BUCK: The vaccine push is still very much underway here, and Governor Cuomo of New York… Clay, the worst governor for the pandemic? Is that fair or do you think Newsom? Who gets the top spot?
CLAY: I think you can say worst governor for the pandemic. I think you can make a strong argument that Governor Cuomo — if the goal of a governor is to protect its citizenry and help them to have jobs, I think you could make a strong argument that Andrew Cuomo is the worst governor of most of our lives — not even just the pandemic.
BUCK: So, not just the worst in America, the worst in America in living memory?
CLAY: Many of our lives. Certainly, the twenty-first century.
BUCK: That’s bold talk, Mr. Travis, but I will cosign. Here he is on how he’s not gonna mandate it; he wants the private sector to mandate it. Go ahead.
CUOMO: Private businesses, I am asking them and suggesting to them, “Go to vaccine-only admission.” Go to vaccine-only admission! We do this Radio City Music Hall months ago, reopened vaccine only. Sold out all the shows. Sports arenas, they went up to about 90% vaccine only. Private businesses, bars, restaurants, go to a vaccine-only admission. I believe it’s in your best business interests.
BUCK: That’s kind of like, “Oh, nice business you got there. Be a shame if the state authorities came, shut it down, fined you, and ruined your livelihood.” I don’t think anybody is unable to read between the lines here for America’s worst governor, Clay.
CLAY: Well — and again, this is significant because I think people are seeing it, but they’re not really tying it all together, ’cause I can see this directly connecting to Big Tech. What government is doing now is they are seeking to pressure private industry to enact rules that the government itself would not be constitutionally permitted to enact. So this is a default state action that is being demanded by the state of New York.
The state of New York, I don’t believe, has the legal authority to mandate vaccines for all residents of the state of New York. But what they’re trying to do is make it so wildly uncomfortable for people based on being able to do their day-to-day life that people just throw up their hands and say, “Oh, okay. I’ll get the vaccine.”
And, again, it’s a back-door attempt at a mandate which would be unconstitutional if the government tried to do it itself. I think that’s significant not only here but also in the way that Big Tech is being used. We need an aggressive investigation into whether or not it this constitutes state action.
BUCK: And it’s also a way of getting around the accountability mechanisms here. This is true in the whole budget process that’s playing out right now, where you have the infrastructure bill has come out separately from the budget. We haven’t even seen the budget. We’ll talk more about this in just a few moments. But the whole point of having a 2,000-plus page infrastructure bill is nobody really knows what’s in it.
People just pile stuff into it; so therefore no one’s really responsible for the waste, the fraud, the abuse that happens. With so many of these Democrat in particular but there have been Republicans who are very bad on the pandemic lockdown stuff as well, it’s, “Oh, I’m just listening to the public health officials.” Well, then who’s really responsible for the bad decision-making, the public health official or the politician who says, “I’m just listening to the experts”?
Same thing here with the private sector and Big Tech acting in concert with them as part of the private sector, of course. Is it Governor Cuomo’s fault now when you go into a store and you have to have a vaccine? And also, is that store responding to what they think is actually good policy for their customers, or are they worried about what could happen to them under a governor like Cuomo who is so heavy-handed when he doesn’t get his way?
CLAY: Buck, also there’s gonna be a huge market for fake vaccine cards, because it’s not as if these vaccine cards, if you look at them, are incredibly high-tech. And anybody who’s ever been on a college campus know that 18- and 19-year-olds who want to get into a bar get fake IDs, irrespective of the fact that you are now requiring the vaccine. Who is gonna be checking vaccine cards at the entrance to the bar?
Are they gonna say, “Hey, I need to see your ID and your vaccine card?” That seems to me to be a big mess. It’s not like you’re gonna have public health experts reviewing vaccine cards. They’re just gonna be getting printed. I know Kamala Harris doesn’t think people have access to Kinko’s, but there’s gonna be a lot of fake vaccine cards just rolling out if people really want them.
BUCK: Clay, to be fair to Kamala — who is already considered the least popular vice president in living memory.
CLAY: Statistically, yes.
BUCK: Congratulations, VP Harris. Considered the worst by Americans in 50 years.
CLAY: And also to have done so in the first six months, when usually there’s a glow of a new administration, which certainly there’s that patina of excitement over the fact that if you read mainstream media it was, “The first woman, the first minority woman to hold the vice presidential office.” Yet she is so wildly unpopular that already they’re talking Weekend at Bernie’s II style trying to drag Joe Biden across in 2024 again for fear what she would do to the Democratic Party if she’s the nominee.
BUCK: But I just wanted to be fair she was clear that it was only that rural folks who can’t find a copy machine.
CLAY: That’s right.
BUCK: It’s rural people.
CLAY: They can’t get IDs.
BUCK: They don’t know how to utilize all that electricity and all the big words and all the stuff, really condescending stuff from the vice president, which may go to why she is not exactly super popular with the American people overall.
CLAY: Democrats hated her when she ran for president, Buck. She couldn’t get 1% support. She collapsed.
BUCK: She was popular with media executives and hedge fund managers in New York and Los Angeles.
CLAY: Pretty much.
BUCK: That’s her base — and the New York Times editorial page to some degree. But I had promised everybody that we’d talk about the vaccines but also this data that I had teased.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: I just wanted to get to this as well about mandatory vaccinations because you’ve been led to believe — if you pay attention to just in a general sense in the media — that it is Republicans who are unvaccinated; it is Trump supporters who are the problem. Let me just hone in on the city that I know the best, New York, which is where I’m from and where I currently am sitting.
Clay, there are 135,000 public school employees. This is as of July 26, I’m give you this data, okay? There are 135,000 of them, and you have about 40% that are unvaccinated. NYPD’s 54,000 uniformed and civilian workforce, 43% are vaccinated. Department of Corrections, 42% are vaccinated. It’s 60% vaccinated for teachers, but you’re talking about tens of thousands of public school teachers in New York City who are mandating that kids wear masks, but they’re not willing to get vaccinated right now.
CLAY: Yeah, Buck, what it does is it speaks to how artificial the line was that these teachers were terrified they were gonna die if they actually taught, because if you truly were terrified of covid, you would have gone and gotten the vaccine immediately. I think what this reflects is a lot of teachers are youngish, in their twenties and thirties, and that’s the group that’s not.
We should mention, by the way, that we’ve reached 70% of adults who have received at least their first vaccine. So we know those numbers. We don’t have the numbers like we talked about out of England, but that’s pretty crazy that teachers would be statistically less likely than adults in America to have actually gotten their vaccine.
BUCK: It’s teachers in New York City, too.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: Who I can tell you: If you’re a teacher in the public school system in New York City, I actually have a few friends who are secret conservatives who teach in the public school system here. There’s a 90% chance you’re a hard-core Democrat, Biden, Bernie voter. No question about it, okay? So that’s why you got almost half of them — and it’s big workforce, 135,000 of them — who are unvaccinated. I’m sure in the nursing homes, Clay, where I actually think that that starts to be, like, special consideration time. I think nursing home staff are at an elevated responsibility for covid protocols.
CLAY: Right.
BUCK: Something like that 40% of nursing home staff is unvaccinated in New York City!