CLAY: We have got bans on African travel, which we were all told was wildly racist when Donald Trump did them. But because of the new variant coming out of South Africa it now is totally acceptable since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are doing it. Florida’s data has some positives: All-time low in hospitalizations from covid going all the way back to April of 2020.
No mask mandate, no vaccine mandate in Governor Ron DeSantis’ free state of Florida. We will discuss that. We are going to be joined by Alex Berenson in the third hour of this program to discuss the latest on covid data. Of course, Alex has been banned by many social media platforms, but he can talk directly to all of us through this program, which is a voice of light amid the darkness. Buck Sexton, how was your Thanksgiving?
BUCK: It was excellent, although there was certainly some discussion around the Thanksgiving leftovers tables over the weekend — ’cause we had food for days and I was with family — about what happened now, Clay, ’cause you see you bring news of what it feels like to have relative covid freedom as a person who lives free. Still when you get in an Uber; you go to the airport…
I’m here in New York City. It’s panic central, as you know. There are masks on people outside all over the place, all over again, even though we were told… We’ve already been through this. In the springtime, you’ll remember, there were stories, “You probably don’t really need masks outside unless you’re really close to anybody.” People are freaked out.
Biden is speaking right now as we talk to everybody across the country about these travel restrictions that you’re mentioning, notably on South Africa. It’s already in a whole bunch of places, this Omicron variant, and let’s take our moment because everybody has been making the same joke here. It was supposed to be — or it would have been or may have been — the Xi variant. I’m not even sure if it’s the Greek pronunciation, so it’s X-i. However you say it.
CLAY: Chairman Xi is the way I would say it.
BUCK: Yes. Exactly. They’re skipping Xi because they don’t want it to be the name of the Chinese premier as the variant of the virus. So that’s why we’re at Omicron right now, and this is just another moment of time where we have to look at what exactly are they telling us? We’ve been told, “Oh, my gosh. It could be so much worse because of the mutations.” There are actual mutations on the virus. And again, I don’t understand the epidemiology. I understand policy.
But they’re looking at this and they’re saying, “Okay, it could be worse. We don’t know if it’s worse.” So what are we really doing? Okay. We’re gonna have these travel restrictions in place. You say, “Well, the travel restrictions right now, Biden says, won’t stop the variant, and we already have our hospital capacity and therapeutics and all these things that we’ve been gearing up for.” So it’s not like at the very beginning when — as you and I know, Clay — stopping travel from China was racist when Donald Trump did it.
CLAY: Totally racist.
BUCK: Totally racist. That was a different circumstance based on the timing of what we see here. But what’s very clear is that this is yet again another opportunity for there to be additional pressure on everybody must get not just vaccinated, but boostered if vaccinated because they don’t want to wait for the numbers to come out. They want people to do this, everyone to do this, including children to be vaccinated.
And, Clay, that’s what this really comes down to. It’s a moment for them to tell everybody, “Forget natural immunity. Forget everything. You must get the shot or else.” Everybody is gonna be saying, “You must get the shot or else” for the entirety of the wintertime under this administration.
CLAY: This new variant comes out of South Africa, and there is an immediate media panic that has ensued, a political panic that has ensued in the blue states and among the usual covid fear porn purveyors. We don’t know all of the information about it yet, but we do know that the South African doctor who identified this new variant has been urging calm, saying there’s no reason to panic.
Only mild symptoms so far. The stock market, by the way, on Friday dropped a thousand points. We had restrictions coming out all over the place. Your home state of New York, Buck, they’ve done away with any sort of surgery that’s nonemergency elective surgery. It’s been ended. But let’s listen to what she had to say. Cut 8, the South African doctor discussing her discovery of this new variant.
DR. ANGELIQUE COETZEE: Looking at the mildness of the symptoms that we are seeing currently, there is no reason for panicking as we don’t see severely ill patients. The most predominant clinical complaint is severe fatigue for one or two days with the headache and the body aches and pain. Some of them will have what they call “a scratchy throat,” and some will have a cough, a dry cough. But it’s not a constant cough. It comes and goes. And that’s more or less the big symptoms that we have seen.
BUCK: So, Clay, also there’s a point here about when people say it comes from South Africa, that’s actually not even known epidemiologically.
CLAY: Right. We don’t know where it originated. It was discovered in some way in South Africa.
BUCK: That’s right. So it may just be that they had been testing very aggressively in a certain area and found it first because it already is in other places. So this notion that we can isolate, even, the origin a lot of virus like this or even the first… Does anyone think this is the first mutation or the first variation? It’s not like there’s a variant mutation and we get the patient zero, so to speak, the first guy.
This is just where they’re finding it, which means it’s already here. Fauci even said it’s already probably here in America. I think they’ve even had a handful of cases, Omicron cases in Australia, which is very locked down, which is why that’s noteworthy. It still has a lot of international travel restrictions. And then right now, Clay, you know, Fauci is addressing the country.
And I do think that he is the worst public health official in the modern history of the United States and arguably in the planet. But put that aside for a second, he — and we’ll come back to it — must vaccinate the world to beat the pandemic. This is now the new message. “The whole world must get vaccinated to beat the pandemic” is what the messaging is from the Biden administration. How long is that going to take?
CLAY: Well, and also especially when the vaccines aren’t particularly effective at preventing the spread of the virus. This is what we said, by the way, on this show for months, that one of the reasons why they argued that every single person out there had to be vaccinated in the United States — kids particularly, people who’ve already had covid — was they said, “You don’t know where the variants are going to emerge.”
And we said on this show, “Actually you can kind of come up with a mathematical probability, and it’s going to be the country where there are large populations and where the virus is spreading most significantly.” Delta we think came out of India and now this newest variant is coming out of Africa. Huge populations there. The virus is gonna mutate.
By the way, we should say this too. Some viral mutations could be favorable. We’ve only been focused on “Delta makes it easier to spread,” all those things. It’s possible — oftentimes this happens, Buck — where a virus mutates to become easier to transmit but far less virulent. So it could be that this new variant out of South Africa, which the doctor who found it…
Let me make sure I get her name right. We were just listening to Dr. Angelique Coetzee. It could be — and we’ll talk about this with Berenson in the third hour — that some of these variants that emerge actually are helpful because they are less debilitating and significant even in the case of the elderly as these variants spread. The mutations, in other words, could be beneficial as opposed to always being negative which is the way the media covers it.
BUCK: And yet the panic that ensued on Friday I gotta tell you felt so overblown from the perspective of an administration that at this point has had multiple variants. I think this is why they’re having this presser, and Biden’s still now talking to the country. He says, “I don’t believe shutdowns or lockdowns will be needed.” The fact… This is right now — right as we’re talking to you — Biden’s also saying, “Everybody should wear a mask indoors.” They want to go back, based on this. You have that South African doctor saying… Look, she’s essentially describing symptoms of a mild cold.
CLAY: That’s right.
BUCK: I think we all know that. When you’re talking about a slight sore throat, fatigue, maybe a prett medium cold. Biden is saying, “I don’t believe shuts down or lockdowns will be needed”? The fact that their mentality is that we would ever go back to that? The answer to that should be, “No, never again. It wasn’t effective when we did it the last time! You’re gonna do this again?” This just shows the mentality. These people have lost their minds.
CLAY: They have, Buck, and there’s never gonna be lockdowns in red state America again. Never, ever, ever are people going back to that. I don’t even think people in the red state America are going to wear masks. And what I keep waiting for — and it hasn’t happened yet — is for blue state America to say, “We’re done with this.” New York, California, Michigan, Pennsylvania, places where — Illinois — there have been Draconian dictator-like metrics that have been undertaken that are doing nothing to make people safer.
By the way, this is the significant part. Florida — and I wanted to read this ’cause I doubt that anybody else is hardly even going to discuss this in the media. I think it’s kind of a significant details. This is this morning. Florida announced that they now have the lowest rate of covid hospitalization that they have had going all the way back to April of last year.
Under a thousand statewide hospitalizations for the first time since they began tracking this beginning in April of 2020. Florida has the lowest case rate in the country and the second lowest hospitalization rate. No covid vaccine mandate and no mask mandate virtually anywhere in the state. I was down there for Thanksgiving, Buck, and in the free states — Tennessee, Florida, Texas, I was in Alabama for the Iron Bowl — you would never know covid had ever existed.
CLAY: Okay. Herd immunity for the win.
BUCK: So you sit there and say, “Okay. Sooo what exactly is the way forward in these blue states?” Explain what their plans gonna be.