Unleashing a plague on the world that did take millions of lives and shut down billions of people’s day-to-day lives. But you’ll notice the media cannot summon the same kind of outrage or anger about China no matter what the storyline, whether we’re talking about Uyghurs in concentration camps or anything else. Russia, Russia, Russia as a media issue has long-lasting consequences.
CLAY: Well, a big reason why — and we had a big discussion surrounding this — is there’s so much feeding at the Chinese trough when it comes to American Big Business. The interaction between Russia and the United States from an economic perspective is relatively small, whereas just think about use as an example Apple or Nike or the NBA and their relationships that exist right now in China, NBC with their acquiring of the Olympic Games when they virtually uttered no criticism whatsoever of anything surrounding China.
There is such economic might, such economic power that exists surrounding China that they won’t even pick Asian bad guys now for movies out of Hollywood. You noticed James Bond movies, every villain remains Eastern European. The Russian bad guys were going all the way back to the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, the Cold War era. They won’t even make a bad guy Asian for fear that they might offend their bosses in China.
And, Buck, this is where we talk about, we need rigorous investigations of Dr. Fauci because, in addition to this virus escaping from a Chinese lab, it may well have partially been funded by our own tax dollars, and we don’t know because it appears that Dr. Fauci and all of his cohorts have helped to cover up all of the early lineage of this story. That’s why we think that Fauci’s gonna retire sometime in the summer and try to ride off into the sunset and claim victory over covid rather than be held accountable in the Senate and in the House.
Which is what he should be for this entire mess, not only the response to covid, but the fact that we may well have funded this through gain-of-function research helped to create covid. And, by the way, Buck, do you feel comfortable, the fact that Moderna, who we have try to mandate you get a Moderna or a Pfizer vaccine that, according to this story out of England, that there is a part of a Moderna DNA code or whatever you want to call it…?
Again, I’m not an expert when it comes to how we craft unique viruses — but that that could be included in the genome of this covid virus? I mean, this is, I believe, such a monumentally huge story. And we have, I feel like, still only touched the very outskirts of this story for fear from so many big companies out there of what China will say if we really figure out what happened here.
BUCK: The implications of the virus being engineered by what is a very often in communication and even tightly knit international health apparatus of sorts, state health apparatus of these different countries, is tremendous. You mentioned the funding of the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab, receiving some funding U.S. based sources or a third party intermediary and what that would mean. But also I think that there’s gonna be enormous pressure brought to bear all over the world, but particularly — and let’s focus in on America for a second here at home — to just move past all of this, to move on.
CLAY: Pretend this didn’t happen.
BUCK: Pretend like they didn’t put us through all this.
CLAY: “It doesn’t matter how it got out. It happened. Let’s move on.”
BUCK: And also what we did in response to it. I mean, the first country to lockdown was China, and somehow we looked at that and said, “You know what? Let’s mirror image the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarianism here to protect people from an aerosolized virus.” That was the thinking of the supposed smartest health and medical minds in the world. This is a stunning failure, and people aren’t going to have faith going forward.
And they shouldn’t have faith going forward in public health authorities not being deeply politicized. What a lot of folks found out was the same way that over time you’ve seen journalists are basically second-tier gender studies and social studies majors or socialism majors, maybe, from Northeastern colleges for the most part — and we’re talking about the major national news outlets — and so they’re incredibly left wing.
The people that work at the top of the CDC and NIAID, the NIH, they’re also very Democrat aligned and left wing in their thinking. And what’s worse is that this ties into — and you can go back a hundred years, and there were certainly in earlier times in the federal bureaucracy in this country there was a sense that if you only put them in charge, right? The statist, authoritarian left has always wanted greater authority in the bureaucracy with the experts because how can you argue with “experts,” Clay?
How can you argue with the people that are supposed to be making these scientists for everybody else? They’re the super smart ones. Look at this. They got the pandemic’s origins wrong, they got lockdown wrong, they got masks wrong, they certainly got components of the vaccine and how well it would work wrong. And all the while, they promised us that they were keeping us so safe.
And there were all these benefits from it, and I think people that look at the data and really take a moment of reflection to realize, Clay, they just made it all worse, really. I mean, we should have just worked on therapeutics, protecting the elderly. The Great Barrington Declaration — which they buried online after it came out — was right and the people that slandered it were wrong.
CLAY: They were 100% right on the Great Barrington Declaration. But, Buck, even leaving aside the Great Barrington Declaration, how much attention did you see given to the Johns Hopkins study that actually looked at specifically whether lockdowns had in any way been beneficial? Because early on you and I were some of the first people who said this, that every choice you make in a public policy setting has a balancing act. In other words, remember when there were so many people early in the covid situation where they said, “Well, if we can save just one life”?
How many times did you hear or see people say, “Well, if we can save just one life,” and if you said something very honest and straightforward, which would have been like, “Well if we made the speed limits on cars 5 miles an hour, nobody would ever die in a car accident. You would have to be a moron to kill yourself driving 5 miles an hour.” I guess you could drive off a cliff but, by and large, in an accident setting it would be virtual impossible.
We make balancing decisions all the time based on living life and analyzing risk and not putting everybody in bubble wrap all day. But, Buck, when you or I back in March or April say, “Hey, you know what? Let’s consider the economic impacts of this shutdown.” Nobody was even allowed to have that conversation.