatever the...
Nominal category has some magic in it.
And that's something hard for me to put in my novels.
I'm very fact grounded.
And I write about this on Unreported Truths.
We talked a tiny bit about the baby bus, which is something I'm now interested in.
I look for stories that as an individual reporter who's not working for the New York Times, I can do in a credible, reasonable way.
It'd be hard for me right now to go to Israel because I don't have a big organization backing me up if I get shot in the head or something.
COVID, believe it or not, is very data-driven and is a story that I could follow.
I look for stories where I think I can add something to the conversation because Because the mainstream media, usually for political reasons, doesn't want to report on it.
And certainly not by the Biden administration or Pfizer.
And this lawsuit, we have...
We have filed our initial suit.
They have filed a motion to dismiss all three of which are the federal defendants.
Andy Slavitt is his own defendant.
And then Albert Borla, who's again the chairman of Pfizer, and Scott Gottlieb have their own lawyers.
I guarantee you this is a good day for the law firms, right?
So they've tried to dismiss it.
We've now filed a response to the motions to dismiss, which I think is very strong.
And by the way, we're now asking for third-party discovery, meaning we want Twitter To turn over everything that Pfizer or the White House said about me.
And Elon, I'm hoping, Elon, you'll hear this and you will tell your lawyers to do this and not fight the third party subpoena.
But so if we can get past the motion to dismiss, and I believe we can, we will get...
The discovery on what the White House and Pfizer were saying to each other about me and possibly somewhat more broadly in the summer of 2021 about the vaccines.
And the world needs to know what was really going on, why everything changed, why the public attitudes towards vaccine skeptics got so much harsher, why there was a push for boosters, why there was a push for mandates.
I'm not really exaggerating to say that this lawsuit is Maybe the only chance that we're ever going to have.
I mean, one thing my wife said to me, I can't remember when, and she was right.
She said, you know, there's a large part of the country, must have been 2021, that if Tony Fauci said to them, this will just end if we just burn Berenson at the stake.
Just burn him at the stake.
That's all we gotta do.
Like, there would have been people with pitchforks on our doorstep.
You know, and she's Canadian.
I think she was, although the Canadians behave terribly.
Oh, this is what I wanted to say to you earlier when we were talking.
Herd instinct, okay?
Again, we were talking about the baby bust and how easy it is and why parents don't challenge, let's say, as you mentioned, you know, DEI stuff in classrooms that they might not like for their kids.
I mean, just go back 3,000 years, okay, when somebody committed a crime.
There were no prisons, right?
So how did you punish that person?
You left them.
You left them on their own without the protection of the herd and mostly those people died, right?
We think we're lone wolves, but we're herd animals.
And if you can get, you know, 60, 70, much less 80 or 90% of the population moving a certain way, it gets harder and harder to stand up.
And so, I mean, I think that force is overwhelming.
And I think the U.S. actually has more people willing to stand up.
Yeah, so I don't know what's going to happen with COVID. If Omicron stays this mild, you know, it'll just be something, you know, it'll run through nursing homes sometimes, it'll hurt some people.
Assuming the IgG4 thing doesn't become a true problem, there will be people who will be sick.
You know, I personally, I get...
You know, I get flack from this from some of my readers.
I think Paxlovid actually works.
I think they will come up with some more antivirals.
I mean, again, how do we get out of HIV? Not a vaccine.
We got effective antivirals.
And, you know, I think there will be some more antivirals for COVID. It should be manageable.
The two big issues going forward actually are less to do with COVID and more to do with, are they going to try to push mRNAs for other respiratory viruses, which they clearly are.
Moderna, you know, that's Moderna's business.
And Moderna stock is down 85% since its peak, which was basically the same day as the Biden administration's mandate in September 2021.
The virology community continues to push gain-of-function research.
They continue to push these...
You know, wandering into caves looking for the worst possible virus.
I mean, it's increasingly clear that virology is toxic and dangerous, at least this part of it, this emerging infectious diseases part of it, because you're much more likely to cause a pandemic than to prevent one, either by messing with viruses in labs to make them more dangerous, which is really the most insane idea possible, or...
Just going to these caves where the bats are not bothering anybody and looking for dangerous viruses.
And here's, to me, one of the best pieces of evidence for this.
Let's pretend that the Chinese lab is not the source.
By source, I don't mean that it was fully created there.
I mean they were probably experimenting with it and it leaked, okay?
I want to be clear what I'm saying.
But let's pretend that this didn't somehow escape from a Chinese lab.
Let's pretend that people who say that this came out of a farm in Wuhan, or a wet market in Wuhan.
A pangolin, yes.
A wet market in Wuhan are actually telling the truth.
The best thing you can say, Ben, Is that this effort led by, you know, Peter Daszak and, you know, funded by the US government that Tony Fauci was aware of, that the Chinese were very invested in, that was supposed to help prevent the next pandemic, did nothing to prevent the next pandemic, even though the next pandemic happened under their noses.
That's the absolute best case for what happened in 2020. We funded a ton of research that did nothing to help us predict what the next problem would be or stop it when it happened.
So what on earth are we doing?
It's just like the vaccines, certainly at this point.
All downside, no upside.
The rational person stops gambling in that position.
And if you're at any point along the chain of COVID policy that I think inarguably got a lot of people killed and wrecked our economy and destroyed a generation of children who are now illiterate, etc., etc., etc., has anyone ever been punished for that?
You can find the details about it in the Pfizer proxy statement.
He's on all the boards.
He's on CNBC. He's never apologized for slandering me or anything else.
He's doing just fine.
Slavitt runs a healthcare-focused venture fund that funds things like getting trans medicines to people, to young teenagers in states where they aren't going to necessarily need to be seen by a doctor.
True story.
That's one of the, and I may be exaggerating slightly, but that is the point of one of his venture capital investments.
And Albert Borla remains the chairman and CEO of Pfizer Incorporated, you know, and gets about $35 million a year.
They were whatever, for whatever reason, they're a little more interested in like the federal purse, have noted that, you know, hundreds of millions of doses in Europe were wasted.
But I've never seen a story like that in the United States.
And ironically, you know, you can find tons of stories about how Africa was going to be the next terrible wave, even into 2021, when it should have been clear to everybody that, you know, the African demographic is so much younger that there is basically zero risk from COVID. You can still find all these stories about how we have to get vaccines to Africa.
The number of mRNA vaccines or COVID vaccines in general taken in Africa is near zero, certainly outside of South Africa.
And my joke, it's not really a joke, this is the first time in history when rich white people have demanded to be the guinea pigs for an experimental medicine.
I mean, it's certainly hard to square that with a healthy society or, you know, not a lot of anxiety among young people.
And the idea that this is happening in wealthy societies, but it doesn't seem to be driven by economics because, you know, there's still pockets of high fertility for ultra-Orthodox Jews and various other religious sects.
And those people are very rarely wealthy.
So, you know, it's not a problem of lack of abundance.
Well, I mean, if that continued at that level, you would be, you know, you'd be down 90% in 100 years.
I mean, it's pretty stunning.
Look, these things can reverse.
Look at, you know, the popularity of the baby boom, you know, post-World War II. There were tremendous, you know, growth in population in the US and Japan and other countries.
So these things can reverse, but there's no sign it's even stopping.