CLAY: So, the NHL — National Hockey League out there for those of you who don’t care at all about sports — has announced that they have got all of the data so far from this season ’cause they’re testing players on a regular basis. The NHL had 100%, essentially, vaccination rate. Every player, every coach, every team official, all of them were vaccinated for covid. They announced today 73% — 73% — of all of the players on the league’s roster have tested positive for covid this season, and approximately 60% of those people have tested positive for the last five weeks okay?
So why use this as an example? Because we have been told for months now, basically for a year, by Dr. Fauci, by Rochelle Walensky, and by Joe Biden, that if everybody in this country were vaccinated, that there would be no issue with covid. In fact, that’s why they’ve tried to demonize and say that we’re having a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” It’s why Joe Biden said that we’re gonna have a winter of death.
That’s what he’s tried to say as an example of what was happening ’cause people were unvaccinated. Well, let me just use this, Buck. This is an interesting subset because we don’t have great data, unfortunately, for the 330 million Americans as a whole. But we do have great data for the NHL. The NHL got 100% of its players and everybody surrounding them vaccinated, and 73% — we’re only halfway through the season, by the way — of the league’s rosters, the players, have tested positive, including 60% over the last five weeks.
How is this not, Buck, perfect evidence, maybe even far more representative — less representative, right, ’cause these are young, healthy players — that the vaccination rates do not, in any kind of substantive way, change the outcome when it comes to spreading this covid and that, therefore, for many young and healthy people, there’s virtually no benefit at all to actually getting vaccinated if you have zero risk of actual serious health complications, which these guys clearly did? What in the world are we doing arguing that vaccination has in any way made them safer or, as a consequence, made anybody else safer?
BUCK: If they were really interested in saving lives and not catering to neuroses, not maintaining control and therefore power — if this was truly foremost primarily about saving lives — given what we know, including this NHL data, the public health authorities — Fauci, Walensky, all of them — and the Democrat Party — Joe Biden himself — would come out and say, “Okay. We have seen the numbers. We understand the data isn’t what we thought it would be,” and, by the way, that’s putting it gently. I’m trying to be charitable here.
CLAY: No doubt.
BUCK: “But now we understand the push needs to, please, every single person who is over the age of 65 — every single one of you — please got the shot. Please get the shot. All right, we understand we made a mistake pushing it on 5-year-olds. We understand he were being crazy pushing it on professional athletes in their twenties. We get it.” They wouldn’t say that but that’s the basic takeaway.
If this is really about saving lives, they would admit the error of both messaging and resource deployment and they would essentially embrace the focused protection strategy that fast outlined in the Great Barrington Declaration going on now, 18 months ago, perhaps — about 18 months ago, I think that’s right — and, Clay, you also see another phenomenon that’s very troubling, and it’s people, when they talk about “The Science” and they speak of the consequences around all of this, notice how that gives take certain power.
You can’t disagree with Biden. You can’t disagree with the NHL mandate. It’s “The Science.” There’s consensus behind it. Essentially the power of the mob or the group is what they’re calling on to make you bend the knee and do it, and then what you find is that when they’ve relied on the mob and consensus-science-based approach and it turns out to be false, guess what, Clay?
Nobody’s really responsible for it, right? “We were just going along, man. We just did what the experts told us to do. Sorry if we twisted or even broke your arm and kicked you out of your job! Sorry if we really had these negative consequences for you. It was the consensus at the time.” Consensus is a way of leveraging power against people instead of making an argument and also in some ways — add “perniciously” — it is something that undermines any accountability for what’s done. Who’s responsible, Clay? If you’re an NHL player and you’re made to get the shot and you get sick anyway, who do you get mad at?
CLAY: It’s a fantastic question. And also, the argument of scientific consensus misses the point that scientific consensus is also wrong very frequently, which is why we have the scientific method. Buck, I use this example quite a bit because as a parent I remember it, but it was different for me. We have been wrong on which direction to put babies in the crib, Buck. Think about this.
When you and I were children, Buck, they told parents the exact opposite. They said you’re supposed to put babies on their stomach, right? Now they have come back and said, “Wait a minute. All of that advice we gave to a lot of parents out there, it was actually the exact opposite of what we told you. We got it 100% wrong.” So you have to challenge conventional authority.
Even something that theoretically is as important as which direction do you put the baby down in the baby bed, they got 100% wrong for our generation, Buck, and then they flipped it for the generation of me now being parent. So they actually told parents something that made it more likely that their kids were going to die of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and then the authorities said, “Oh, our bad. We’re actually flipping it to the other side now,” and that in and of itself is pretty crazy that we would ever have ended up in this situation in the first place.
BUCK: They put doctors on TV in commercials to smoke cigarettes and say, “There’s no bad health effects. In fact, it opens up your lungs. ”
CLAY: Great point.
BUCK: They have been wrong so many times on issues of science and especially when it’s about consensus. You don’t have to convince anybody if they have a certain kind of bacterial infection, right? They go into a doctor and say, “Hey, you got a staph infection. You’re gonna take antibiotics because you know those antibiotics are gonna help you.” If you’re in a really bad space, you understand that.
There doesn’t have to be an argument around it. But on areas where there is argument what you see is there can be the false consensus used to push policies, and then there’s never any accountability. Back to what I was saying before, a perfect example of this is the Food Pyramid. Remember the Food Pyramid and it had six to 12…? I learned this as a kid in grammar school. I remember this. Six to 12 servings. It was everywhere, the Food Pyramid.
You don’t really see it anymore, six to 12 servings of grain. That’s a great guideline. Yeah, have six to 12 servings of white rice and white bread and other starchy grains every day. It’s a great way to get toward diabetes and obesity at a very young age, not a great way to actually eat healthfully. Same thing about eating eggs. Remember eggs were supposed to give you high cholesterol? False. Eggs do not give you high cholesterol. But I remember that. “Oh, don’t eat too many eggs, Clay! You’re gonna have high cholesterol.” That was “The Science.”
CLAY: It’s true. “The Science” is often wrong which is why we have to constantly challenge “The Science”, and if you ever question that, just go back and read all the advice that they were giving you for covid in March of 2020 and look at how much of it has changed.