Wednesday on FNC’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson opened his program questioning the new push by government and health care bureaucrats to impose new mandates in the name of combatting a spike in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Carlson speculated the push was due to politicians not wanting to part ways with power obtained during the early stages of the pandemic.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: Have you been reading the news recently? How would you describe to your grandchildren 50 years from now the moment that we’re living through? Well, if you’re looking for a single snapshot that perfectly distills the pure hallucinogenic absurdity of it, consider the Biden administration’s new guidance on COVID.
We learned yesterday that America’s children are going to spend yet another year with covered faces, this despite the fact that masks are demonstrably terrible for kids and the kids face no meaningful threat from the coronavirus, but it doesn’t matter, the White House says that kids have to wear their masks, and so they will.
We also learned yesterday that the administration is going to force Federal employees to take the COVID vaccine, the mandate will start with government healthcare workers. Now, some of these healthcare workers, for reasons that no one has bothered to explain or even ask about, have so far refused to take the vaccine. But now, Kamala Harris is going to make them, these healthcare workers.
Ponder that for a moment. So, Willie Brown’s girlfriend is claiming she knows more about Medicine than nurses and doctors do. She is an expert on the subject, and so by the way is her 78-year-old business partner, the one who seems adrift in fantasy a lot of the time and tends to nod out in mid- sentence. He is a medical expert, too.
Watch him explain that once you’ve had the vaccine, you don’t need to wear a mask.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I think it’s a great milestone, a great day. It’s been made possible by the extraordinary success we’ve had in vaccinating so many Americans so quickly.
When your country asks you to get vaccinated, you did. The American people stepped up.
You did what I consider to be your patriotic duty. That’s how we’ve gotten to this day.
If you’ve been fully vaccinated, you no longer need to wear a mask. Let me repeat, if you are fully vaccinated, you no longer need to wear a mask.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: “Let me repeat. If you are fully vaccinated, you no longer need to wear a mask.” And we believe that, it made sense and by the way, that was the settled science. It was just two months ago back in May. Only Russian spies and white supremacists questioned that science.
Of course, you don’t need a mask once you’ve had the vaccine. Why would you? The COVID vaccine is a miracle. It’s like the moon landing. Patriots get it. The vaccine is foolproof. It’s all you need.
Again, we believe that because it made sense, and then we saw something very strange. We saw Kamala Harris and her husband –whose name is either Doug or Douglas depending on the source — kiss each other in public with masks on. And this was weird because we knew that both of them had been vaccinated, and that’s when we started to wonder.
Now, either this was some kind of weird fetish ritual they’re into, “Get the mask, it’s time to kiss,” or else the White House wasn’t telling us everything about the vaccine. Well, they’re still not telling us everything about the vaccine, but yesterday they dropped more clues about it.
The administration now says that all people including people who have been vaccinated are going to have to wear masks, but only depending upon where they live. So, if you’re in something called a high or substantial COVID transmission region, you better prepare to put on your little mask. Now, what are those regions? What does this mean exactly?
Well, for the answer to that pressing question, which could affect your life, we go right to the source. Here is the man who helped to create COVID in the first place. Watch him explain.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: The recommendations and the guidelines have been changed to say that if you are vaccinated even though you are vaccinated, you are in an indoor public setting in an area of the country with a high degree of viral dynamics, namely the red and orange sections on the CDC chart, then you need to wear a mask even though you are vaccinated.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Well, that makes total sense. Of course, you’re required to wear a mask even if you’ve been vaccinated depending upon where you live or how do you know if you live in one of those places? Well, according to Dr. Fauci, you just check the red and orange sections on the CDC chart. Oh, right. The red and orange sections on the CDC chart that you keep in your wallet next to your AAA card, just look carefully, and if you do, you’ll see the red and orange sections account for more than 60 percent of the entire United States of America.
Where? Well, Union County, Oregon. That’s on the map. Union County, Oregon has a population of 25,000 people. It’s small, it’s pretty. People literally think it’s nice, but the CDC calls it dangerous. That’s strange.
Union County, Oregon hasn’t had a single COVID death in nearly two months. It doesn’t matter, it’s red and orange, so wear your mask if you wind up there, if you dare.
Same with Washington, D.C. It was a red and orange zone as of yesterday afternoon. Officials in Washington report that just two people have died of COVID in the past two weeks. It doesn’t matter, the administration will be requiring mask use there anyway.
According to Willie Brown’s girlfriend, that’s science.
But is it science? Look at this chart of COVID deaths in the U.K. They’re right on your screen now.
Now, the numbers have been low — pretty low since April. But what’s interesting is that those numbers have stayed low even after the British government lifted its mandatory mask mandate. That’s weird.
As one economist who studies the subject, as JPMorgan put it and we’re quoting, “The current delta wave is turning out to be much, much milder than we had anticipated.” Oh wow. That sounds like a good news. Has anyone told the politicians? No, don’t bother. They don’t want to hear it.
In Los Angeles, officials brought back the mask mandate when COVID cases moved up so slightly it is hard even to measure the rise on a chart. Look at it, here’s the graph. This is a graph of COVID cases in Los Angeles County.
We put a line at the point where politicians in LA brought back the mask mandate. They said they had to because there was a spike. You’re looking at the spike. That’s the spike they cited as a justification.
Well as you’ll note, if your eyes are open, it is barely noticeable.
So, the question is, do politicians in Los Angeles know something that we don’t know? We can’t be sure of that. We do know fairly certainly that the news media are lying about the actual science in order to justify the new restrictions. Now, why would they want to do that? We have no idea. But that’s exactly what they’re doing.
Here is one example. In Florida, the Sun-Sentinel newspaper recently ran this headline quote, “New COVID cases nearly double in Florida — the worst in the nation.” Holy smokes. Better run to Georgia and to show how scary this was in the State of Florida, the otherwise placid state to which so many are moving, they included a chart that shows an uptick in positive test results. You’re seeing it on your screen now and it’s terrifying.
So those are the test results, but actually who cares. What matters is the harm and what the Sun-Sentinel did not include is the chart that shows COVID deaths. I wonder why. Oh, because those are near zero and that’s a very different picture as you can see, and of course that’s the picture that actually matters. That’s the picture from which we ought to be making public health policy.
Now, it wasn’t so long ago that all of us understood that. People like Tony Fauci in fact told us out loud that the goal was to keep people from dying of COVID, and that sounded very reasonable to everybody. That’s why they said we needed the vaccine and that’s why millions of people took the vaccine. Now that they have taken the vaccine, politicians have decided that actually they can’t part with the enormous unprecedented levels of power they have amassed over the last year, so they are going to keep ordering you around regardless of the science.
And of course, Tony Fauci is going to do his best to defend it all because in the end, he is one of them.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
FAUCI: Something has changed and what has changed is the virus. The CDC hasn’t changed and the CDC hasn’t really flip-flopped at all.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Yes, the CDC there’s been no flip-flops at all. We’ve been totally consistent. If it looks like we repainted the slogans on the side of the barn, all animals are created equal, but some are equal. It is just an illusion. No flip-flops.
We seem to remember that in the past year, Tony Fauci has gone from telling us not to wear masks. They are totally useless, and plus, doctors need them to wear masks or you will die, to wear three masks or you will die, to don’t wear any masks at all, back to now, you’d better wear masks.
And now, he is telling us he has never flip-flopped on masks.
So, YouTube had better get to work tonight deleting all of those previous videos or else we’re going to have a lot of trouble believing Tony Fauci, and no doubt, they are deleting them even as we speak.
The bottom line whether you believe Fauci or not is that this is getting very confusing. This is an administration that has told us they’re in charge of our health and in charge of fighting this global pandemic. They’re not doing a good job of explaining what the science is. In fact, they’re doing such a bad job that even Kamala Harris doesn’t seem to know what she thinks.
Here was Harris just yesterday, even as she spoke, contradicting her own administration’s guidance by explaining as Joe Biden did two months ago that once you get vaccinated, actually, you don’t have to wear a mask.
Now as you watch this, see if you can spot the clue that it’s just possible that Kamala Harris doesn’t really believe what she is saying as she says it. See if you can spot it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KAMALA HARRIS (D), VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: People need to get vaccinated, that’s the only way we’re going to cut this thing off. Nobody likes wearing a mask, get vaccinated.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: See, you don’t have to wear a mask if you’re vaccinated says the vaccinated lady who is wearing a mask. Does your head hurt yet trying to follow this? You know, it might just be easier to stop thinking entirely and just obey. Maybe that’s the real message here.
On the other hand — and we’re trying to be charitable — it is possible the administration’s guidance is so all over the map, so lacking in scientific substance, and so confusing that Kamala Harris can’t follow it despite her extensive medical background as someone who dated Willie Brown. That’s possible.
Now, Rochelle Walensky is an actual doctor. She went to Harvard. She is the Director in fact of the CDC She’s never been elected to anything, but since this is a pandemic, Rochelle Walensky’s word is law. It’s more powerful than anything that Congress produces. She is her own Federal agency. In fact, she sits between King and God, somewhere there on the continuum.
So listen carefully as Rochelle Walensky tells you that COVID is killing twice as many children as influenza does. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DR. ROCHELLE WALENSKY, DIRECTOR, CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION: I think it’s really important for people to understand that this is not a benign disease in kids compared to other diseases that our kids see. So, if you look at the mortality rate of COVID just this past year for children, it’s more than twice the mortality rate that we see in influenza in a given year.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So, you’re not supposed to question that and you know, we didn’t really dare to check those numbers because who are we to check the numbers from an unelected Federal bureaucrat when she is commanding us to obey, so we didn’t. We just took it at face value.
But a guy called Phil Kerpen who is a columnist and good at math had some free time, he decided to check the CDC numbers on what the CDC Director just claimed on CNN, and what did he find? He found that the Director of the CDC has no idea what she is talking about, so here are the actual numbers from the CDC website.
From 2019 to 2020, according to the CDC, a total of 124 children died of COVID. From 2020 to this year, which is not done yet, a total of 213 children died of COVID. Now by comparison, the influenza virus killed more than 400 children just last year, and in fact that was not an aberration, influenza has killed far more children than COVID has in each of the past five years. In fact, it’s not even close.
And all of that is assuming that the CDC’s numbers on underage deaths from COVID are accurate and it looks like they’re not. In a recent report, the CDC itself acknowledges it could be vastly over reporting the number of children who have died from COVID. The CDC report says that when considering everyone who died of COVID, roughly 2.5 of those who died had a co-existing medical condition unrelated to their deaths.
But for children under the age of 18, that number went up dramatically. It was over 35 percent of children who died from COVID had what the CDC called a quote, “unrelated medical condition.” In other words, more than a third of children who were listed on the official records as dying from COVID had a co-morbidity that the CDC assures us cannot possibly be related to COVID, but it appears upon closer examination that the comorbidities might in fact be related to the deaths of those children.
We’re going to pause here and say, why are we getting so precise about these numbers? Because these numbers are being used to justify putting a mask on your third grader for an entire freaking year at school. What’s the effect on a child of doing that? Of sitting in a classroom full of people whose faces he can’t see? Of breathing cotton fiber for 10 hours a day every day? They are profound, so these numbers matter.
So, for every other age group, these sorts of comorbidities are much rare and that makes sense when you consider that COVID is much less dangerous for children. Now, Joseph Allen is a scientist who works in “The Lancet’s” COVID committee. He found that quote, “Three major studies over the past year all found the risk of death to be in the range of one in a hundred thousand to one in one million. Hospitalization rates for school-aged children younger than 12 (the group that can’t get vaccinated yet) hovered around three or four per million throughout the pandemic.”
If you need perspective, those are extremely low numbers, much lower than the CDC Director just claimed. Dr. Marty Makary who works at Johns Hopkins found a quote, “mortality rate of zero among children without a preexisting medical condition such as leukemia.” So, in the face of those numbers, which they are lying about, based on their own reporting, this is apples to apples. The Director of the CDC just lied about what the numbers are that her own organization produces, but based on those numbers, they are saying that kids should be forced to wear masks and take the COVID vaccine.
Clearly, there is no science to back that up. But, Rochelle Walensky does not care, she is instead full force leading the charge for more mandates for children and adults. In fact, according to Rochelle Walensky, we need vaccine passports to make certain that people who haven’t gotten the shot can’t leave their homes or make a living.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: I know they’re doing it in Europe, but you’re not CDC Director of Europe, which I’m sure you’re plenty happy about, but they’re issuing health passes there, right, where you know, you can go to a disco or a discotheque as they like to call it there, if you have a health pass. Is that something that the CDC would ever lean into or perhaps advise here?
WALENSKY: You know, I think some communities are doing that and that may very well be a path forward.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: That may very well be a path forward. Where are people who are going to like protect us against this? This is insane. Who’s going to stand up and say so? No one so far.
And so instead, the floor is left to Rochelle Walensky and people like her, manipulators of data, liars. We need vaccines immediately. Everybody should be forced to get one.
Now if there’s one message around COVID that has been consistent from the Biden administration from day one, it’s that. Get the vaccine, don’t ask questions. The Biden administration’s lackeys in the media have pushed the same message from day one with increasing ferocity and humorlessness. What is going on here?
Max Boot of “The Washington Post,” the dumbest columnist ever to work at that newspaper just explained the quote, “progressive case for forced vaccinations,” quote, “Words I never thought I’d write, Saudi Arabia is being more progressive than America,” says Boot. “Saudis will need to show proof of vaccination to enter schools, shops, malls, restaurants, concerts, public transportation.”
Oh, that’s progressive, forcing people to take medicine they don’t want to take. By the way, the vaccination rate in Saudi Arabia is far lower than the vaccination rate in the United States, but they’re more progressive somehow, because they use more force. That’s how distorted the left has become.
But the bigger question is, if the vaccine works as well as they claim it does, why are so many vaccinated people getting COVID? It’s not just happening to Democrats who flee Texas to stop the legislature from working, it’s happening to a lot of people, probably people you know.
Most of them are fine, not all of them, but they’re still getting COVID.
Piers Morgan tested positive for COVID after taking both doses of the AstraZeneca shot in the U.K. Milwaukee Brewers outfielder, Christian Yelich also tested positive after getting vaccinated, a medical assistant from Minneapolis called Jummai Nache had to have her legs amputated after receiving the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine.
And in New Orleans, a 33-year-old fully vaccinated business owner called Angelle Mosley just died of corona. Now why did this happen? We don’t know. We’re not Rochelle Walensky. We’re not going to make up stuff if we can’t actually answer it. But it’s becoming really clear the science is slightly more complicated. It doesn’t mean the vaccine doesn’t work or it’s not worth taking, but don’t lie to us. It doesn’t always work.
You know people who’ve gotten COVID after getting a double vaxx, again it doesn’t mean it’s not worth taking, but stop lying to us. If you want us to have confidence in your medicine, then tell us the full truth, but they won’t. They’ve been telling us for six months that this vaccine is perfect, but clearly in some cases, it doesn’t always work.
And that’s not our theory, by the way. Take it from the guy who created COVID. Watch this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
FAUCI: Now that we have a delta variant, that has changed the entire landscape, because when you look at the level of virus in the nasopharynx of a vaccinated person who gets a breakthrough infection with delta, it is exactly the same as the level of virus in an unvaccinated person who is infected. That’s the problem.
So, those data were very compelling and that triggered the change in the CDC guideline.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So, the level of virus — and we’re quoting now — ” … is exactly the same as the level of virus in an unvaccinated person.” What? What does that even mean? We’re not even going to speculate as to what that means. But if this administration is trying to reassure the country and justify forcing people to take medicine they don’t want, maybe they should wake up and figure out what they’re trying to say and then explain it to people.
The truth is, we don’t know and we don’t know what we don’t know and here is how we know that we don’t know what we don’t know about this vaccine. The other day, Pfizer’s purchase agreement with the Albanian government leaked out onto the internet.
A lot of fascinating things in that document, lots of legalese, but in between it all were quotes like this — and this is from that document — “Purchaser acknowledges the long-term effects and efficacy of the vaccine are not currently known and that there may be adverse effects of the vaccine that are not currently known.” Was that reassuring? What are those effects? And why don’t we know? And why can’t we ask?
No one is pausing to ask questions at this moment though. That’s not allowed. Nancy Pelosi definitely won’t allow it. You’re an anti-vaxxer if you ask those questions.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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