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Jan. 10, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender

57:14

Government Hysteria with Alex Berenson

Alex Berenson discusses his new book, Pandemia, and how hysteria took over our government, rights, and lives with RFK Jr in this episode. Order Alex's best seller, Pandemia, here: https://smile.amazon.com/Pandemia-Coronavirus-Hysteria-Government-Rights/dp/1684512484/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3PB8SP714KRTZ&keywords=pandemia&qid=1641773860&sprefix=pandemi%2Caps%2C220&sr=8-1

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	Hey, everybody.
	It's my honor to have as my guest, Alex Berenson, who just wrote this book, Pandemia.
	And Alex Berenson covered the drug industry and financial fraud.
	He's a reporter for the New York Times.
	He's the author of Tell Your Children, The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence.
	An Edgar Award-winning writing, best-selling thrillers, and a freelance journalist.
	He's a graduate of Yale University.
	He lives in New Jersey, and he has a Substack account, which I urge you to go to, alexberenson.substack.com.
	Alex has been one of the leaders of The resistance throughout the pandemic very, very courageously began reporting he was not looking to be a revolutionary hero.
	He was a science writer who was trying to report truths when the whole world was reporting lies.
	And he became a hero to many of us during that period.
	He's a prickly character and something of a young curmudgeon, but we're all grateful for his service to the truth to our country of public health.
	Welcome to the show, Alex.
	Well, thank you for having me.
	And, you know, I don't know if I'm a curmudgeon, but as I say at one point in Pandemia, I, you know, I don't like to get pushed around.
	And I have to say, having now lived through what they say about me, I, you know, I guess I understand you a little bit better because the stuff that gets said has nothing to do with reality.
	And I guess at some point you just have to accept that and decide you're going to continue to report out.
	Yeah, you have to find peace inside.
	If you're among all the tumult and the darts, you have to be able to have.
	I think you need a spiritual place to go.
	Otherwise, it's hard to take.
	That's an interesting way.
	I mean, I just feel like I just am chasing the truth.
	Like, that's my spiritual place.
	Just trying to find out what the data is.
	And maybe that's not good enough in the long run, but that's what I have now.
	Anyway, it's great to be on with you.
	You too.
	In your book, you mentioned Stephen King's book, The Stand, which I don't know how many people read that.
	I mean, it was a bestseller and it was Stephen King.
	Oh, I think a lot of people read it.
	It was a very long book.
	Yes.
	And so that may have defied a lot of the readers, but it was, I love that book.
	And it was about a plague.
	And one of the interesting things about it, and the plague was called Captain Tripp's.
	And it killed outright probably 99% of people.
	But what you have is kind of similar to what's happening now.
	You had a very, very militarized response by the government.
	And you, although not, maybe not as militarized as what we're seeing now, you had an extreme polarization in society where all of the liberals Are drawn to one community in Boulder, Colorado.
	All of the conservatives are drawn to Las Vegas, Nevada.
	And they're very organized and disciplined.
	And then the two communities essentially have a battle against each other.
	And I have not seen any references to it since this began.
	And yours is the first one I saw.
	And it struck me as that is really apropos.
	Well, let's hope that's not where we're at.
	I thought you were going to make a reference to the McNamara, you know, to the idea that this is the worst mistake we've made since Vietnam, which is, I think it's worse than Vietnam, but it's unquestionably worse.
	You know, I mean, the handling of this pandemic, as you say, $27 trillion has caused us.
	The worst thing is this tremendous shift of wealth.
	$3.8 trillion from working people around the globe to these super rich titans.
	We've created 500 new billionaires since it started.
	And one of the things that I'd love you to talk about, because you do a great job in this book, of talking about how from the beginning, the internet titans smelled blood in the water.
	They knew that this was going to help them.
	And they were, you know, they essentially were...
	Helped engineer a coup d'etat against American democracy, against the economy and everything else.
	And they saw that all of these businesses that they were closing down and forcing people to stay in their home and use their computers and their website was going to give them Unheralded power over all of humanity and enrich them beyond, you know, anything imagined even by Midas.
	And it was like you really outlined that in a way that I thought was really convincing.
	My view of this is generally less...
	I don't want to say conspiratorial, but I see less of a plan here than you do in many ways.
	And what I see is people sort of seizing the moment in some ways.
	And Upton Sinclair, this is the epigraph of my very first book, The Number, which is about sort of financial accounting and And how the stock market and Wall Street went bad in the 1990s, which, you know, it periodically does go bad.
	The line is, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
	And that is one of the great lines in human history.
	It's always been true.
	It's true today.
	And so these companies, you know, the big internet companies, look, I don't know what they knew or didn't know in March of 2020.
	And And the panic, I think, certainly in places like New York, was real.
	But it is also true that very clearly early on, they saw that having people at home would benefit them.
	And so did Wall Street.
	And you can see it in the movements of the stocks.
	These companies, within a few months of the beginning of the pandemic, were trading at all-time highs.
	They recovered more quickly.
	They rose more quickly than anybody else.
	And that was true.
	Both of the real titans, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, but it was also true of these smaller companies like Peloton and Zoom and Pinterest.
	These other companies recovered very, very quickly and soon set new highs.
	And so the companies understood, certainly people, senior people in the companies must have understood that forcing people to be at home Yeah.
	and into virtual school, forcing office workers to not see each other was going to be very good for them.
	It was going to increase reliance on the internet.
	And I mean, I talk about my wife a little bit in the book.
	And one of the things that's happened to her is, you know, she now works as a psychiatrist for a company, doesn't matter what company, but they do outpatient psychiatry.
	And, you know, she sees people every day who, you know, have problems because of too much screen time.
	Well, how does she see them?
	She sees them virtually because it's become clear to big companies, big service companies, big providers, that it's more efficient to do it that way.
	Nobody has to drive anywhere.
	Nobody has to meet in person.
	If you're running five minutes late, you just open the call five minutes later.
	It's much easier for everybody.
	Unfortunately, the psychic costs are enormous, but the companies make money.
	And I do think that's true.
	And the other thing that happened, so that's the internet side of the billionaires.
	The other side is that there was this titanic effort to save the economy from crashing completely in March 2020.
	And that consisted of two, you know, sort of prime, there were two major ways that the government did that.
	One was fiscal stimulus, meaning we're just going to pay people to stay home.
	And okay, that was somewhat justifiable, I think, because, you know, you don't want somebody who lost their job because of a lockdown.
	Not to be able to pay the rent or not to be able to pay for food.
	That's clearly wrong.
	But there was also tremendous what's called monetary stimulus.
	And that just means essentially that the Federal Reserve suddenly is printing money.
	There's lots of fancy ways to describe what they're doing, but basically they're just making money out of nothing.
	And who benefited from that?
	People in the financial system benefited from that.
	Whether that was banks, whether that was hedge fund managers, whether that was private equity managers, those people have made, and people investing in Bitcoin, investing is sort of a loose word for that, but everybody who speculated made out tremendously well last year.
	And so that is pretty indefensible.
	And the other thing you've seen is now, after 30 years, when we really had inflation under control, inflation has gotten out of control.
	And the people on the left, they want to blame supply chain problems, and maybe that's part of it.
	But most of this probably has to do with the incredible amount of money that's been injected into the system in the last 18 months.
	And to be honest, the Fed does not know how to get out of this right now.
	They're very afraid that if they go back to something close to normal, the markets will crash.
	And the economy will crash, and they don't know what to do about it.
	And as a result, we have this inflation that was much worse than expected this year.
	So yeah, Wall Street made a ton.
	The internet companies made a ton.
	And of course, healthcare, and most especially, the vaccine companies made a ton.
	So this was very, very good for some very, very powerful and rich people.
	And it's not a conspiracy to say that, you know, it is just the truth.
	You found a Terrific quote from Dr.
	Donald Henderson, who many people are familiar with.
	And Dr.
	Henderson was one of the people who, he won the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his role in obliterating smallpox.
	And he's regarded as one of the gurus and charums of epidemic management.
	He wrote in December 2006, he and three other scientists authored an 11-page paper about the best ways for managing This is in 2006.
	And this kind of states the global orthodoxy at that time, that this was not unique, but the fact that he's writing it because he's such an important authority, let's say.
	And what he says is, disease mitigation measures in the control of pandemic influenza.
	After outlining lockdown measures, they pose the question, we must ask whether any of these proposed measures are epidemiologically sound and consider the possible secondary social and economic impacts.
	That is a momentous and obvious piece of wisdom.
	Before you lock down a society, you better make sure that the lockdown is not going to kill more people I'm not even looking about whether lockdowns are effective against mitigating the spread.
	Will the lockdown itself kill the disease?
	And one other thing that you do in your book is you do a very good job inventorying some of these catastrophic impacts of the lockdown.
	Let's talk about that for a second.
	Here's where I want to say something about your book, which is, you know, that last chapter about the games.
	I mean, it's fairly clear that over the last 20 years, so these lockdowns, on the one hand, they came out of nowhere, right?
	They were completely unforeseen by most people, including some people in public health.
	They couldn't have happened without what happened in China in January 2020 and then Italy in late February, early March 2020.
	On the other hand, and this is where your book, to me, the most interesting stuff, you know, there's lots of interesting stuff in it.
	But the most interesting stuff, it was seeing how this small but determined group of pandemic fearmongers and pro-lockdowners laid the groundwork for this over a 20-year period.
	And how, over and over again, they tried to move this to the mainstream.
	And so when this happened, there was a playbook.
	And I don't think most people, aside from this real small handful of people, some inside the U.S. government, then the guy, Richard Hatchett at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness, And a handful of other people had sort of been planning a response to this and were just dying to put it into gear.
	And the other thing is they had been sort of promising, I hate to use that word, but let's say they had been predicting a pandemic on this scale for years, and they'd been wrong over and over again, right?
	So they're wrong in 2003.
	They're wrong in 2005.
	They're wrong in 2009.
	They're wrong in 2013.
	They're wrong about Ebola.
	They're wrong about Zika.
	They're wrong about West Nile.
	None of it really does anything, okay?
	For 20 years, they've been telling people, you got to be aware that this is a real terrible risk.
	You know, the Soviet Union's gone.
	It's not going to be smallpox.
	It's going to be some emerging epidemic that we don't know about.
	And when that happens, we're going to lock down the world.
	Well, you know what?
	Their funding actually, in some cases, is actually starting to dry up.
	You know, you saw this with Daszak's group.
	The USAID contract had run out, and they were looking at not having another contract to move.
	Well, just in time, at the beginning of 2020, there's a pandemic that, you know, is finally disease X. They finally get what they've been predicting all along.
	And we can talk about where disease X came from and...
	You know, that's another part of this.
	But I think what your book does so brilliantly, which I didn't, you know, and I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about this.
	I was not knowledgeable about the number of sort of war games and epidemic exercises that had happened over the two decades.
	So yes, nobody thought that lockdowns were possible except this tiny group of people who thought, you know, who were planning them.
	Yeah, we're going to come back to lockdowns, but let's talk about the way they triggered the lockdowns, which was essentially using models from two different institutions, which some of them developed by people who are clearly,
	a history is almost kind of grifters, you know, pandemic predictors, consistently predicting them, but Who exaggerated, and this actually is where Alex Berenson made his bones and captured all of our public attention because you were so meticulous at that time during the early pandemic at saying,
	wait a minute, here's the models that they're using and here's the actual daily death rates and infection rates.
	And they're nowhere close.
	And the models, IMHE, which is funded by Gates, and Ferguson's also funded largely by Gates in England, and the models for those two groups were so out of control.
	So talk about that a little.
	Sure.
	I think you sort of outlined, and it is in Pandemia, you know, I was a comparative nobody in March 2020.
	I mean, I had been a reporter for the Times many years before, but I, you know, I'd written some spy novels in the interim, and then I wrote a book about cannabis, which, you know, got some attention, but it wasn't a huge, you know, it was a, I would say it was a Medium important piece of nonfiction.
	It was not a life-changing book.
	And so, you know, I saw what Ferguson was doing and how he had made this, you know, incredibly terrifying prediction back in March, you know, back in mid-March.
	So Neil Ferguson is a physicist, actually, by trade.
	And he then became an epidemiologist.
	And this was sort of in the late 90s, he became an epidemiologist.
	And over the next, you know, really 20 years, he made a series of completely wrong predictions.
	I mean, laughably wrong predictions.
	One was off by a factor of a million.
	And I'm not exaggerating.
	He was wrong by a factor of a million.
	He said the swine flu in 2005 might kill, you know, 200 million people, and it killed 200.
	So he was a fool, but he has a great accent, and he has a great degree, and that'll take you a long way.
	And he's one of these people who was wrong over and over and over again.
	So in February of 2020, as the pandemic started, When he accelerates in China, he gets very concerned.
	So he works for Imperial College London, which is a well-known university in London, and they have a deal with the WHO. And he's also part of something called SAGE, which is not a secret group, but not highly publicized group, called the Scientific Advisory...
	I'm sorry, I should have this off the top of my head.
	I want to say Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies.
	That may be wrong, and if it is, I apologize.
	It does meet secretly and it has very, very powerful people like Jeremy Farrar from Welcome Trust is on and off of it and a lot of other people.
	Yes.
	I mean, it's basically sort of a kitchen cabinet for the top people in the British government.
	So, yeah, I would say there's been more transparency around SAGE in the last year, but there's still, early on, there was very, very little.
	So Ferguson has these platforms.
	He has the WHO, Imperial College platform, Where he can sort of communicate at first privately to governments all over the world, and then publicly he can put out a report.
	And then he has a direct line to the British, you know, the top levels of the British government.
	And Ferguson panics.
	And he releases a model in mid-March 2020 that says at least 2 million people are going to die in the U.S. if we don't do anything.
	500,000 people are going to die in the U.K. And by the way, even if we really lock down society until a The numbers are going to be half that.
	We're going to have to go even further than a normal standard.
	It's hard to know what a standard lockdown was then, but we're going to have to go to something called suppression, which was really everybody stays in your homes and, you know, something close to what the Chinese were doing, where basically you couldn't go outside without approval.
	So that's sort of, Ferguson says, we need this or the hospitals are going to be overrun.
	And, you know, I think this is a really important point that we need to remember The initial point of lockdowns was to save the medical system, right?
	It was not to prevent anyone from dying from COVID. There were these predictions that there were going to be 10 times as many people needing hospitalization as all the beds in New York State.
	So I think, I'm exaggerating slightly, I think the actual numbers, we're going to need 65,000 hospital beds and New York State has, you know, 18,000 beds.
	It was going to be a complete collapse of the hospital system within weeks, where people were going to be, I mean, no exaggeration, had this stuff come true or been close to coming true, there would have been people dying outside the hospitals, intense, untreated.
	That was essentially what they were predicting.
	They didn't quite come out and say that, but look at what the numbers were.
	They were far, far, far beyond the ability of the system to cope.
	You quote Levine, Mark Levin from the city council.
	They were going to be graves dug in Central Park.
	Central Park was going to be a cemetery.
	That's right.
	Central Park would be turned into a cemetery.
	That's right.
	And here's the thing.
	The reason...
	So, okay, so, you know, not that many people knew who I was.
	So, okay, so Ferguson puts this out.
	And then literally 10 days later, he says, Oh, you know what?
	You know how I said 500,000 people would die if we didn't do anything?
	It's actually 25,000 in the UK. By the way, he was wrong both ways.
	Now one number is too high, one number is too low.
	And so nobody noticed that.
	You've got a few stories in the UK. Nobody in the US noticed that.
	And I thought to myself, this is crazy.
	We did this because of what this guy said.
	We locked down because he said the hospitals were going to get crushed.
	And now he's saying, oh, you know, I take it back.
	They're not going to get crushed.
	Okay, so that was like the 26th or 27th of March.
	Then, so the thing about exponential growth, I mean, this truly was supposed to be something where it was not going to be months away, much less years away.
	It was going to be days away.
	That these numbers were going to double and double and double.
	And all of a sudden, by the end of March, by March 31st, April 1st, 2020, 10,000 New Yorkers a day were going to need hospitalization.
	10,000 new beds needed every day.
	And the problem was that was completely wrong.
	It was within days you could see it was wrong.
	There was no acceleration in the number of people showing up.
	Just to interrupt you for a minute, Alec, what you were doing, which nobody else was doing, was there was actually a daily predictor in Ferguson's model.
	No, in the IHMG model.
	In the IMHG model.
	Yes.
	Where you could check it against the hospital beds that were, if the prediction was right, you could check the two numbers, the predictive number and the actual number, and they were.
	Completely wrong.
	Light years apart.
	That's right.
	Nobody was noticing.
	And Cuomo was getting up there every day and using the predictive numbers, even though he had the other numbers.
	Well, I mean, it's weirder than that.
	You know, I sort of have to walk through in the book.
	It's almost hard to explain to people.
	It wasn't that the prediction for a week out was wrong.
	It was that the number that day was wrong.
	So IHME would say on April 3rd, there are 12,000 people in New York's hospital beds with COVID or whatever the number was.
	And tomorrow it's going to be 17,000.
	And guess what?
	On April 3rd, it was actually 3,000 people in the hospitals.
	Not 12,000.
	And the next day it was 3,500, not 17,000.
	And again, I'd have to go back and look at what the numbers actually are, but that's approximately correct.
	The IHME model, it wasn't that it was getting things wrong in the future, although it did get things wrong in the future.
	It was getting things wrong the day of.
	It way wrong.
	And so in this model world, Which the Times was reporting on and Cuomo was talking about.
	In the modeled world, all the hospitals were overrun.
	In the real world, yeah, they were getting full in New York, but they were not overrun.
	And everywhere else in the country, they were empty.
	And nobody seemed to notice.
	I think I remember at that time.
	The hospitals use a system where they have a diversion alert where a hospital that is overrun diverts patients away, ambulances away, to nearby hospitals.
	And I think there was only one hospital in New York, Queen Elmhurst Hospital, that ever had a diversion alert, and all the other ones had empty beds all the time.
	I'm not sure that's true in New York City, but I can tell you.
	So this was something else I was able to do.
	New Jersey, it was online in real time.
	So you could see which hospital, because these hospitals would want to notify each other.
	And, you know, New Jersey, I think, has 80 hospitals.
	And usually there was like one diversion, you know, and it wasn't, oftentimes it was like psych ER or something.
	So, yeah, it was not happening.
	I mean, you know, I have to tell you, as I'm recounting this to you, It's so shocking to me.
	Like, why was I the only journalist in the United States doing this?
	But, you know, it's been repeated with the vaccines.
	Like, the data is not that hard to find.
	Now, I have people helping me, just like you have people helping you now get some of this data.
	But a lot of it is public.
	It's insane, the failure of the media here.
	Yeah.
	How do you explain that?
	How do you explain how they all got subsumed in the orthodoxy?
	Because it really is a catastrophic phenomenon for our country, for democracy, for public health and everything.
	I mean, CNN is probably the worst example.
	And you can see the direct connection between the pharmaceutical advertisements and brought to you by Pfizer, but there's a lot of other media outlets that are not getting that much money from pharma, and they're still all subsumed in that orthodoxy, and they're all practicing that censorship.
	That's a great question, and I'm glad you pointed out that, you know, the Times, for example, doesn't get that much money from Pfizer.
	You know, I say in Pandemia that I think, look, it was very clear early on that this was going to hurt Trump.
	And a lot of the media hated Trump, hates Trump to this day.
	And they were willing to do almost anything to get him out of office.
	And so that was a dangerous phenomenon.
	There was real fear in New York in March.
	There was a surge of deaths.
	That's a fact.
	And I don't think people quite understood how much of that had to do with problems with the ventilators and how much of it had to do with Cuomo sending sick people back to nursing homes.
	But look, there were real deaths, okay?
	And I don't live in the city, but I was in the city a lot because I was visiting my father, who was quite sick at the time.
	He wound up dying in May 2020, not of COVID, as I talk about a little bit in Pandemia.
	There was real fear.
	So there was this hatred of Trump.
	There was real fear.
	And frankly, a lot of reporters are afraid to challenge, quote unquote, capital S science.
	They're not very good at math.
	They're not very good at science.
	That's why they became reporters.
	And there's a handful who are.
	But when you put those three things together, the train got going very quickly and And it became very hard, I think, to acknowledge that the reality was not as bad as it had been made out to be.
	Let me go to the next step with you, okay?
	So they exaggerate the predictions, and it triggers us into this cascading effect of where we all accept a two-week lockdown.
	But then...
	There's all these weird steps that are taken by the government to exaggerate the deaths and exaggerate the cases.
	And among those are the, which you talk about in the book, and I think one of the best ways, there's parts of this book that in the future I will cut out those pages and send it to people about specific issues because you summarized them so efficiently.
	One of the areas where you do this is talking about all of these devices that the federal public health agencies used that all had the result of exaggerating the impacts of the pandemic.
	One was the coding of death certificates.
	Another was the PCR test.
	Yes.
	It all pointed the same way.
	And again, and this is where maybe I'm, you know, for all my cynicism, maybe I'm naive.
	When all the errors point the same way, I know there's this desire to say it must be a conspiracy.
	But, you know, I just don't know.
	I mean, I think there was a great fear at the beginning that, you know, that this was going to get out of control.
	And here's where I will get a little bit conspiratorial, okay?
	Yeah.
	Why was there such a fear at the Maybe you're believing the worst because
	of your inside knowledge of the work that was being done and the risk that they were taking.
	And again, that's not to say that they did it intentionally.
	It's like, oh man, you can imagine the conversation where it's like, the Chinese really screwed up.
	And they created this thing that is bad.
	And it's going to kill 3% of the people in the world.
	And that's, you know, I know that we haven't quite seen that yet, but that's where it's going.
	And we need to respond to that in this way.
	And so to me, that is a plausible explanation, although we don't know if it's true, why they overreacted so fiercely when they should have pulled back.
	The question, let's assume that that's true.
	And I'm going to continue to say we don't know if that's true.
	Why couldn't they pull back a month or two later?
	I don't understand that part either.
	Yeah.
	Now, let's talk about how many people died from the pandemic, from COVID, and what that means.
	And one of the things that you do that I think is really valuable to people that is To impose a reality, a realistic risk assessment on COVID is to basically, and you don't say this directly, but that we need to be looking at life years lost rather than lives lost because the deaths were overwhelmingly among people who would have died that year in
	any case.
	Let's talk about that.
	Sure.
	So, I mean, I don't know if I would say that overwhelmingly among people would have died that year, depending on, you know, how you...
	I think you...
	Who you believe, I would say...
	I think you'd say at one point, 40% would have died that year and 60% by the second year.
	I think at least half, you know, the best estimates, and this was going on funeral home operators who obviously have insight into the, you know, into the cases, and actually Ferguson said it too.
	He actually said two-thirds of people, I think, Within 18 months and at least a third the year of, meaning this was in early 2020.
	When you look at who died, okay, so COVID picks on three kinds of people.
	And it does.
	It picks on people, okay?
	It picks on the extremely elderly in a country like Canada.
	Half the people who died from COVID, the median age of death, was 85.
	I mean, half the people who died were over 85.
	In Italy, 82 or 83.
	Now, in the U.S., it's slightly younger.
	It's in the high 70s.
	Now, why is it younger in the U.S.? Because there's other two groups of people.
	What?
	Because we get a chronic disease here.
	Well, we have tons of severe obesity.
	Yeah.
	And when you see people who are under 50 dying of COVID, they are overwhelmingly obese with cardiac conditions or severely obese.
	I'm not going to say there aren't exceptions, but those are the people who die.
	And then the third group is just sort of unfortunate people who might have downs or people who have genetic abnormalities who have been sick from birth.
	And so those are the people who die from COVID. So it's sort of hard to say that so openly without sounding harsh, but I don't mean to sound harsh.
	This does not mean that those people shouldn't be protected and we shouldn't do everything possible to help them.
	It means that we need to be realistic about who's not at risk.
	And that when we shut down society to protect the vast majority of younger people who are not at risk, we're harming them.
	It is unfair to them.
	It is bad public policy, and it's wrong.
	And the younger you go, the wronger it is.
	Here's the thing.
	When you say this, people on the left say, you're denying the reality of COVID and you're one of those people who says that only 5% of the deaths were actually COVID. No, I'm not saying that at all.
	COVID caused substantial excess mortality in the United States in 2020 and in early 2021.
	I will say right now, it's a lot harder to separate out COVID from the vaccine deaths, which is a whole different issue.
	But clearly, in the pre-vaccine days, COVID was causing substantial excess mortality.
	No question about it.
	But those folks were going to die for the most part within a year or two.
	And there was just nothing we could do about it.
	And I'll give you the one number that says this more powerfully than any other.
	35%, and depending on some states it's even more, some countries it's even more, 35% of all the deaths in the U.S. from COVID last year were in nursing home patients.
	The average life expectancy, and I hate to say this, because one day we're all going to be entering a nursing home, the average life expectancy once you enter a nursing home is six months.
	Those are places we send people, even though we're not honest about it, we send them there to die.
	And COVID killed those people Preferentially.
	It kills the sickest of the sick.
	But you also do a good job of this showing why it was that I think 20-year-olds and 30-year-olds believed that if they got COVID, they had like a 30 or 40% chance of dying because the media coverage did not stratify that data in a way that And Americans could really understand a risk profile.
	It was deliberately blurred and conflated by a lot of different people to make it look like we all face it.
	And here's where I will go with the conspiracy.
	That was intentional.
	And you can see it in a SAGE document.
	You can see it in German government documents.
	I'm sure there are U.S. documents, too, although they have not come out yet.
	And the news media happily participated in it.
	And I'll never forget, last year there was a story in the Times of this guy named Tyler Ambergray, and he was 29, he was in Texas, and the story is how he was this fit hockey player who died of COVID. And I read this and I thought to myself, there's no way, okay?
	It's just not possible.
	And there was something in the story about how he'd gotten COVID and he'd taken a sleeping pill and he hadn't woken up.
	But it was a COVID death.
	And so I got the autopsy.
	In Texas, you can get the autopsies.
	In my opinion, autopsies should be public information in every state.
	The dead, it doesn't matter to them, and the rest of us should know what's happened when somebody has died in a way that requires an autopsy, in my opinion.
	As a reporter.
	But so in Texas, you can get the autopsy.
	And what the autopsy showed was, yes, Tyler Ambergway had had COVID. No, he had never, as far as I can recall, he had never gone to the hospital.
	And he died, according to this, primarily of a drug overdose.
	Okay.
	And so that was the truth.
	And that's You know, and maybe, and COVID was on the death certificate because he had had COVID at the time, and so technically you could report it as a COVID death, but he died primarily, again, according to the report, of a drug overdose.
	And so that is a case where, you know, the media just lied.
	They just didn't tell the truth because they were trying to scare people.
	And there was a case, and this is only a few weeks ago now, it's not a pandemic, Of a 14-year-old in Alberta, Canada, who was announced as, you know, this young person died of COVID and the family was furious.
	And they actually came out that these two sisters said, our brother had terminal brain cancer.
	He'd been in the hospital since August of 2021.
	I think he died in October.
	And he got COVID two days before he died in the hospital.
	He died of a brain tumor.
	Don't lie about him.
	And the chief medical officer for Alberta, Canada, had to acknowledge what she had done.
	Those are the deaths of people really under 40 and certainly absolutely under 20.
	And I will say this with certainty because I've reviewed the statistics in Germany.
	I put this on my stub stack a few days ago since I can no longer tweet things.
	Germany reported, and Germany's 80 million people and had substantial COVID, not as substantial as the U.S., but substantial COVID. Zero.
	Zero deaths of healthy people aged 5 to 17 in the first 18 months of the pandemic from COVID. Zero.
	There are approximately 10 million Germans in that category.
	Maybe, you know, maybe 20% of them have...
	Oh, of the 20% who had health problems, there were three deaths in that 5 to 17 age range.
	Three.
	So when you hear that COVID is a risk to young people, and certainly to healthy young people, you are being lied to.
	And again, I don't know why.
	The two things that are the most sort of conspiracy-making and mystery-making to me in the last few months are why the desperation to vaccinate healthy young people and why the unwillingness to acknowledge natural immunity.
	Which has also, by the way, been going on since the beginning.
	You may or may not remember, I think it was in March 2020, maybe it was April, the WHO said, we don't know if antibodies provide protection against COVID going forward.
	And actually, they were forced to To change that, and who forced them to change it?
	Bill Gates and the pharma companies, because they knew that, you know, that was essentially saying that vaccines wouldn't work.
	So the WHO went so far to try to scare people that pharma stepped in.
	But this idea that natural immunity is not a thing, when all the evidence suggests natural immunity is better than vaccine immunity, is just beyond me.
	Well, here's another document that I love that you dug up, which is from SAGE. And this is where they say it's entitled Perceived Threat.
	And it worries that a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened.
	It could be that they are reassured by the low death rate in their demographic groups.
	This is a public health crisis.
	People aren't scared enough because not enough people are dying in their group.
	And then it says, it gives a solution for this terrible problem.
	The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent using heart-hitting emotional messaging.
	Emphasis in the original.
	And then it says, the authors then go on to say why you needed both positive and negative reinforcement.
	Communication strategies should provide social approval for desired behaviors.
	Social disapproval from one's community can play an important role in preventing antisocial behavior.
	Consideration should be given to use of social disapproval, but with a strong caveat against unwanted negative consequences.
	I think they just have ignored that caveat pretty much altogether.
	Yeah, no, they sure have.
	And look...
	I don't remember who said it, but somebody said it in just, oh, maybe it was Scott Atlas.
	The idea that you're intentionally trying to panic people, as Fauci, I think Atlas in his book writes that Fauci said we need to panic people more.
	It's so wrong and so contrary to what public health has always been, or certainly what it's been in the last couple of decades.
	Well, I have memos that I can give you from CDC for years on the, you know, they do a flu strategy meeting every couple of years, and they have for years and years, we have the transcripts of those saying we have to drum up fear, you have to exaggerate deaths, you have to I do human interest stories.
	Anytime you can find somebody who died, you have to get to the local press and inflate that.
	Let me say something to you.
	And I still, I will admit, I still have not investigated other vaccines in any meaningful way since we last spoke.
	So I'm still ignorant.
	But here's what's clear to me.
	I'm telling you don't do it because your career will be even more.
	No, no.
	At this point, it doesn't matter.
	Here's what I have sort of realized.
	Vaccines became, most of pharma sort of ignored vaccines.
	It was sort of seen as a low-profit business.
	One shot, you know, what they were into was either a cancer drug that you could charge $100,000 for, or, you know, an antidepressant that you could give, you know, over and over to a huge population for years on end.
	And at some point in the last 10 to 15 years, that calculation changed.
	It became clear that, A, you could charge more for vaccine.
	I can tell you when it changed, 1986, when they took immunity, when they gave them immunity from liability, there was a cold rush at that point, and when we went from At that time, there were three vaccines when I was a kid.
	There was 11 by then, and we went to 72 doses of 16 vaccines.
	But I would say it took a little bit longer than that because I'm talking more about the adult vaccines, whether it's a meningitis vaccine or a shingles vaccine or Gardasil, these vaccines that you can charge $100 for, that you don't have liability for, that the government actually is going to Help you advertise.
	And at some point, the economics of vaccines became quietly much more favorable than they had been.
	And as you say, yes, there was a gold rush.
	And then pharma starts to lobby for this.
	There's also, you know, the big money is actually in the chronic disease epidemic, you know, which you'll find out if you research this.
	It's directly linked to the vaccines, and that's a $500 billion.
	What I'm saying is vaccines sort of became this...
	And there was this group of vaccine fanatics, okay?
	Nobody outside pharma is a pharmaceutical fanatic.
	In other words, the doctors all know the companies are problematic.
	There's no Dorit Rice or Peter Hotez pushing...
	Drugs as a solution to every problem.
	The companies will do it, sure, but we're all suspicious.
	But vaccines have this nonprofit constituency that doesn't exist for drugs, and they have worked with the companies.
	In this way that no one has sort of realized, or I won't say no one, I didn't realize until COVID that this was happening.
	As somebody who covered the drug industry in the aughts, my impression was that vaccines were really kind of God's work because there was no money in them.
	And that clearly stopped being true at some point.
	Yeah.
	Let me go back to what you were talking about before and just put a bug in your ear about this.
	It's something that you can look into.
	But I believe that the reason that there's this tremendous, or one of the reasons there's this tremendous drive to vaccinate children is because of the liability implications to And if you have an EUA vaccine, You have immunity under the PREP Act and the CARES Act.
	Oh, nobody can sue you no matter how negligent, no matter how grievous the injury, you can't get sued.
	But if once you get approved, You no longer have that immunity from liability.
	Aren't they then going through the vaccine compensation injury program?
	That is only available to childhood vaccines.
	It's not available to adult vaccines.
	You can sue somebody.
	If you get your shingles vaccine as an adult, you can sue.
	And I'm involved in litigation on the shingles vaccine.
	You have to get it approved for children.
	But once it is approved, A recommended, I guess, a CDC recommendation.
	It then has liability protection, not just for children, but for adults.
	So if they can get a recommendation for this vaccine to children, even though there's no reason to give it to children, that's the way for them to get immunity for adults.
	And this, they may have some other claim that they can get immunity elsewhere, but...
	I think all the other claims for immunity are going to fall apart, but this immunity is solid if they can get that childhood vaccine.
	That's interesting.
	You know, to me, it seems clear that these should not be treated as vaccines, certainly from the point of view of liability, right?
	I mean, they're not...
	I mean, they're not offering six months of protection.
	So these are therapeutics, and we can argue about how good they are, but they are drugs, and they should be treated as such.
	I suspect if that happened, the companies would stop selling them tomorrow.
	Yeah, of course.
	They couldn't sell them for one day if they had to deal with a liability issue.
	Let's talk about the vaccine for a second, about one aspect of the vaccine, which again, I recommend people to get this book.
	You can see how dog-eared it is.
	Hold on, let me make it more presentable.
	But I really love this book.
	It is.
	So, anyway.
	The cover, by the way, is my favorite part of the whole book.
	The cover is, that is a picture taken just west of Times Square in April 2020.
	And that is the middle of the day in Times Square, and it is empty.
	That's what we did to ourselves.
	We destroyed our cities for months.
	We destroyed our city.
	So another part of this book that I want to clip out the pages and send it to people who are my friends who believe that the vaccines are effective and that they ended the pandemic.
	You know, when they came here to read that there was a drop off and all this.
	You do a very, very good takedown of all that, and you look at the data from the most vaccinated countries in the world, which were the earliest vaccinated.
	You look specifically at Denmark, the UK, and Israel.
	So tell us what we can learn from the experience of those nations who were early adopters Who are very aggressive, who vaccinated the vast majority of their populations.
	What happened?
	So what happens is, it's sort of a story in three acts, and the media only discusses the second act, although they've sort of been forced into talking about the third act.
	The first act is, there's a spike in cases when you give the first dose.
	That's clear basically from all the international data.
	And as I say in the book, it's not entirely clear why, okay?
	There may be an actual sort of effect of suppressing the immune system.
	So I got accused of saying, oh, you're saying the vaccine contains the virus.
	No, I'm not saying that at all.
	I'm saying that for whatever reason, When you offer people the first dose, you get a spike in cases.
	And it probably has to do, again, with the temporary suppression of the immune system.
	It may have to do with the fact that, in some cases, you're opening a nursing home that's been closed for a whole year to people.
	You know, they are being vaccinated for the, you know, they're being exposed for the first time.
	But for whatever reason, you get a spike in cases.
	Okay.
	So what you see with vaccine efficacy is a story in three acts.
	And the first act is immediately when you give the first dose, there's a spike in cases.
	And it appears a spike in, you know, hospitalizations and deaths, too.
	You saw that in Israel.
	You saw it in the U.K., And you saw it actually in other countries too.
	And Gibraltar, which is the most fascinating.
	Gibraltar in January, yes.
	There have been places, Vietnam actually, countries that had had no cases once they started their immunization campaign had a spike.
	And by the way, the companies, when they designed the trials with the sort of approval of the FDA, essentially ignored cases for almost six weeks, and especially in the first two weeks.
	They just essentially said, we're not going to count those cases.
	And in the real world, you have to count the cases because people are getting sick and dying.
	And by the way, people would say, oh, well, he's saying the vaccine actually contains the virus and people are getting sick because they're being injected with it.
	I was saying nothing of the sort.
	What I said was, you see this phenomenon, it's probably because there's a temporary immune suppression that's happening, possibly because just the physical act of vaccinating is exposing people.
	We don't know, but we know it's happening.
	Okay.
	Then for a few weeks, so you get this spike, then actually you start to develop some antibodies, cases come down, you get the second dose, and suddenly you have a lot of antibodies, okay?
	And for a few months, somewhere between two to four months, the vaccines actually work as promised, it seems like.
	In other words, people have real protection from COVID-19.
	They have tons of antibodies in their blood, they're not getting infected very frequently, and there's not a lot of transmission.
	And look, there's people out there who will argue that even that is a statistical artifact, but I don't really believe that.
	I believe that that is a real phenomenon.
	That's what I call or came to call the happy vaccine ballot.
	So there's a period in the Happy Valley, yes.
	A period in Israel in the spring, in the UK in the spring, later in Europe in sort of the late summer and fall because the Europeans got, you know, started later, even in the US in the mid-summer where cases and infections went down.
	So the vaccines are actually working.
	And this led to this incredible overconfidence in the spring about the vaccine.
	And I talk about this in Pandemia.
	I mean, the comments people made, including Fauci, people talked about this eradication or certainly elimination of the disease and complete herd immunity, meaning there might be a case here and there.
	It was still going to exist, but it was not going to be a problem at all.
	And if you could just get to 70%, 80% vaccination, That would happen.
	Okay, let me just read Fauci's quote.
	Certainly it's not going to be a pandemic for a lot longer because I believe the vaccines are going to turn it around.
	Yes.
	He said that, but he said even stronger things than that.
	That was, I think, in November or December of 2020.
	By April and May of 2021, they were really talking about...
	This being completely over.
	And unfortunately, they got overconfident at precisely the wrong time.
	Because here's what happens.
	The vaccines cause you to produce this tremendous burst in antibodies, much more than natural infection, which is one reason why there were these people out there saying the vaccines are actually more protective than natural infection.
	But, unfortunately, your body actually doesn't want the level of antibodies that the vaccines causes it to produce.
	And very rapidly, you start to clear these antibodies.
	And meanwhile, there's a whole set of processes that will happen when you're naturally infected that don't seem to recover, and those don't seem to happen with the vaccines.
	You do not get the same level of memory B cell You do not get the same level of T cell immunity, and you don't get these improvements that happen over time to your B cells and your T cells, where they become better able to recognize this if you're reinfected.
	You don't get any of these benefits, or you get them in a much more limited way.
	You also don't even get the same width of antibodies that you do with With natural infection, you don't get any antinucleic capsid antibodies, which is part of the virus that because you're only producing the spike protein when you're vaccinated, you're never going to get those antibodies.
	So you get this very narrow bump in spike protein antibodies that goes away.
	And within four to six months of the second dose, so that's six, you know, five to seven months after you've started this cycle, you are losing protection.
	And you don't lose it slowly, you lose it very rapidly.
	And so in Israel, over the summer, in the UK, over the summer, in continental Europe right now, and in the US now too, you're seeing massive spikes in cases and in deaths and in hospitalizations.
	And the only response that the vaccinators had is, we're going to boost you.
	And all that means is that you're getting a boost in antibodies again, because it is not clear.
	And if they say otherwise, they are exaggerating their knowledge.
	It is not clear that you're getting any improvement again in B and T cells.
	You're getting this improvement in the number of anti-spike protein antibodies.
	And by the way, that doesn't even seem to work right now against Omicron.
	Okay, so this is why the vaccine seemed to be almost completely useless against Omicron.
	But even against Delta, yes, you're gonna get a reduction in cases when you give people the spike, give people that third dose, but it isn't clear how long it's going to last.
	And Israel just now has announced a fourth dose.
	So once you understand this, You really are being put on a treadmill with the vaccines.
	And the only way off, basically, is to accept that you're going to have to let yourself get infected and see if natural immunity is going to be the answer for you, unless you want to be taking these boosters indefinitely.
	And just one more point, in most of the developed world, and in the U.S. especially, almost all the vaccines are mRNA vaccines.
	So this is the Pfizer-Moderna technology.
	In Europe, they use some AstraZeneca, which is a somewhat different technology.
	But the mRNA vaccines were never designed to be dosed repeatedly.
	Okay?
	Moderna initially was going to be a therapeutics company, and it realized that dosing people too often with mRNA led to all kinds of negative side effects.
	And so that's why Moderna became a vaccine company, because the idea was we're only going to have to give people a couple of doses, and then we're done.
	But now that's been thrown out the window.
	So whenever somebody, if these companies tell you they know what the effect of a fourth dose, a fifth dose, a sixth dose, much less, you know, biannual doses for the rest of your life, they don't have a clue what that's going to mean.
	They couldn't possibly have a clue what that's going to mean, because none of us have done the research.
	We haven't had time to.
	And I want to say one more thing.
	Of all the things people should understand about the vaccines is the clinical trials for the vaccines were blown up.
	What I mean by that is shortly after the companies got their emergency authorization, they offered the vaccines to essentially everyone who had received a placebo in the clinical trials.
	And what that means- They obliterated the placebo group.
	That's right.
	They obliterated the placebo group.
	Which is criminal scientific fraud.
	You know, it is terrible scientifically.
	Because right now, let's say the vaccines do have real long-term side effects.
	The only way we would know that cleanly and quickly is by comparing deaths in the placebo or serious events in these big clinical trials in the people who received the vaccine to the people who didn't.
	That's the whole point of a clinical trial.
	You match the two sides, and then whatever outcomes differ, you can assume is the result of the treatment.
	They destroyed our ability to do that.
	They did it with the FDA's okay.
	It should never, ever have happened.
	Thank you for this amazing book.
	I urge everybody to get it.
	Give it to your friends.
	Get this book.
	After you get my book, get this book.
	There you go.
	Everyone's already bought your book.
	Thank you, Alex.
	This is great.
	And, you know, if you ever, I'm sure you come to New York, you know, I'll probably be your last friend in New York State.
	Let me know.
	I would love to do it.
	I'll call you when I come in.
	All right.
	Thank you, sir.
	Thank you so much.

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