The Megyn Kelly Show - COVID Vaccines, Masks and Schools, with Alex Berenson and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya | Ep. 57

Episode Date: January 29, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Alex Berenson, author and former New York Times reporter, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, discuss COVID lockdowns and the harm of closing schools, the latest on vaccines and vaccine distribution, the new COVID variants, masks (and double-masks), "focused protection," "trickle down epidemiology," overcoming COVID fear, the actual number of COVID deaths, COVID vs. the flu and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today on the program, COVID, the vaccine, and the never-ending lockdowns. In particular, what's going on in the schools has got me really upset today. We've got some really smart people on the show today, including Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. He was with us not long ago. He's from the Great Barrington Declaration. I mean, that's something that he has helped author. He's actually a professor of medicine at Stanford. But that's that sort of memo that made a really strong case for how we could open back up

the country as soon as humanly possible while protecting the most vulnerable. Made a lot of sense. And he's got a good plan for how we can open up this country in the next 30 days. And so why aren't they listening to him? We're also going to be joined by Alex Berenson, former New York Times reporter who's been very heterodox on these COVID lockdowns and the COVID information and the sort of COVID porn that gets shoveled at us day in and day out by people who, I don't know if they like the lockdowns or just have no problem with them, but he's been very brave in pushing back on some of the conventional wisdom. So we'll ask him some good questions. But listen, I want to start with what's happening in our schools. It's not getting enough attention. Whether you have a child or you don't have a child, we got to talk about it.

COVID infection rates finally are falling. They're down about over 30% nationwide right now, according to the Times. Experts are now predicting new cases in the U.S. will only steadily decline. So we really are starting to round the corner on this thing. They're estimating now that approximately one third of the U.S. has been infected with COVID. So we're on our way to herd immunity. And we've learned a lot. Like closing schools is unnecessary and does far more harm than good. Everyone from the Centers for Disease Control to the World Health Organization has said the schools present an infinitesimal transmission rate and that closing them costs more lives than would leaving them open.

And yet still, still, the teachers unions, in a disgracefully selfish act, continue to refuse to send in the teachers at the national and some local levels. It's not all teachers, of course. We should say that up front. Most teachers want to work. Most are courageous and selfless and deserve our deep thanks, as we've seen a lot over this past year, as we watch them teach our children. My son's teacher has been in class all year, in class, in the classroom at age 65 with a room full of

fifth graders helping these kids come home joyful every day. And we are grateful. Same for our other two children. Most teachers want to be in the classroom and want to be with the children and will tell you that these unions do not speak for them. But others simply will not return to class. But first, some district officials in various states are now saying schools, they may not operate normally, not just for the remainder of this school year, right? We're in January now, January through June, but for the entirety of the 2021 to 22 school year, all of next year. And Randy Weingarten, she's the president of the American Federation of Teachers, very powerful. It's the nation's second largest teachers union. You see her all over cable news, is leading the stay at home charge. It's not safe, she claims. The teachers are scared, she says.

That may be, but their fear is not supported by the facts. COVID infection rates in elementary schools have been minuscule. 0.2% for teachers, 0.1% for the children. Moreover, the infections that they've identified in schools were not acquired in the schools, according to the CDC, which is jumping up and down now saying the safest place for K through 12 attendees is in school. Okay, so there's no infections, virtually none. And the ones that are there were not acquired in the schools. There is no good reason not to return to in-school learning. Still, the Chicago Teachers Union this week refused a direct order from the school district to return to school this past Monday. Same deal for the teachers in Montclair, New Jersey.

It's basically right outside of New York City, very tony suburb of New York, where elementary school children have not been in school for 319 days. The teachers there now defying an order to get back in the classroom. Just halftime hybrid learning. Nope, won't do it. The Biden administration, which released a plan to have the schools open within his first hundred days, which, by the way, isn't good enough. That's basically the end of the school year. Still

not good enough, but he's already gone soft on it. He's already reversed himself on that, bowing to the unions, which are huge Democratic donors. And instead of fighting these powerful donors, the unions, Joe Biden's now switched his message to the schools need to be safe before the teachers go back. This after literally tens of billions of dollars have been spent to make the schools so. They've gotten over $60 billion from the feds to shore up their ventilation systems and so on. And they've been prioritized, teachers have, for vaccines. And here was the new White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, siding with the unions. We need to do the things to open safely. Most of the teachers I talk to,

they want to be back in the classroom. They just want to know that it's safe. And we as a country should make the investments to make it safe. Okay, so we have. And their standard of safety knows no bounds. The truth is no amount of safety measures is going to get these teachers back in the classroom. Even a direct order from their bosses hasn't gotten them back in the classroom. The Chicago schools have installed air purifiers in the classrooms, conducted ventilation tests, increased cleaning, procured rapid testing, among other things. But still, the teachers who are receiving priority on vaccinations say, it's not safe, not safe enough.

These people won't be satisfied until they get the hazmat suits appropriate for an overnight stay at Chernobyl. The Wall Street Journal reports that children in over 130 parochial and private Chicago schools, and by the way, over 2,000 early learning centers there, have been in class safely since last fall. But still, Chicago teachers play the victim. And we're seeing this dichotomy happen across the nation between public and private schools. The private schools go back and the kids who are in the public school system, which doesn't have as much money behind them, they don't get to go. And it's unfair. Remember the school teachers in New York City,

where I am, who showed up with cardboard coffins and fake body bags after they were ordered back into the classroom? So concerned were they about their safety that these same teachers from the union, many of the same ones, got on buses a few weeks later, went to Washington, D.C., and marched with Al Sharpton and 50,000 others in support of BLM. No social distancing there. And old Randy Weingarten, she was there too, repeatedly seen without a mask. But it's all about safety. Now, now we're seeing the spike in depression and anxiety and even death for children forced into months-long isolation. CDC data showed the suicide, it was already the second leading cause of death among young

people aged 10 to 24 before the pandemic. But the closure of schools and the related social activity that's been shut down, you know, no after-school sports, et cetera, has left children prisoners in their own homes. There are no school mental health counselors to keep an eye on them, no in-person teacher support. That's usually the first line of reporting when you see a problem with a child. Nonstop distance from their friends and kids who have abusive parents now trapped in the danger. And indeed, suicides are frighteningly on the rise. The New York Times had a disturbing report this past Sunday about the surge of student suicides in Clark County, Nevada. That's the Las Vegas area. It's gotten so bad there that they have had to create an early

warning system that monitors students' mental health episodes. Like they're able to electronically check the children's iPads from afar and they're doing remote searches for disturbing terms or searches that the kids have done on them. That system has already sent more than 3,100 alerts to officials just since last March, including one that went out to a boy's father at 2 a.m. telling him his son had been searching,

quote, how to make a noose. Sure enough, the dad ran to his son's room at 2 a.m. and found his son trying to hang himself. It appears he stopped it. By December 2020, okay, just last month, the Times report showed that over the previous nine months, OK, from December 2020 back nine months, 18 Clark County students had taken their own lives. That's double the preceding 12 months. One left a note saying he had nothing to look forward to. One of the children was nine years old. And Las Vegas is not alone.

The Times reports death by suicide in Aledo, Texas, where a 12-year-old hanged himself after months of the lockdown. In Maryland, a 14-year-old boy, quote, gave up after school remained shut in the fall. In Sacramento, where an 11-year-old boy shot himself during his Zoom class in Maine, where a teen killed himself due to, his father says, the ongoing isolation. This has to stop. The schools have to reopen. It's safe. It's been proven safe. The Chicago teachers who refuse to obey the district order to get back in the classrooms should be fired. Same for those in Montclair, New Jersey and any other district that puts the well-being of students last. The grocery stores are open. The hospitals are open. The liquor stores are open.

The pharmacies are open and the schools essential to our children's well-being must open too. Teaching, they say, is supposed to be a noble profession. Where is that nobility now? All right, we're going to be joined by Dr j badacharya in one second he's the perfect person to have on about this because he's been sounding this alarm about the non-covid deaths that result from these measures we've taken for a long time now he's been jumping up and down trying to tell people this is going to happen and they haven't listened uh but before before we get to him let's let's pay the bills.

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for insurance in black and white. I think you're going to love it. I think it's going to save you a lot of time and a lot of money. So you're welcome. Joining us now to talk about the news of the day is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. He's a professor of medicine at Stanford University and one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. Doc, great to have you back. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. So let's just kick it off with the schools and what's now become a real crisis. I mean, those stories are heartbreaking. And, you know, they were in the news on Sunday, the very same day, the Chicago's, the Chicago teachers union said, we're not going back. We refuse even to do a hybrid. So

people don't care, Jay, they, these teachers unions, they don't care, not going back. And I don't know what kind of measure would take to get them to bend? I heard your intro, and I think, I mean, you're spot on. We have a responsibility to our kids to have them back in school in person. The scientific evidence is overwhelming at this point. But even early on, we kind of knew that children were not super spreaders. Though they can get infected, they spread the disease for reasons we don't fully understand yet, but it's so clear that they are much less likely to spread the disease to adults. On the basis of this evidence, Sweden, for instance, kept its schools open all through the epidemic, much of Europe the same. The United States is an outlier in this.

And your highlighting of the harms to kids is really on point because if you look at it, uh, kids really are much safer. So there's, there's, I just give you one other, one data point, uh, you reported child abuse rates have plummeted in the U S but it's not because child abuse has dropped. It's because schools are where child abuse cases are picked up and, and dealt with. Um, uh, we, we, uh, There was a study done in the Journal of American Medical Association that estimated, you know, like schools, it's not just for learning. I mean, it breeds a lifetime habit that results in people being sort of healthier and wealthier

their entire lives. You cut school for a little while and children lead shorter, less healthy lives. So someone did an estimate published in the Journal of American Medical Association, top medical journal, that just the school's closure in March and April led to five and a half million fewer life years for our kids. Oh my God. It's really underscoring the socioeconomic differences too, because the kids of lower socioeconomic status are the last to go back to school. You know, here in New York City, the wealthy private schools, they're open. You know, my kids, they're in school. And yet the public schools have been totally unreliable and the have-nots, you know, those who are struggling and those who have been successful financially in a way that in any other circumstance they would find completely unacceptable.

No, I agree with that, too. It's an engine for the this is probably the single biggest drive driver of inequality I've ever seen for it for an economic policy. We basically have decided that the poor don't need to be educated in the United States, whereas the rich can find alternatives. I don't really understand the, I mean, I don't actually, like the teachers I've talked with, many of them, the rank and file, they want to do a back teach. They understand the role, the important, the vital role they play in their students' lives. And I think I don't really understand the political dynamic at this point. For teachers themselves, the schools are, I mean, compared to like, you know, we ask our clerks to go in and, you know, sort of work all day.

We ask doctors and nurses to go in, work all day. We ask doctors and nurses to go in, work all day. We ask all kinds of people who perform essential services to continue to perform them despite the risk of the epidemic, in some cases, much, much, much, much less safely than a teacher would have. And yet, I would say that the teachers are performing an absolutely essential service if they would just agree to go do it. I think a lot of teachers around the country want that. I mean, they understand the responsibility that they have in their hands, the power they hold to make the lives of their kids better. And I think the teachers unions should start listening to their own teachers. Exactly. So that's where it is.

That's been my experience too. I have quite a few friends who are, who are teachers and the union doesn't always speak for them. The union is this powerful, like amoeba that moves on its own, depending on what Randy, in the case of, you know, the second largest teachers union, um, wants. And it may not be what the teachers want. And, you know, it's like a lot of these teachers would actually like to get back into, into the classroom. A, they want to get out of their own house, right? They're sick of sitting around their own house and trying to teach. They know it's not meaningful. B, they care about their students, maybe reverse the order of those. Um, but they're being told they can't. And even here in New York, there's one private school that's mandating only virtual teaching. Okay. So you can only have a virtual experience even for the children who come back to the school. So kids, the school's open. The kids can file into the classroom,

but their teacher is going to be remote in every classroom. And even, Jay, if the teacher is inside the school, if the teacher shows up at school, they'll put her, let's say in the nurse's office and she will teach remotely to her class. That's one story up because somehow they think this is more equitable. Somehow they think this is more equitable for the students who can't make it into the school that everyone needs to have a virtual experience doing anything else is inequitable. And so everyone gets screwed. I mean, that's the bottom line. They don't have it figured out. And the real harm we're seeing in places like Las Vegas, right, where kids have been driven

to a very dark place during a time of life that's already really fraught. Yeah. I mean, I think we really do have a responsibility to our kids. We can do this safely. So for instance, we know that people, teachers who are older might be at higher risk if they get COVID. Prioritize them for vaccination. Allow them alternate, if they haven't been vaccinated or the vaccination hasn't been completed,

they can give them alternate arrangements so that maybe they help with curriculum with younger teachers. For younger teachers, the risk of COVID is very, very, from risk of dying from COVID is incredibly low. I mean, it's on par with the risk they normally take from other infectious diseases. So I don't, so for those folks, they can teach safely because the kids are passing the disease on at much lower rates than adults, that kids are not the super spreaders of this disease.

Well, that's exactly right. So nobody's saying that people who are immunocompromised or older, or we can identify now what makes you more at risk. Nobody's saying that they need to rush back to the classroom. Nobody. No school's saying that. They're all still offering a remote teaching option for those who are at most at risk. It's not acceptable.

The young, healthy teachers. I just saw a thing out of Chicago where the teacher, I thought it was a joke. It's not. The teachers from the dance program in Chicago did some interpretive dance to show how they didn't want to go back to their, these are able-bodied, perfectly healthy young people, like, dancing their way back to their couch. And it's like I said in the opening, you know, talking points that they're not going to be happy until they're in, like, a hazmat suit that you'd get if you were working in an IBM clean room, you know, assembling the computer chips. Like, there's nothing that approaches 100% safe. But I think we've gotten as close as we're going to get. I think there's this misperception about the deadliness of the disease. For people who are over 70, the survival rate is 95%.

5% is a high death rate from a single disease. You don't want to downplay that. Older people really are at high risk. For people under 70, the survival rate is 99.95%. And for people under the age of 30, it's, I mean, it's on par with the flu. The flu is more dangerous than COVID for children. I'm 52. My death mortality, survival rate from COVID infection from worldwide studies is something on the order of 99.8%.

I love teaching in person. I would happily go back to teaching my classes in person if my school would let me do that. I mean, I think because it's just much more effective in person in conveying the information I want to get across than I am on Zoom. I think that's most people have felt that, that teach. I think, you know, in life, we all take some risks. This is not such a high risk that we should, I mean, we have to consider the risk we pose to the kids, as you've rightly emphasized. There's a trade-off here. And as I feel as a teacher, I have a responsibility to my students. I suspect a lot of people feel that way. A lot of teachers feel that way. So we just have to tell them what the real risks are, address the panic,

and then let them take the responsibility seriously to their students. And that human touch, everybody knows how important that is. We've already become so isolated in this world, always looking down at our phones, never looking out the window, making less and less conversation. And yet, thank goodness, there are still some places where forced socialization occurs. And schools are one of them. And especially at an age where you're coming of age, you're figuring out your body, your hormones, your place in life, who you are, like then more than ever, you need the support of friends and teachers and mentors and guidance counselors and coaches. And we just whipped it away with very little consideration for what we were doing.

And maybe you could excuse that in March, but it's now January of 2021. and there's no excuse for it now. That's why I admire what you guys have done at the Great Barrington Declaration, because you've tried to find a way. It's not just about schools. It's about everyone. It's about businesses, because all of what we've said can be extrapolated. The isolation, the dangers, the depression that comes from these lockdowns. You had a piece just last month and this, your declaration came out months ago, but saying we could open in January. We could end the lockdowns in January if they would just do what you guys are calling focused protection, which for the audience who doesn't know that at this point, what is focused protection? So focused protection is prioritizing the

protection of people we know to be vulnerable to COVID disease, high mortality risk from COVID disease. People who are over 70, people over 65 actually have chronic conditions that put them at higher risk. You know, even people maybe under 65 that have some of the chronic conditions that are very high risk should they get infected. Practically, now that we have the vaccine, that means prioritizing those folks for the vaccine.

So just to give an example, in Florida, for instance, Governor DeSantis actually has done this. He's prioritized nursing home residents where something like 40 percent of all deaths from COVID have happened. And by the end of January, that's only a few days, every single nursing home resident in a vast number of the assisted living facilities will have offered a vaccine in Florida. In California, we just barely have gotten started. My 80-year-old mom lives in Los Angeles. She still has not gotten vaccinated. She's really high risk. I'm not going to go visit her until she's vaccinated.

I think it's a choice. It's a policy choice to do this. We can protect the vulnerable. she's vaccinated right i think um uh it's a choice it's a policy choice to do this we can we can protect the vulnerable once we've done that once you've protected the vulnerable that at that point the lockdown harms are way worse than the disease than the disease itself they're just and and you know we can we can this is something we're going to be endlessly talking about uh about in cataloging the basically the civilizational suicide that we've undertaken through these lockdowns. But I think just to give some sense of this, what argument is there

if we have removed from the population by protecting them with the vaccine so that they're no longer at risk from infection and death from infection? What argument is there to keep the lockdowns in place? There really isn't a good one, I think. Well, you're obviously very immersed in this and in the medical community. So why are they doing it? I mean, what is it with the Jones for lockdowns and interminable masks and restaurant closures and business closures and school closures? Why? I think they've forgotten what public health is about. Public health is not just infection control. Public health is about promoting, in sort of a holistic sense, the health of the population. And health doesn't just mean I don't have COVID. Health means all kinds of things. And as you've emphasized, Megan, correctly, mental health,

emotional health, physical health in other ways, you know, cancer screening, good diet, good sleep, good, you know, so all these things are part of a healthy life that public health normally would think about. And, you know, there's trade- offs involved in that. I mean, sometimes, you know, you, you, you can't, you can't have absolutely everything. And so public health is, is about giving people the tools to manage those trade offs in their lives appropriately, trusting people to make decisions once you've given them good tools. What's happened is this is a monomania about infection control as if it were the only priority in public health. And that is an enormous mistake. Because what happens is then we let slip all these other things that are absolutely vital for human functioning and human flourishing.

And as if and as if this disease has a 100% death rate, you know, it's like that they're treating it really like it is the plague. To your point, I go to see a cardiologist every year because my dad died at age 45 of a heart attack. So I'm always very on top of that just to make sure I'm okay. And I asked him, how has the office been? Has it been busy? Has it been slow? He said, disturbingly slow. This is one of the top cardiologists in New York. Well, it's not because people's heart disease and heart concerns just went away over the past year. It's because they're not coming in, right? They're staying locked inside of their houses. And I said, have you had any problems, like serious problems arise as a result of that? And he said, yes.

He said one guy didn't come in for his annual appointment, wound up having chest pains. He told him get to the hospital immediately. The guy didn't want to go to the hospital because he was so worried about catching COVID at the hospital and he died. It's just one example, but it's an example of the way in which this is hurting people in other ways. I've heard those stories. What we're going to see is, just give another small data point, but it's going to be huge, is women with late stage breast cancer, that's going to sharply increase next year because a lot of women skipped their mammograms this year. I mean, we're going to start to see another data point.

How do you teach a six-year-old to read over Zoom? The answer is you don't. We're going to start to see illiteracy creep back up after we've made an enormous amount of progress against it. I mean, there's just a whole host of things that we care about that we've forgotten because we only look at COVID. And I think it's just a mistake. And on the schools, there's such a disparity between, like the schools in Florida are open.

So these are terms that parents actually might care about. So the ninth graders down there are getting a leg up on the ninth graders in Chicago, right? They're learning at a faster rate. They're learning a lot more. And when they get to that SAT, they're going to be better prepared. Like that's the stuff that normally drives parents crazy, but it's happening. And even the United States versus other countries, like you point out Sweden that have been open and providing information. And we know we're stuck on this remote learning, which is barely a step above nothing. We're going to be behind, like considerably behind.

As you point out, this could be generational at this point. Yeah. And as you pointed out, the inequality effects are just, I mean, I think for minority populations, minority students, it's been much worse than for others. It really is a dereliction of duty. So what about, so now they're unveiling the vaccines, right? The latest information I had was that about 41 million doses have been delivered to states. About 19 million people have received at least one dose. And of course, they need two doses. So, you know, if you assume 40 million doses are out

there, that means 20 million people should be getting dosed, fully dosed, fully vaccinated. So far, they say only 3.3 million have been fully vaccinated. About a million a day are getting the vaccine. By the way, that was the same under President Trump as it is right now. So at this rate, when is everyone who needs to get vaccinated going to be vaccinated? I guess that question is who needs to be vaccinated immediately, right? Because the question, if you're talking about the entire population, it'll take a year. And that's just the United States. I mean, worldwide, the United States is lucky.

We vaccinated more people than any other country on earth. So the question to me isn't how long until we vaccinate everybody. That's a mistake in thinking. The question is, how long till we vaccinate the people who are vulnerable? If we put our minds to it and make it policy to prioritize the vulnerable, then we should be able to be done in a month, in two months. I mean, different states will be more and less efficient at it. But I mean, two months. Aren't they doing that? No. So Florida, for instance, has done that. But California has not. I think California,

I think, was just in the middle of, I think, January 13th or 14th is when we first started vaccinating people over 65. My 80-year-old mom still is not vaccinated in LA. I don't, whereas Florida, I mean, I think I just saw one millionth person vaccinated in, or offered the first dose of vaccine among the elderly. I mean, I think it's a policy decision who to choose to vaccinate first. And states that have made vaccinating older people a priority have done that. I think West Virginia has done pretty well. I mean, there's a few states that have made that a priority and have done quite well at that.

And other states have sort of waffled at that. Well, here in New York, now that you mention it, we did the opposite. We said you couldn't get it if you were over like 65. It was a relatively low senior's age and vaccines were going to waste. And then our dumb ass governor, forgive me, but no love lost there, finally reversed the policy. I'll let you continue your thought. Yeah. I mean, I think there was this, I mean, in New York, it was like, they're trying to make the perfect, the enemy, the good. Like they were like you can't you can't give the vaccine unless they're on the 1a priority list uh but then like someone just hanging around that you know the vaccine is this this thing that has to be stored at minus 70 degrees you open it up you basically have to give to everybody you have to use up the vial immediately or else it goes to waste so you may as well give it to people that are if they're hanging around if you have but but like realistically

what you should be doing is you should be prioritizing the elderly. So go to your nursing homes. That's a really easy place to find a lot of elderly. Go to your assisted living facilities. Go to senior centers. In neighborhoods, try to find out where the multi-generational homes are,

where all of the people live. You know, public health officials actually have access to that kind of information. And call them up and say, look, we'll come to you and give you the vaccine. I mean, I think that those kinds of programs are certainly within the capacity of public health all across the country. And that's something we should be doing, I think. What do you make of, you know, now they're talking about the variants that there's suddenly, you know, when you weren't allowed to say China virus, but now you can say Brazil virus and South American virus, South Africa, like that. Now, now that Trump's gone, we're allowed to note where the virus, the new strains are coming from.

And what they're saying is that they're not sure, I guess, whether the vaccine has a total overlap with some of these new variants, like the one from Brazil. And what's your take on it? Like if you get this vaccination now, the one from Pfizer, the one from Moderna, do you have to worry? So I haven't seen the Brazil variant, but I've seen a sort of careful work done on the UK variant and the South African variant. And both the Moderna vaccine and the Pfizer vaccines, so they've done these tests on monkeys to see if the variant, the vaccine

actually protects, produces antibodies that can neutralize the variant. And for the UK variant, it seems like it's 100% neutralization. For the South African variant, there's slightly less neutralization, but enough to protect the monkeys against this variant. So I think it's actually very, very promising. And from what I understand, the Pfizer and Moderna are both looking at sort of booster shots. The idea is let's put an mRNA sequence that covers the variant. I think the variant is something to look at and think about, but at this point, I wouldn't worry

about it. I mean, I think the vaccine will protect against them, at least the ones we've seen thus far. And the biologists that look at this, I mean, they seem like this is something that they're thinking about, but that they're not deeply worried about as yet. Do you think at this point, if you get the vaccine, you know, both doses and possibly a booster, you'll ever have to get it again? It's hard to say, because we don't know how long lasting the immunity is from the vaccine. I think that it's likely that the vaccine, just like if you get infected, will induce relatively long lasting immunity, but there's no proof of that yet since the vaccine's only been around a couple of months. We know from lots of studies that natural infection induces very long lasting immunity, you know, year, two, three years. And even after antibodies fade, you still have some memory cells that protect you against severe infection. I think the long run of this disease, the very long run is it becomes like another coronavirus,

a common cold virus. You get it when you're young. It doesn't, it just causes mild, mild symptoms when you're young. You don't die from it. And then through life, you keep getting it, but it just causes a cold because you've built up immune memory around it. I think that's the long run of the disease. I don't think the long run is yearly vaccinations forever, although that may be the case for a few years, I think. Well, there's a lot of information going around on the web about the vaccines potentially being dangerous. I mean, everything from long term, it's going to come back to haunt you to it's secretly going to insert some sort of a chip that Bill Gates is going to be monitoring

you through. I mean, this is right. This is like if you spend a lot of time on the Internet, you're going to go down these dark rabbit holes. Can you respond to that? Do you have concerns about the vaccine, long-term, short-term? I'm assuming you don't think Bill Gates is part of a massive conspiracy, but what do you think? The technology itself is really an amazing technology in one sense. Basically, you can design a vaccine relatively quickly. The mRNA sequence that's put in the vaccine isn't the whole virus. It's just a snippet of the virus. And the mRNA actually get your body degrades it as soon as, as soon as it produces the protein more or less.

So I think it's a, it's a, it's a, and then the protein induces the immune response. So I think it's, it's a, it's not one of these, there's no chip involved. There are safety concerns with every vaccine. And that's actually, I think, being monitored very, very closely. You know, I think there are cases of people getting allergic reactions from the vaccine, the cases, things like that. For the most part, the severe adverse event rate has been pretty low.

I mean, it's on par with other vaccines. Are there going to be very, very long-term effects? I mean, again, the vaccine has been around for a couple of months. It's not possible to say that with certainty that there aren't. But I think for the older population, for whom COVID is really deadly, the vaccine is way, I'd rather take that uncertainty over the long term effects of the vaccine, which are probably very unlikely, versus the certainty that COVID for someone who's over 70 has a 5% death rate. I mean, I told my mom to take the vaccine, for instance. Right. Now, a couple of questions there. So I read that severe reactions to the

vaccine are very rare. 10 people out of more than 4 million had severe reactions. And they said out of those 10, I think 9 out of 10 all had serious allergic reactions to other vaccines before. So it's like, unfortunately, you may be a person, and you probably already know it, who has very negative reactions to vaccines, including anaphylaxis shock. Some of them had had on other vaccines. So just to put people's mind at ease on that, it does seem like that the most severe reactions come to people who might have reason to expect a severe reaction. And obviously plan accordingly and talk to your doctor about what to do there. But I wanted to ask you whether there is a,

do they know whether there's a long-term negative effect of having COVID? I mean, so there's a lot of interest about that in the literature. So there are some longer term outcomes from almost any respiratory disease in a small fraction of the population. So that, that happens with the flu, for instance, for a small fraction of the population that can get some severe outcomes. And that's true for COVID as well. There's this phenomenon that people talk about called long COVID, where people have sort of extended, for an extended period of time, fatigue and some other symptoms like this that make life difficult. You get this, for instance, with mono, right? Sometimes you get sort of extended. Now, how common that is, is actually not well established

in the literature. My sense is that it happens for some people, but not very commonly. But that's something that still, again, needs some further investigation. I'd say, again, it's a balance of risks. We have to face uncertainty, face the fact that a lot of these things are uncertain. And when I look at the balance of risk, what I see is for older people, COVID is relatively deadly. The vaccine may have some side effects, but it's unlikely to be a huge problem for most people. And the balance of the risk favors the vaccine. For younger people, the lockdown harms are devastating. And that's why we started with them. I think it's important to think about. And so the small probability of COVID harms,

you have to balance that against the certainty of these massive lockdown harms. And there, the balance says lift the lockdowns, right, to me. And so I think as far as the vaccines in younger people, I think the vaccine should be made available to younger people. They were tested in younger people, certainly works in younger people, but they shouldn't be prioritized for them. Kids, by the way, haven't been tested with the vaccine as yet. So they haven't run the test on the vaccine. I don't think it's right to vaccinate children yet with the vaccine that hasn't been tested on them. And if you've had COVID, you don't need the vaccine?

If you've had COVID, you certainly should not be prioritized for the vaccine because you're already immune. They actually did test people with previously had COVID with the vaccine and they found the vaccine didn't do anything for them. So I think, yeah, I think the answer is, yeah, if you previously had COVID, you almost, you probably don't need the vaccine. You may want it to feel safe, but you certainly shouldn't be prioritized for it. Yeah. My primary care physician in New York, who has a specialty in infectious disease, was saying, he thinks not only do you not need the vaccine if you have COVID, but you shouldn't get it because he said he's seen some severe, not severe, but some unfortunate

reactions to getting the vaccination after you've had it? It's a balance of risk, right? So if you have had COVID before, the benefit of the vaccine is almost zero. And there are some, you know, probabilities, some harm, right? Because you've there are, as we talked about, with a small probability, some side effects from the vaccine. And you think now, now, do not do not vaccinate your kids. I mean, let's say at the point when it's available, like if you could, I have three children that I'm not going to vaccinate them until, until the, until there's good safety, until, until they've actually been tested on kids. How do they do that? Who, who volunteers their kid to be the guinea pig for the COVID vaccine?

They're actually, they're running, they're running studies. So parents are doing this. I think for, I mean, for kids, it is really close because that's a really good question, good ethical question, because for kids, the COVID infection is not particularly deadly relative to other risks they face, including the flu, for instance. Flu, I think, is typically more deadly than COVID for kids. So I think it's a close question whether the kids should be tested really at all for COVID, for the COVID vaccine. This is a weird question, so forgive me, but sometimes I get sucked into this vortex when I see the death rates. And I understand we've lost over 400,000 people here in the United States due to COVID. I get it. And I understand there

may be an asterisk on that number too, because it's not necessarily the case that COVID caused each of those deaths. It's people died with COVID. But sometimes I wonder whether we've been sucked into this vortex that's a little disconnected from reality. You know, like we've done so much damage. Your term civil civilizational suicide, was really poignant. For a virus that the vast majority of Americans have a 99.95 chance of surviving. When you look back now, we're almost a year into this whole thing, and you look how the United States and the world has responded to this, how would you sum it up? I mean, I think we have had a vast overreaction to this in one sense. The lockdowns we thought would protect us haven't really protected us. And actually, the inequality effect is so, I've come to think of it as trickle-down epidemiology. We've used the lockdowns to protect the rich, whereas we essentially expose, like in California, for instance, it's the poor areas that have had

the high death rates from COVID. The lockdowns haven't protected people living in places where there's high poverty, minority populations, especially Hispanics have been hard hit. I think it's like 50% or over 50% of people who've had COVID deaths are Hispanic in California. The lockdowns have been an enormous and ineffective overreaction, not actually protecting the population from COVID. While at the same time, the collateral damage is absolutely devastating. It's an unfocused overreaction, how I characterize it, Megan. I think we should have focused on the population. We knew to be at risk, protected them, thought of creative ways to protect them from the beginning of the epidemic. And we knew who they were, older people, nursing homes. I mean,

New York, Pennsylvania, they sent old infected patients back to nursing homes. They did this in Quebec too. I mean, it's just shocking given what we knew even in March. We knew who was at risk. We should have designed policies to protect them. And for the rest of the population, the lockdown, we should have been thinking about the collateral damage from the very beginning. It's an unfocused overreaction. And it doesn't seem like we learned so good because here we are doing it again. More lockdowns, school closures. And honestly, can we just spend a minute on the masks?

Because more and more mask mandates, that's one of the first things we got from Joe Biden, mandatory masks on all federal property and transportation. And now they actually are talking about double or triple masks being something we should consider. I mean, honestly, there's going to be a revolt in the country if any sort of mandate comes down along those lines. But what do you make of masks and now the growing call for possibly double masks? I've looked at the evidence on double masks. I mean, it seems very weak to me. There are places where masks are useful. So if you're in a hospital, masks are really useful because there's high viral load potentially there. In places where it's crowded, masks can be useful.

But masks alone in a car on a federal highway by yourself, I don't understand what the public health reasoning is behind that. No, I feel sorry for those people. Yeah, it's just I don't. But I mean, if there's a mandate, like you could pull you over and say, look, you're not wearing a mask, just like you're not wearing a seatbelt. Even if you're alone in the car by yourself, I just I mean, I think if this is one of these things where there's this action bias in people, and this is something we can do, so we require you to do it, even if in places where it doesn't make so much sense. I'm not against masks.

I think they can be useful. I think one thing I will say about masks, I think sometimes people overestimate exactly how effective they are in protecting you. So an older person wears a mask, goes to a grocery store that's relatively crowded, feels safe there because they're wearing the mask. Well, they're not necessarily safe there. Instead, we should have policies that help deliver groceries to people that are in their 70s that live in the community for free or maybe. And this is actually something people that are listening can do just by themselves. If you know, for free or maybe, and this is actually something people that are listening can do just by themselves.

Like if you know an older person living alone or living with other people that don't have a lot of help, you can offer to buy groceries for them or deliver groceries for them, right? They may not have, they don't know how to use DoorDash, but they may have neighbors that can help.

At this rate, you know, given that they're not listening to you, Jay, and your, your colleagues who have been pushing for this focus protection, how long do you think we're going to be living like this with these at least partial lockdowns and school closures and masks, whether it's single, double, or triple? I mean, how long, because I know Fauci and Bill Gates are both saying lockdowns may have, may quote, have to continue through the fall of 2021 and even into the following year. I think by April, we will have vaccinated, even the slow states will have, like California, will have vaccinated nearly every elderly person. At that point, the death rate from COVID will come down very sharply. I think the demand for the lockdowns has to do with the death rate, the fear that comes from the idea that COVID is this deadly disease. So when COVID

death rates start to come down after the vaccinations have been widely disseminated among the older populations, I think that fear will start to get addressed and the demand for the lockdowns will collapse. I think the the demand for the lockdowns will collapse. I think the political support for the lockdowns has everything to do with that fear. And I'm optimistic, actually. I think by April, May, we will have vaccinated most people that are older. And I think no matter how hard the public health authorities push for it to control COVID down to zero, which is an impossible goal. People won't have it. So you don't think we have to wait until we have true herd immunity

to stop with the masks and the lockdowns? No, I think the key thing is protecting the vulnerable. I do think that people, it's hard to unring the bell. Once you panic the population about something, it's hard to completely dissipate the fear overnight. So I think people will continue to wear masks. Some people can continue to social distance. You'll start to see, you know, it's funny, like what you'll have as a secret handshake for people who aren't who aren't scared of the COVID once once the older people are vaccinated, the secret handshake will consist of a handshake. You'll just shake hands. It's so true.

Well, it's funny because, you know, you'll see people come over, you know, let's say somebody who's going to like fix your dishwasher and they've got their mask on and, you know, they're going to come in. This happened in my place. They're going to come into my apartment. They're going to walk into my kitchen by themselves. They're going to spend some time with my dishwasher and leave. I'm like, you don't have to wear your mask. We're not going to get anywhere near each other.

I'm certainly not wearing my mask in my home. But it is sort of like, you know, hey, you think that mask is necessary? Because I'm not going to, you know, like you sort of put the toe in the water. People have very different perceptions about the deadliness of the disease. Some much closer to the truth

where it's relatively not deadly for people who are under 70. And some, yeah, there's a USC survey that apparently people, like people in this survey of American population set, they believe that the death rate from disease is 17%. Oh, good gracious. Yeah. So you have this like situation where some person has that very, very misperception about this high death rate meets someone that has a sort of more accurate perception about how deadly disease is.

And you get a predictable response. The person who thinks the disease is incredibly deadly is shocked by the behavior of the person who thinks the disease is not that deadly. And when you meet someone new, there's always this dance about how deadly do you actually believe the disease is, right? And it's sort of an unspoken dance. And eventually you come to some agreement, you know, you both take the mask off or you both are making sure that you stay socially distanced, masked with, you know, three

masks. I think that will start to change. That'll take longer to get rid of. Well, I don't think anybody would object to somebody else wearing a mask because it makes them feel better or wanting to socially distance because it makes them feel better. It's the fact that these government officials telling us we must to be on the street or we must to walk into any store. And as soon as that can end, people are going to feel a lot better or we must wear it everywhere and we may not go into schools and so on. I hope that comes sooner rather than later. Last question. I think I, I'm not sure I asked you this, but I know you said you'd get, get your mom the vaccine, but when it becomes available to you, are you going to take it? Yeah, I'll take it,

but I don't want to wait my turn. I don't, I shouldn't, I'm 52. I shouldn't have it now. I should have it after, uh, after my mom and all the people older than me get it first. Exactly. Well, I know for a fact here in New York City with some of the hospitals, very rich people are offering a bunch of money to jump the line. It's so disgusting. People with money just gross me out sometimes. And if they make the right donation into the right fund, who knows whether they'll get it. But that's between them and their God, right? You're going to steal the vaccine from grandma? Good luck. You take it up with St. Peter when you get up there and have to argue your way in. I agree with you. Wait our turn. It's not immoral for somebody to take it before anyone older than me. It's just not right.

That's right. Listen, Jay, thank you so much for all the good work that you guys have been doing on this. Appreciate your voice of reason. Thank you, Megan. Thank you for having me on. Up next, we're going to be joined by former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, who's been making waves online now for 10 months. He's been pushing back on some of these COVID narratives that we've been fed from the mainstream media from the start. Some of the data, some of the facts that they've given us about the alleged number of deaths, and now some of the narratives about the vaccines and certainly the lockdowns. So I'm going to ask him about all of that, about masks, about the new push to double and triple mask, and see what Alex

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Alex Berenson. Alex, it's wonderful to have you here. It's been a lot of years since I had you on my show at Fox. And I don't even remember what you're talking about, but I remember, how is a New York Times reporter sounding anything other than hard left, which is where you were at the time? Yes. Well, I think we were talking about the John Wells novels, by the way, which, which, you know, I took a break from the times to write those. And now I'm sort of back into hardcore journalism. It's been so fun watching you on Twitter, because you're kind of, I think you might drive people crazy in the same way I feel like I sometimes do, which is because you

were at the times people, and because I would challenge Republicans on Fox, I'm going to challenge both people, but you know, I guess people found it extraordinary when I would go after Republicans. The liberals wrongly assumed that like we had an obligation to quote, be on their side, you know, like they're on our side and they need to stay on our side. And I, you know, I all along was like, I'm on the side of truth. And I think you're on the side of genuine facts and truth pursuit, and it drives people nuts. And you've been, you've been trying to sound the alarm on some of these quote facts that have been shoveled on us by the mainstream media on COVID from the beginning. So can we just start big picture? Like, when you look back on what's what you've reported over the past year versus what has been spoon fed to us by the mainstream media,

how would you describe it? Sure. I mean, the biggest, the biggest issue of all, and I mean, I guess it sort of makes me in the sense a small C conservative is this idea that a lot of what we can do can make much difference to this. Okay. And if you look back pre-COVID, pre-March 2020, there was a lot of sort of humility in the epidemiology community and the infectious disease community about the value of a lot of what they called non-pharmaceutical interventions. So that could be anything from a travel ban to a school closure, all the way up to locking down society. And when people looked, or to wearing masks, for example, when people looked

at the effect of all of these things, for the most part, they were unable to show much benefit. And that sort of dated all the way back to the 1918 flu epidemic. And so what happened was China appeared to show that a really hard lockdown, a lockdown harder than anything that Western societies have been able to accomplish, was able to eliminate the disease. And by the way, it's China. Everyone wonders about the data. It's not clear. But that certainly was the takeaway that a lot of people had in March 2020.

And all of a sudden, all this stuff that's never been proven to work and that cuts against the grain of Western society and individual rights and freedoms and making your own decisions, all this stuff got suddenly thrown into, not just thrown into the conversation, but it was, we're going to do all this. Okay. And the second thing way back then that we had way back, it's only a year ago, is there was a belief based on the early Chinese data that this illness was very, very dangerous. Okay. That maybe 3% of the people who got COVID were going to die from it, which, you know, 3%, on the one hand, it's, you know, it's one person in 30. So it isn't that many. On the other hand, it would mean 10 million Americans if the disease spread to everyone. So that's a lot of people.

So there was a belief, we must take extreme action here because this is so deadly. And those numbers turned out to be completely wrong. It is very clear after a year that what, that the, what they call the infection fatality rate, which is not the rate of people who get COVID and have symptoms and then ultimately die, but the rate of everyone who gets COVID, because a lot of people get COVID, especially if they're young and healthy and never have symptoms at all is much, much lower than 3%. That it is probably worldwide in the 0.1 to 0.2% range. Now, in a country like the US that has a lot of older people, it might be closer to 0.3%, but it's very low. But we have never really gone back and

adjusted our policies based on that knowledge. And one other, which is one of the things I know you have a lot of questions, but when you survey people and you ask them, what is your risk of dying of COVID and how many people in the United States have died from COVID people, math is hard. Okay. And you know what, we, we teach all this math that people don't really need in high school, like algebra or, you know, algebra is okay, but calculus trigonometry, we should be teaching people statistics because people don't have any idea what the difference between one in a thousand and one in 10 and one in a million. These all just sound like low risks, but there's a huge difference, obviously, between one in 10 and one in a million. But when you survey people and you

ask them, you know, how many Americans have died of COVID? You know, I saw a number a few months ago, 10, they said 10%. I mean, 10, that would be 30 million people. That's, that's far, far from the truth. And then you say to people, you ask people under 40, this just came out, what's your risk of dying from COVID? Your personal risk under 40, people say 12%. Okay. That's off by a factor of thousands. Okay. That would be one person in eight. And if you're young and healthy, it's probably more like one in two or three or 400,000. Okay. It's, it's almost, and when I say young, I mean under 40, not under 20. If you're under 20 and healthy, your risk is essentially too low to measure. So we have never adapted to the reality of the seriousness

of the disease. Not that the disease is not serious, but it is not societally destroying in any way. And at the same time, we've done all this stuff that before March of last year, people were sort of agreed didn't work. And we've just decided to do it. And guess what? It does not seem to work. Just as we thought a year ago in California, you have a hard lockdown for months, nothing matters. And you compare it to a state like Florida, it doesn't matter. Now, if you're New Zealand, and you're willing to essentially cut yourself off from the rest of the world indefinitely, and you're willing to go into lockdown whenever you see cases, and you're willing to go into lockdown whenever you

see cases, and you're willing to make this thing run your whole life, your whole country indefinitely, you have a chance possibly of keeping it out or keeping it under control. I say chance because we'll see next summer, which is winter in New Zealand, what happens. But they may be able to do it. But that comes back to how many people this actually kills and knowing that and knowing whether that trade-off makes sense. But none of this stuff is being talked about at all. And we're now almost a year in. And why, why do we think that is like, why? Because it seems impossible that they'd be so anxious to avoid data that is settling. That makes you feel a little better. That's right. Look, I think for a while, it was pretty clear that this was a very,

very useful way to bash Donald Trump. And he certainly didn't cover himself in glory in his response to this. If you think about what Trump's strengths are, they're basically sort of being blustery and sometimes taking chances. You know, when he killed Qasem Soleimani in Iran, and people say, oh, we're going to have a war with Iran. You know, guess what? We didn't have a war with Iran. We just got rid of a really bad guy.

You know, he did that. Those, his strengths are not the strengths that you would like to manage a pandemic. And so it's pretty clear that he, you know, was kind of the wrong guy for the job and the media saw this and they were able to bash him over and over again. And I mean, I think it's pretty clear he would have won the election if not for COVID. The economy would have been a lot stronger. And if you look at sort of the, you know, all the prediction models, you know, when the economy is strong, the incumbent usually wins. So that was sort of,

that was part of it. I also think there was a lot of genuine fear in the media. You know, the media is very New York centric and New York suffered quite a bit in March and April of last year. And we could talk about why that is. There's reasons for that, that, you know, that, that, that are sort of unrelated to the severity of the pandemic and sort of decisions that New York City and state made. But nonetheless, there was a lot of fear last year. And I think once you commit to being afraid of this, it's hard to pull yourself out of that ditch. And then from the public health point of view, once you commit to doing all this stuff,

it is hard to acknowledge that it hasn't worked. So what do you see? We're now at the absurd place of telling people to wear two masks. Why are we telling people that? Because one mask does nothing. It doesn't protect you. And it almost certainly, I'm not going to say certainly because there's a slight chance it might slightly reduce the risk of outbound transmission. But one cloth or surgical mask is basically useless. So now we're telling people, wear two of them. Right, right. Or more.

Or more. How about three? Why stop there? I literally, walking down the streets in New York like two weeks ago, followed a man in a full hazmat suit. Not even kidding. He was walking his dog in a full hazmat suit. I'm like, okay, so maybe he's immunocompromised and has found a way of having a boy in the plastic bubble type existence in this city. I don't know. But people here are scared. And I do think the media is part of the problem. They look at any media that didn't go full scare tactic as having been irresponsible. But we knew early on when this broke Europe. And then it was like, actually, no, he's not. And, you know, he's it was the very

first time he tried to have a presser on this. And I think it was March. And I sent out a tweet saying it's really frustrating not knowing who to trust. I don't trust the media on this because they have an obvious stake in trying to hurt Trump. And also, they just love anything that panics people. Outrages or panics. They love it. I can speak from the inside on this and I don't trust him either because for the same reasons he sees his political fortunes at risk and has every incentive to downplay it. Now we know he was intentionally downplaying it. And, and you should have seen Alex, the sanctimonious responses I got from, you know, this sort of mainstream journalist, like, how could you say that? You know, so someone like you, you know, from the media, you should know, you know, to trust the media with

something this important. And then I got other people like, oh, sweetheart, just check out the WHO or the CDC. You can trust them. And as you know better than anybody, no, you cannot. No, we were given totally incongruous information from both of those bodies when it comes to things like masks and our own surge in general, when it comes to things like masks versus what they were saying just two months later. You know, it's been one of the huge frustrations of this pandemic. You don't know who to trust. So here's what I'd say. The, you, the, the recommendations are very driven by politics. You have to be able to trust the data. Okay. If we can't, if we can't trust the

data that's coming out of a place like the WHO or, or, or the CDC or the States, then we're really in a bad place. Okay. Then we're sort of in a post-truth world and that's very dangerous. So, so am I, you know, like when I, when I point to stuff, you know, I'm not saying like, and you know, and this is why people, the left hates me on Twitter and they keep begging Twitter to ban me and Twitter will not ban me because they know that I source everything and I source it to real sources. Right. So if I say, here's what's happening in the state of, you know, Wisconsin or here, you know, or here's some coroner's reports, I give you the links, okay? Or here's a paper that was published out of China or Switzerland

or wherever, I link it to, I link it for you, or I screenshot it and link it so you can see it yourself. And I mean, we have to, we have to be able to trust something or we're in a really bad place. But so there's the data and then there's the recommendations and the public policy measures and the political games that are being played. And one of the things that I think that I'm such an irritant to people is because so often the data is fairly obvious. Okay. It's, it's like, you know, right now, um, or, or, you know, we talk, let's talk masks is a good example. So, so there's all this science, there are all these papers that were written pre 2020 about how masks don't really do anything. And then you look at places that have had mask mandates for a long time and what's happened to the illness or, you know, to the, to the number of positive tests and number of cases. And you can see they've skyrocketed. And so once you like,

once you show people that visually, um, you know, a light just goes off and that's not me, you know, I'm not making that up. I'm not saying, Oh, you know, mask, give you a, you know, mask, Bill Gates wants you to wear a mask so he can, you know, get 5G into your brain. No, it's like, here's the data. The mask mandate happened on this date. And three months later, cases were 50 times as high as they were. Okay, but let me ask you this, because they'll say, okay, but there are studies. I was reading this in the Times. They studied some Beijing households and said when everyone wore masks before an infected person in the house showed symptoms,

the risk of transmission was cut by 79 percent. We'll get things like that. And then you you see what you said, like all the major cities with the mask mandates, the coronavirus spikes. And you say, hey, the masks don't seem to be really doing much. And the response you'll get is things like, oh, look at the Beijing studies. And then the second point will be it would have been much worse if they didn't have the masks don't seem to be really doing much. And the response you'll get is things like, oh, look at the Beijing studies. And then the second point will be, it would have been much worse if they didn't have the masks. Yeah, how much worse could it be?

And countries that don't have mask mandates, it's not worse. And so the people who are desperate, I mean, this has really sort of fractured sort of fractured my, um, my faith in the public health establishment in a very serious way, unfortunately, because people are so desperate to find points that support the, you know, preconceived notion about whether it's masks or lockdowns or school closures, that they will rely on these really lousy observational studies. And the problem, the, so the, the kind of study you want, and there was one of these studies done last year, is you give two sets of people, you split them in half.

You take a group of people, say, for example, because this is a real example, 6,000 people in Denmark, and you give half of them masks, surgical grade masks, not N95s, but pretty good masks. You tell half of them to wear masks, and half of them just go about your business. And most people were not wearing masks back at this time. And this was last spring. And you see how many people get COVID. And it turned out that the mask wearing group had no fewer cases. I mean, they had slightly fewer, but it was not a statistically significant number of cases than the people who did not wear masks. And so that's a good study. OK, that tells you that mask wearing appears to provide no benefit to the wearer.

And, you know, that and by the way, that study was completed in June. It was, you know, the outcomes were sort of tallied up by July. It was written by early August. And then the people who wrote it couldn't get it published in a major journal for almost four months. And that's clearly because it said something that people found, you know, that the scientific establishment didn't want to hear. Finally, it was published. And guess what? It got one day of coverage. And it's been what you and I call in the trade memory hole. You know, it's as if this never happened.

And meanwhile, these crummy observational studies keep getting, you know, from two hairdressers back in Kansas in June get talked about as if they're the gospel. Can I just say, so this what's disturbing here, just to tie it all together, is we're seeing this in so many different places. It's not just with respect to COVID. Same thing we had over the summer when we had the Black Lives Matter protests and the narratives going around about all cops being racist and, you know, on the hunt to kill innocent black men. People would cite studies that had been done prior to the tumult, you know, in more calm, objective times, proving that you do not have a greater risk of being shot by a police officer if you're black in fact you have a greater risk of being

shot by a police officer if you're white and when some of that data was brought up by people like heather mcdonald in the wall street journal there was such outrage people went back to the original people who had done the study and said you got to to revoke this. And they started to, we started to see legitimate scientific studies that have been done in calmer times, get taken down, walked back because of the public pressure. Abigail Schreier has talked about this when it comes to the, the, the craze of trans girls, you know, suddenly there had never historically been real trans girls. And now suddenly they break out in clusters in high schools right around the time girls get acne or girls gain weight or girls start to feel socially unacceptable. And studies that look at that get shamed, get have to go through another review,

have to get an asterisk put on them like this is dangerous. What's happening right now when it comes to woke ism and sort of this shoving down your throat, whatever the mainstream narrative is, is dangerous. And with respect to covid, and we started off the show by talking about how these narratives, these false narratives are leading to real deaths now. And I'm not saying COVID hasn't killed people. Obviously it has, but, but the overreaction to, to the actual problem is leading to unnecessary deaths, including amongst our youngest and brightest and sweetest, you know, a little nine-year-old boy in Las Vegas, Nevada, killing himself because of the isolation out there that was not necessary. Yeah, I mean, that's absolutely true. Now, you know, we do not,

we count COVID deaths obsessively, okay? And we certainly over-count them. We can argue about how much, but there's no question there's over-counting going on based on the rules that the WHO and the CDC created for counting deaths, which mean basically that if you have a positive test and you die, you know, in some states up to two months later, you're going to be counted as a COVID death. We are overcounting COVID deaths, but let's be clear, there are plenty of COVID deaths, but we do not count, okay, in anything like real time overdose deaths. And the United States has a terrible overdose crisis, and which predates COVID, let's be clear, which, by the way, is another, you know, this is sort of another the geniuses in the in the medical establishment decided 25 years ago, that we should be treating pain much more aggressively. And, you know, this sweet little company called Purdue Pharma came along. And, you know, ever since then, you know, overdoses have

been out of control in this country. They've gotten worse year after year after year. We can tell you this is another, this is again a story for another day. But, you know, that's to me another example of where a small C conservatism in sort of medical care would have been a very smart move instead of being much so aggressive. But the reason I say this is last year in 2019, there were about 70,000 overdose deaths in the United States, which is a horrific number. We don't know how many there were in 2020. CNN has that cute little thing where every day they tell you, or every minute they tell you exactly how many COVID cases and deaths there have been. They don't tell you that for overdoses.

But based on the early data that I have seen from, because some jurisdictions have now given you some clue of what 2020 looks like, Cook County, which is Chicago, Maricopa County, which is Phoenix, big counties. It looks like overdose deaths are going to be up 30 to 60% in 2020 compared to 2019. Now, at the high end of that, that would be 40,000 more people dying of overdoses. And those are deaths of despair. Those are lockdown deaths. Those are people who've been laid off, who are bored, who are stuck at home, who are getting their stimulus check and don't have anything to spend it on and can't go out and can't go to music. They can't go to a bar

or a live show. They're playing video games and they're shooting up. Or they're using fentanyl and they've had a problem in the past and they've gone to a 12-step meeting and those meetings are virtual now and virtual doesn't help them and they're using again and they are dying. And those deaths are lockdown deaths and we should be ashamed. Yeah, we should be ashamed. Can I ask you about the numbers? There's 425,000 deaths attributed to COVID in the United States, something like 2 million worldwide. So do you think, I realize, I know, I know that if you have COVID, then you die. Even if you die of something else, you could have been a cancer patient who had to go to the hospital because things were going downhill. And then you caught COVID and then you died and they'd say you died of COVID, you'd be counted. So do you have any way of knowing what the real number is likely to be? So there's a lot of guesswork in this. So here's the thing. If you have a death of,

let's say pneumonia, a respiratory failure that know follows covid that's that's probably a covid death okay i mean and there's a lot of those those are about half of the deaths okay everything else maybe a little less than half so i'm talking about pneumonia uh you know or or or other lung infections that follow code if so so that's one basket and then on the complete other side there's this sort of classic and you can you can find cases of this this is not rare uh the gunshot wound and the person tested positive for covid a week before and that's listed as a covid death okay that's clearly those deaths should not be listed as covid okay so, and then, then in the middle, there's a spectrum. Okay. And the spectrum is everything from somebody with severe dementia, who, who gets COVID and, you know,

and dies a day later. You know, did that person die with COVID? Did they die from COVID? Were they, were they going to die? Were they going to die anyway that day, if they were going to die two weeks later and they were 98 years old? Is that properly counted as a COVID death? I don't know, but there's a lot of those, okay? Based on the number of elderly people in nursing homes who have died of COVID, we know there's a lot of those. Based on the CDC's reports on dementia and Alzheimer's listed on the death certificate

along with COVID, there's a lot of those. That might be, at this point, that's probably, I think, 50,000 to 75,000 deaths fall into that category. And then there's deaths that are a little bit closer to what you would call, quote, unquote, real COVID death. Somebody who might be overweight and unwell, but they're not a death's door. And then they get COVID, and wind up, you know, on a ventilator and they die. And those, I mean, I think you should, you should probably classify those deaths as being from COVID, but, but, you know, in terms of there's something known as quality adjusted life years, those people generally don't have that long to live. But, you know, those are COVID

deaths. So until somebody at some point does a really good death certificate review of, you know, of 1,000 or 5,000 deaths that are classified as COVID, we aren't going to be able to get, you know, granularity here. But I would say that it's probably clear that at least half of deaths are real COVID deaths. And then the other half are with COVID or completely misclassified. But some of those with COVID deaths might have been not somebody who was going to die the next day, but it was going to die in months. And so I think there's essentially a medical argument to be made about how it's overstated, it's not slightly overstated. It's substantially overstated. Now, some people like to say, oh, only 6% of people who died with COVID died with COVID. That's clearly wrong too. And let me just throw one more thing out because this gets complicated, but I want to circle back to excess deaths. So there's this notion that the

United States has had 400,000 COVID deaths, and we've also had 400,000 excess deaths. There's two problems. And so that means that all the COVID deaths are real deaths. There's two problems with that. The first is that the CDC, probably for reasons that are not clear, underset last year's baseline death rate. Now, that sounds sort of technical, but what it means is they said, oh, we expect about 2.85 million people to die last year. Really, if you look at the trends from

the previous years, the number you should have expected was closer to 3 million. Okay, so that's actually a pretty big difference because it means that instead of having 400,000 excess deaths last year, maybe we had 250 or 300,000, which is a lower than the number of reported COVID deaths, which goes back to what I'm saying, some COVID deaths would have occurred anyway. The second problem is that some of those deaths are going to be overdose deaths, right? If we've had 25 or 30,000 extra overdose deaths, plus extra homicide, plus extra people who didn't get cancer treatment last spring and died of cancer, some of those are going to contribute to the excess death numbers too. And I'm sorry,

I don't mean to be confusing about this. I don't mean to sort of walk people down this rat hole, but it's really important to understand that the numbers you're seeing are essentially, I'm not going to say they're made up. There's a reality to them, but there's a lot of guesstimation happening inside them. In one minute, I'm going to ask Alex the question that may not be asked, and that is the terrible comparison of COVID to the flu. How does it actually stack up, right? I mean, you're not going to tell us here on the show that we can't talk about this stuff. That's what they've been doing for far too long. So we're going to talk about it and get some data. So stay tuned for that. But before we get to that, I got a crash course into home title theft recently, and you

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free days of protection that's code radio at home title lock dot com check it out let me ask you the scary question the question you're not allowed to ask the Voldemort question. And that is the comparison to the flu death rate. Because when I look at the World Health Organization is saying over 100 million people worldwide have had COVID, whether they know it or not. And 2 million plus people have died, you know, with covid from covid. I don't know what those numbers. I think they have the same problems that our four hundred thousand do. So that would not that would be a relatively low death rate. And I think the flu death rate would be higher.

But you're not allowed to say that, Alex. So I don't know. You tell me because you start comparing it to the flu and people lose their minds. So, so that, that's, that's not correct. Um, if I, if I could be so blunt, um, no, no, I'm looking for information, not giving it. So, so here there's two problems with that. Um, the first is a lot more people have gotten COVID than have had positive tests for COVID. And we don't know how many, but this was back in September, Mike Ryan of the WHO was a senior guy at the WHO. I remember this. I learned this from your Twitter feed. Keep going. Yep. He said 750 million people at the time had had COVID by their estimate. He said one per 10%

of the world's population. That would mean that the death rate again, is in this one per thousand, maybe two per thousand. Here's the thing. And that number, the WHO has never gone back to that. We know, though, that many, many, many people get COVID and recover from it and are, actually, in cases where mass testing was done, like on an aircraft carrier, for example, or in some cases like a dormitory filled with, where homeless people live, or a dormitory filled with people who are working at a meatpacking plant, something like that, you see asymptomatic rates as high as 90%. So, and when you do these, what are called antibody tests, which we seem to have stopped doing for reasons that are not clear to me, you saw much higher rates of antibody testing than positives with antibodies, meaning people had recovered from this. It was called PCR testing, meaning people are actively infected or quasi actively infected. So it looks like, I mean,

at this point, if 750 million people were infected back in September, and we've now had, you know, kind of a big second wave, well over a billion people have now been infected. So we don't know how many though, but what we know is that 100 million number is low. Okay, so two divided into 100, 2 million divided into a hundred million would be a death rate of 2%. That is not the death rate. The death rate is much lower than that. We don't know exactly what it is, but we know it's much lower than that. But I will say one other thing. The flu death rate is even lower. The flu death rate is usually quoted at one in 1,000 or even sometimes one in 2,000. So COVID is not that dangerous on a population-wide basis. The flu is even less dangerous. But I will throw one more

thing at it. COVID is dangerous to the very elderly and very sick. All the excess death effectively occurs in those populations. When the flu can be dangerous to kids, it is sometimes dangerous to middle-aged people. And then again, it's dangerous to the elderly. So the flu actually is dangerous to people, not just at the end of their lives, but beginning their lives. And so we do have reason to be wary of the flu. I think that's an excellent point. And I've you know, I've been frustrated because I'm not very good at math, as you can tell, but I, when I actually sit down and take a hard look at it, because I saw that thing and I went and I watched the soundbite myself, um, of that guy from the WHO saying 10% of the world's population. And, um, I started to do the math and thought,

if you just, if you believe him, if you just believe him, then the death rate would be lower than the flu. And then and then I learned, you know, you can't say that. It's it's one of those. Well, you just can't say that. You can't. Screw you. Irresponsible. Nothing that says the flu is more deadly than covid will be allowed. I didn't tweet it, but I just saw the blowback to everybody who had asked that question. I thought, this is crazy. Why? Why can't we take an honest look? That information is from the WHO, who again, the mainstream journalist told me, oh, sweetheart, you can trust. And your point about the young children is well made and

well taken because I'll tell you back to my own experience here in New York, we have a great pediatrician, a great pediatrician. And if I get the flu or if Doug, my husband has gotten the flu, they, they're very aggressive about preventing it in my kids. Like they want the kids to be on Tamiflu before they get it. Like they actually worry about the flu and children. It's not like a common cold. It really, it can potentially be deadly in a way that you do need to be concerned. Yes. And, and that, and by the way, that is not true of COVID. I mean, when you either, I know that some people under the age of 18 have died of COVID, but, you know, first of all, when you look at the individual details of the cases, they're often

very strange. And when they're not, when they're not strange, it's people, for example, the British, the British paper came out a few months ago, about six people under 18 in Britain who died and they were profoundly ill. I mean, I think two had late stage cancer. You know, three were neonates who, you know, who had really severe birth defects. And that's, you know, that's who the that's who COVID kills in, you know, in children. Right. And nobody ever looks that stuff up. So let's talk about let's spend a minute before we move on to vaccines. I do want to ask you about them. Can I just ask you something I've been dying to ask you? Do you wear a mask? And how do you feel about wearing a mask? Well, I have to wear a mask if I want to, you know, go go to, you know, go shopping, basically, if I want to go to Walmart or whatever, you know, I got to wear a mask. So I wear a mask if I want to, you know, go, go to, you know, go shopping basically, if I want to go to Walmart or whatever, you know, I got to wear a mask. So I wear a mask. I was on a plane last month. I wore a mask. I mean, I'm not going to fight with people about the mask.

I will, I will wear it below my nose as a sort of quiet protest or, or, you know, on the, on the plane if they'll let me get away with not wearing it because I'm eating and drinking, I'll find ways to kind of eat and drink the whole flight. But you know, if somebody says you got to put the mask on, you got to put the mask on. It's, it is not worth, it is not worth upsetting people or certainly getting into a fight about it. I will say this, you know, the mask, people, even in Florida, which where, where I was, you know, a few weeks ago, where you don't have to wear masks statewide, the mask has become this talisman of it protects me. And so so people at least at least kind of, you know, like,

like, I don't want to, I don't want to say, you know, rich white people, but like, people who people who are scared, like, they want you to wear your your mask and, you know, in other demographics, people where people have maybe like a little bit more, um, uh, you know, they have a, they have a slightly less crazy attitude about risk. Uh, and they're slightly, you know, they're slightly more fatalistic maybe, or they have other problems. They have other things to worry about. Exactly.

That's what I was going to say. They don't, they don't, They don't worry so much about it. But you get in an elevator in Florida and the mask is down and people are like, oh my God, he's going to kill me. And so, you know, you can choose to fight the fight and just annoy people or not. And generally, it's not worth annoying people. So I wear the mask, but the mask is useless. I mean, especially the way I wear it. Let's be honest.

I agree with you. This has been a total overreaction. And they're just so obsessive about it. Here in New York City, the rule outside has been the mask or six feet, right? So you don't actually have to have it on. You could be six feet away from the people on the sidewalk. And as long as you do your, you know, your OJ Simpson jumping around the, the, uh, the airport carousel things, um, you're fine, but man, they look at you like you are running around like hacking, spewing virus on everyone. You're totally fine. And you're 12 feet away.

I will say this. I won't wear it outside. I mean, like I just won't. And you know, if you're walking by me on the sidewalk in Midtown, like too bad there's that's, that's my limit. Yeah. And you know, here in New York, they'll, they'll yell at you. Where's your mask? And it's always somebody who's got a vote logo on their mask. It's some 25 year old wearing an N95. And it's like, please stop. You're fine. Okay. Let's talk about the vaccines. How do you feel about them? Okay. So this is bad growth now because, because I don't want to fight about the vaccines. Just like I didn't want to fight about the masks. Okay. Fighting about the mask. People talk about you like you're a crazy person. Unfortunately, the data is what it is. And we have a problem right now with these vaccines.

And let's be clear, there's different kinds of vaccines. I'm talking about the two approved vaccines in the United States right now, which are called mRNA vaccines, which is a technology that had never been used for an approved pharmaceutical product before this. Okay. And basically didn't exist about 10 years ago. I mean, there was, you know, it did certainly, there were no, there were no products being developed at that time and didn't exist as an approved product until December when the, and still technically these vaccines have not been approved fully there. The FDA did something called an emergency use authorization for it. Okay. Here's what's good about the

vaccines. Here's what we know from the clinical trials. They appear, I'm not even going to say they appear, they reduce the level of moderately symptomatic or mildly symptomatic infections in people. Okay. We know that. We know that. We've looked at the data and many more people who got the placebo, which is a saline solution, you didn't get the real vaccine, then who got the vaccine became infected with SARS-CoV-2. Okay. That's A. And had a symptom. I mean, the symptom could be a mild cough, but had some symptom. That's A. B, we know that the vaccines

cause people to produce antibodies to the spike protein on SARS-CoV-2. That's good. That's what your body does after you get infected. So we want that. All right. The third thing we know from the clinical trials is that the vaccines produce serious or severe side effects in a lot of people who get them. Okay. Usually transient, but that could be a fever of 102.

It could be a fever of 104. It could be really serious fatigue. It could be nausea. It could be diarrhea. A lot of people could be a big swelling of the lymph node. A lot of people who get these vaccines have severe short-term side effects, okay, especially after the second dose and especially after the Moderna vaccine. So, there are two companies making those vaccines. The Moderna vaccine seems to have more side effects. That's what we know. Here's what we don't know. We don't know if the vaccines reduce serious disease. Now, you can say the Moderna vaccine seemed to reduce serious disease, but the way serious disease was defined actually wasn't that serious. We don't know if they reduce hospitalizations meaningfully. We

don't know if they reduce ICU visits. We don't know if they reduce deaths in COVID because there were essentially no deaths in COVID. There was one death in the placebo arm and no deaths in the vaccine arm in about 70,000 people who got these vaccines or placebo. We don't know if they reduce overall deaths. We don't know if they increase overall deaths. We don't know if they increase overall deaths. We don't know if they might cause the coronavirus to mutate in a way that becomes more dangerous, which is a real risk. We don't know if there are long-term side effects. There probably aren't based on the data that we have, but we don't know that right now because we didn't run the studies for very long.

We don't know how well they protect against new variants. There's some suggestion that there's a variant that's coming out of South Africa that the vaccine doesn't protect that well against, which is why Moderna is already talking about a booster. We don't know if a booster shot or, you know, third and fourth shots next year might cause even worse side effects. And there's one more thing we don't know. And this comes out of Israel right now. Israel has vaccinated more of its population than anywhere else in the world. The vaccination started on December 19th. So that's about six weeks ago now. People have been waiting, and now 60% of people over the age of 70 in Israel have now had both shots. This is the Pfizer vaccine, and 90% of people in that

age range have had at least one shot. People have been waiting now for weeks for serious cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in Israel, and overall cases to go down. They have not gone down. Israel has one of the worst epidemics in the world right now in terms of the number of positive tests it has. And it's had more deaths in the last week than in any previous week in the last year. And its serious cases are going up. We don't know why this is. It could be just that the vaccines do work and they haven't worked yet, although that case gets harder to make with every day that goes by. It's still possible. It could be that it happens that the ultra-Orthodox population in Israel has not been properly vaccinated,

even though everybody else has, and some of the Arab communities haven't been vaccinated, and that's where people are still getting sick. That case is also harder to make now because so much of the rest of the population has been vaccinated. So the cases would have to be going way up in that remainder. It is also possible that the vaccines simply don't work at all in the people who they need to work in. In other words, maybe the vaccine causes your immune system or my immune system to generate antibodies. But unfortunately, in my 76-year-old

mother, it doesn't help her because her immune system isn't great and she's the one who COVID can really target. I'm not saying that's true. I'm saying we don't have evidence at this point from anywhere to rule that out because we didn't test this enough in people in that age range to know. We should have focused our testing on people 75 and over, 80 and over, 85 and over in nursing homes. We didn't do that. The companies didn't do it and the regulators didn't make them. And that is a giant, giant flaw that probably to my mind should have been corrected before these vaccines were allowed to be sold. Okay. And the other possibilities are worse. The other possibilities are that the vaccine is either

driving some kind of mutation that we don't understand for reasons we don't understand yet. I'm not saying that's happening. I'm just saying it is a possibility or that the vaccine is producing what's known as antibody dependent enhancement, which is a real risk from vaccines, although we don't know what's happening in this case either. And that would mean that people, some people are getting sicker post-vaccination than they would have otherwise. I'm not saying we know. What I'm saying is the data coming out of Israel should scare people. And based on the fact that the clinical trial data doesn't support anything except evidence that this reduces mild or moderate disease and that it does produce spike antibodies to the spike protein,

we don't know what we should right now. And that bothers me a lot. Wow. Well, I mean, I'm concerned by all of that. I don't like what I heard. I much prefer 90% effective, 95% effective, and we have a cure. But you know, I will say all along, I've sort of gone with my own doctor who I trust, right? Like that's what I did with my kids and the vaccines too. And in their case, and in my case, they both said, get it when it's available, get it. There's no reason to believe based on the way the vaccine works, that there's any long-term harm, maybe Maybe maybe some symptoms that when you get it, but they for the most part have been mild. And you know that there there might be a question about long term effects of COVID that we haven't yet seen either. You know, so there's risks on both sides, like getting COVID. How does that affect you 20 years down the line? We don't know yet. You know, I don't know. I think I like hearing alternate viewpoints because I do think you raise some good points and the data are the data.

Like people should follow what's happening in Israel and make up their own minds. Right. It's like shutting down people from access to data that doesn't fit one narrative is not the answer here. Yes. And let me say one last thing about the vaccines, because I'm not an anti-vaxxer. OK, I was vaccinated as a kid. My children have been vaccinated against all the answer here. Yes. And let me say one last thing about the vaccines, because I'm not an anti-vaxxer, okay? I was vaccinated as a kid.

My children have been vaccinated against all the standard stuff. It is possible in three weeks or a month, the Israeli data will look completely different, okay? It is possible, but it hasn't happened yet. And now we're six weeks out. I would also say if in three weeks or a month, the Israeli data doesn't look different,

we should all very, very seriously be talking about it because that would be really bad. You have an invitation to come back if that happens. Yes. And I hope the data gets better. We should all hope the data gets better from Israel. The other thing I'll say is there are going to be more vaccines approved that use a different technology, okay, that use various different technologies. And those vaccines may have a better side effect profile. They may be less dangerous to the people for who, whatever reason, seem to have bad side effects about the mRNA vaccines. I will say at this point, I am not taking the mRNA vaccine. I will not take

either the Pfizer or the Moderna vaccine. My mother asked me if she should get it. And I said, look, given your risks, I still think the risk benefit ratio is in favor of getting it. She did get it. You know, frankly, that was a few days ago. Now that there's even more bad data out of Israel, I'm a little bit concerned. But you know what? She got it. No side effects, it seems, so good for her. And I certainly would not let my kids get these vaccines. Maybe different vaccines based on different technology. But given the risks to them of COVID, which are essentially zero, I'm not sure what the upside for them getting these vaccines would be. And that's a personal decision. That's what our doctor said too. That's right. I mean, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

Oh, did he? That's, you know, I think those of us who were- Yeah, he said not for the kids. He said it hasn't been tested on kids. And kids have basically zero risk, next to zero risk of COVID. So why would you- That's right. One last thing.

These are personal decisions, right? These are decisions that you should be allowed to make after talking to your doctor, after doing your own research. I think given the novel technology here, I think it's totally reasonable. And I don't think that's true necessarily about, let's say, the measles vaccine, vaccines that have been around for generations. This is different for kids. And if parents aren't comfortable letting their kids be vaccinated, they should not have to. And that should not be a condition of them returning to school.

It is not right. I agree. And by the way, schools need to open up and so does the country. I know you've been advocating that right from the get go. And I mean, you've been proven right about that. You really have. Like what we've done. And Jay, Dr. Bhattacharya was was calling it civilizational suicide that we've been trying to commit. And we just won't let up. You know, we won't turn off the gas, even though we can see ourselves struggling to breathe. And it's got worse.

Biden was elected. Right. I mean, he's he's basically on the side of the teachers unions. Totally, totally. Totally. Yeah, it's because those are his donors. You know, I mean, he came in with a little swagger saying, we've got to open up the schools. I mean, at some point he must have been looking at real data.

And then, you know, those are his big donors. And before you knew it, they were saying, we don't want to go back. And to go back and he was like oh yeah you know we really need to make it safe first it's like how much more do we we spent billions of dollars tens of billions of dollars over a hundred trying to make them safe ventilation systems prioritization in the vaccine line um you know cleansing closed down in the middle of the week for extra cleansing hybrid models. You don't even have to be there full time. You can do half remote half. No, I don't feel safe. And here in New York City with the people showing up with the little coffins, Alex,

the teachers with a little coffins before they had to start to teach the children at schools where there's been zero proof there's any transmission at all. Yep. It's gross. It's so gross. Yeah, the schools really infuriate me. All right. Well, listen, I appreciate all the great reporting on it.

I feel like you're brave. One of my personal goals has been to get you to follow me on Twitter. I don't know why you don't. It feels like a personal slight. Okay. While I have you here, I really need you to do that so that we can DM. Because sometimes I have questions that I want to send out to you and I have no way of getting them. Are you going to slide into my DMs now?

Well, maybe. I think I probably have your phone number now. So I'm just going to bother you that way. I'm kidding. Because if you remember that, I mean, I think you saw that slate thing. I'll never forget that. That was a great moment. that's a great moment um yeah what was that they were calling me hot or i can't remember what yeah so i think i said something to you like any red-blooded american male would

be glad to be on with you or something like that which which i'll stand by that comment um but uh but and then slate you know slate used that as evidence that you were the Fox on Fox. Well, listen, I'm definitely not one of those women who finds it sexist to be told that she's attractive. So bring it. Well, you're you're now followed on Twitter. So we can. So we can talk over Twitter. Thank you, sir. Our thanks to Dr. J Bhattacharya and Alex Berenson today. I want to tell you that this hour was brought to you in part by The Zebra. Find out how much money you can save on car or home insurance by visiting thezebra.com slash Kelly now. And don't forget before I lose you to go subscribe to the show because we have an extraordinary, extraordinary interview coming up for you on Monday.

And I'll tell you the story quickly. It's a woman named Lindsey Graham, not the Lindsey Graham, the senator, but a woman from Oregon. And we booked her to talk about her lockdown rebellion. She she engaged in what she's called an act of civil disobedience against the lockdowns in Oregon. And the governor unleashed a whole lot of retribution on her. Well, we wanted to talk to her about it as part of our COVID show, but it spun into something extraordinary because it turns out Lindsay was at the Capitol Hill protest that turned into a riot, though she didn't participate in that, she says, on January 6th.

And if you want to see a window into how somebody loses their faith in government, in media, and as that same faith rises in one man, Donald Trump, to the point where she really believed that she was in the midst of what she called a holy war that day, tune in on Monday. I promise you, you'll find this fascinating. In the meantime, have a great weekend. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures. you