Joe Biden believes if he yells at Americans about COVID, they ll forget about Afghanistan. And the Biden administration continues to downplay the ongoing crisis in Afghanistan. Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. If you believe your data is your business, head on over to ExpressVPN and get 3 extra months for free. That's E-XP-R-E-S-V-P-N-N, and you can start using it with another click of a button, and now you're done. So should you protect your data, like I do, by using ExpressVPN? To learn more about ExpressVPN, go to expressvpn.me/ProtectYourData and use the promo code ProtectYourData to get 3 more months of ExpressVPN for FREE! Ben Shapiro's new book "The Dark Side of Afghanistan" is out now, and it's available for pre-order now. It's also available for purchase in Kindle, iBook, Paperback, Hardcover, AudioBook, and AudioBook format, so you don't have to wait until the end of the month to get a copy of the book. The Dark Side Of Afghanistan: A Guide To The Worst Nightmare by Ben Shapiro on Amazon Prime and Vimeo. It's free and includes a limited edition hardcover edition of The Dark side of Afghanistan: The White House Guide to Afghanistan's Worst Nightmare. You won't Want to miss it? Order it here! Subscribe to the Dark Sidebar on Audible and get 20% off your first month for the rest of the year, plus a free 7-day shipping offer, plus an additional month of shipping discount when you sign up for the paperback edition of the Hardcover edition, shipping only $99 or two months, plus shipping on Prime membership gets you two months for $99/month, plus free shipping and shipping starts start-up shipping starts get $99, plus two VIP access to the second year, shipping starts, plus 3 months get $49/place get $24/month get $39/place, plus you get a VIP discount, and a limited promo code, plus they'll get an ad discount, plus all other options, plus she'll get $5,000 shipping starts starting at $50/month gets you'll get a maximum of $50, and they'll also get VIP access, plus 7 other VIP access and 7 other options? Want to become a VIP gets an ad-free version of the show?
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00:01:58.000The idea is that we are going to focus on COVID because he likes talking about COVID better than he likes talking about Afghanistan, which, by the way, does show you what an unbelievable disaster Afghanistan is.
00:02:10.000COVID in the United States right now is a problem.
00:02:12.000COVID continues to roll out across the country.
00:02:16.000The daily case count continues to be in the 100,000 range in the United States.
00:02:21.000The daily death count in the United States is continuing to rise right now.
00:02:25.000It's around 1,000 a day, 800 a day, depends on which day you're looking at.
00:02:30.000It's already started to peak in a lot of states, and we'll get to that in a moment.
00:02:32.000But Joe Biden would rather talk about this stuff because he is hopeful that he can yell at you about COVID and scare you about COVID and get you back to yelling at Ron DeSantis rather than talking about the fact that he precipitously pulled out from Afghanistan, leaving the entire country in the hands of the Taliban, revivifying Al-Qaeda, revivifying ISIS, and simultaneously preventing thousands of Americans from leaving.
00:02:52.000He would rather you not talk about that, so he'd rather talk about COVID.
00:02:55.000That's how badly things are going for the Biden administration at this point.
00:02:58.000He'd rather talk about the disease he said was going to be over by July than the disaster he's now unleashed in Afghanistan.
00:03:05.000And so let's talk about what he's saying about COVID because now his plan here apparently is that he's going to just push more and more restrictive activity.
00:03:14.000And then if you push back against it, he's going to suggest you want Americans to die because he thinks that he got away with this with Trump last year.
00:03:20.000And so he thinks he's going to do it again.
00:03:21.000They're just going to keep running this playbook until you feel compelled to vote for Joe Biden.
00:03:27.000He's going to keep saying that you need to mask up forever and that you need to Keep getting booster shots forever and that your kids need to mask up forever.
00:03:33.000And if you oppose any of these things, if you say, listen, I'm vaccinated and if I infect somebody else and they are unvaccinated because they chose not to get vaccinated, that really is their business.
00:03:44.000And if you say there's no evidence that kids should be masking at this point.
00:03:48.000Like, according to New York Magazine, no evidence kids should be masking in schools.
00:03:51.000If you say that stuff according to Joe Biden, you're very, very, very bad.
00:03:55.000And so yesterday, the big news of the day surrounding COVID is that the FDA finally approved the Pfizer vaccine.
00:04:00.000Now, If you're waiting around on the FDA's full approval of the Pfizer vaccine, let me just say you're a buffoon.
00:04:07.000The reason I say this is because the FDA had already given emergency use authorization and hundreds of millions of people around the world had already taken the Pfizer vaccine.
00:04:14.000We have the biggest data set in world history with regard to a vaccine, with regard to Pfizer and Moderna vaccines being rolled out across hundreds of nations, or dozens of nations at the very least, with hundreds of millions of people having taken it and with the serious side effects being extraordinarily low.
00:04:44.000It turns out that your crappy regulatory bureaucracy actually inhibited people from getting the vaccine for months and months and months and months.
00:04:51.000And by the way, I really don't think there are many people who are waiting around for FDA approval to get the vaccine.
00:04:55.000People who are waiting around to get the vaccine are not going to be satisfied by the FDA approval.
00:04:59.000And people who wanted to get the vaccine already got the vaccine.
00:05:02.000That is, I think, the reality of the situation.
00:05:04.000So what exactly is the great importance of the FDA giving full use authorization as opposed to emergency authorization on this thing?
00:05:11.000Because, I mean, what exactly were they going to do?
00:05:12.000Were they going to say, well, you know what?
00:05:15.000We gave emergency authorization, but no full use authorization.
00:05:17.000So all you suckers, all you 150 million Americans who already took the vaccine, We're going to have to suck that out of your arm.
00:05:23.000We're going to have to find a way to get that out of your blood now.
00:05:26.000So this was always going to get full use authorization because it should have full use authorization, but it should have happened like six months ago, seven months ago.
00:05:43.000Once you have had the vaccine, the vaccine remains, by all available data, extremely durable against hospitalization and death from COVID-19, including the Delta variant.
00:05:52.000It is not as durable against preventing infection.
00:05:56.000This is true for virtually all vaccines, by the way.
00:06:00.000I'm not aware of any vaccine where there are no breakthrough infections.
00:06:02.000So, Delta breaks through sometimes the COVID vaccines, the Pfizer, Moderna, J&J, AstraZeneca COVID vaccines.
00:06:11.000It breaks through them, but the result of the breakthrough is like you get a cold or you get a mild flu.
00:06:16.000is in the we don't care about this category, or should be in the we don't care about this category.
00:06:19.000Because when COVID first broke out across the world, if everybody had said, man, there's a bad flu going around this year, that would just be called a regular year.
00:06:26.000The problem with COVID is that it was killing millions of people all over the world.
00:06:29.000So if it has now been downgraded to you get a breakthrough infection, and man, that's a bad cold.
00:06:59.000In fact, I'm sure that I'm one of the only people in my office who is vaccinated.
00:07:04.000And you can ask the folks in my office.
00:07:05.000Literally, in about one week after I got the second vaccine, I said to the people in my office, I don't care if you wear masks, I don't care if you're vaccinated around me, because I don't care.
00:07:24.000I think that if you are certainly above the age of 18, the risk factors tend toward COVID as opposed to toward side effects from the vaccine.
00:07:33.000I think once you get below the age of 18, there's some serious questions to be asked about whether the risks from the vaccine outweigh the risks from COVID.
00:07:39.000Once you're under the age of 12, even the FDA won't authorize that for use under the age of 12.
00:07:44.000But as large an advocate of vaccines as I am, and I'm a huge advocate of vaccines, I'm probably the strongest advocate for vaccination on the right.
00:07:51.000And this has been true for years and years and years, like going back well over a decade.
00:07:56.000Despite that, I don't think that you should have to be vaccinated to work as a construction worker.
00:08:01.000I don't think that you should be, you should have to be vaccinated in order to work at a hotel.
00:08:06.000I don't think that that is necessary because again, the vaccine is available to all adults.
00:08:10.000And if those adults are particularly vulnerable, they should be wearing an N95 mask.
00:08:14.000And yet, the New York Times sort of let the cat out of the bag yesterday when they ran an article called, With FDA Approval, Pentagon and Others Add Vaccine Requirements.
00:08:21.000The idea here is that what the FDA approval really was about, it was really not about the full use authorization per se, because again, hundreds of millions of people have already had the vaccine.
00:08:31.000The full use authorization was about creating a leg for people who want mandates to stand on.
00:08:36.000Within hours of the announcement, the Pentagon, CVS, the State University of New York system, and the New York City school system, among others, announced they would enforce mandates they had prepared to carry out, but had made contingents on the FDA's action.
00:08:47.000One of the first and largest to move ahead was the Pentagon.
00:08:50.000Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had already received authorization from President Biden to mandate vaccines for all active duty troops once the vaccine was fully approved, and he was moving swiftly to put the plans into action.
00:08:59.000So the question is, What are the vaccines and the mandatory vaccines designed to do?
00:09:03.000And if the idea is that the mandatory vaccines are designed to prevent hospitalization and death, what you're really saying is that you have to have this treatment in order, you have to have this treatment to stop bad things from happening to you.
00:09:16.000Now, normally in a free society, We say that things that you do to yourself are kind of on you.
00:09:21.000We don't say you must do X in order to protect yourself.
00:09:26.000That is a pretty rare thing in public policy.
00:09:29.000So the other case that was made is that you need to get vaccinated so you're not passing on the disease to others.
00:09:34.000But again, all adults now have the capacity to protect themselves.
00:09:37.000And one of the things that we have learned over the course of the last several months is that even if you are vaccinated, there is a chance that you're going to pass this on to others.
00:09:44.000Which is why, of course, you have seen the CDC idiotically recommending that even after you're vaccinated, you need to mask up with other people who are vaccinated.
00:09:52.000Even though everybody who's vaccinated is going to get a mild cold or mild flu, statistically speaking, nearly everyone is going to get a mild cold or mild flu if they get a breakthrough case after having been vaccinated.
00:10:02.000But again, all of this is just a political excuse to cram down mandates and then to claim that the people who oppose the mandates are in favor of death.
00:10:12.000I know this because they've been playing this game for the last year.
00:10:14.000If you're Ron DeSantis and you said, let's protect the elderly, and if you're younger and you're healthier, if you want to wear a mask, go ahead and wear a mask.
00:10:21.000If you don't want to wear a mask, that's on you.
00:10:23.000But you got to take responsibility for what risk level you wish to assume in life.
00:10:27.000If you're Ron DeSantis or if you're the country of Sweden, you're bad and you want death, right?
00:10:31.000This is the case that the left has been making for a very long time.
00:10:33.000I don't see it ever ending, by the way, because I don't see any limiting principle here.
00:10:37.000The limiting principle, at least at the beginning, was we'll do this until we have a vaccine and everybody's had the opportunity to get it.
00:10:51.000There is no limiting principle at this point.
00:10:52.000There is no second vaccine around the corner.
00:10:55.000And the evidence on the booster shots, by the way, is relatively skimpy.
00:11:00.000The WHO, for example, does not recommend the booster shots.
00:11:03.000The WHO says that the booster shots may not actually increase your antibody response.
00:11:09.000The WHO is saying that there are serious questions to be asked about whether it actually prevents hospitalization and death to take a booster shot.
00:11:18.000And yet you have the Biden administration pushing universal booster shots, which is even crazier than what they've been doing pretty much everywhere elsewhere, right?
00:11:25.000There are some places, like Israel, where they've been doing booster shots, but they've really been pushing it on people who are older and more vulnerable first.
00:11:31.000In the United States, you had the Biden administration and the FDA recommending booster shots for everybody.
00:11:35.000The WHO is like, I don't know where you're getting any of that.
00:11:38.000In any case, this is all the predicate.
00:11:39.000It's all the predicate for talking about why you are bad, right?
00:13:01.000It has an extraordinary capability of spreading from person to person.
00:13:05.000And that's why the CDC is saying, even if you're fully vaccinated, if you're in an indoor situation in an area of the country, which essentially is the whole country with very few exceptions, then you should be wearing a mask when you're in an indoor situation with other people, not in your home, in a public situation, Indoor.
00:13:30.000You can get infected and have no symptoms at all and then inadvertently and innocently pass it on to someone else who is not vaccinated or is incapable of getting vaccinated.
00:13:41.000That's the reason for the CDC recommendation about masks.
00:13:44.000Okay, this is super anti-scientific, and what he is saying at the end is not a scientific question.
00:13:49.000What he's saying at the end is a public policy question.
00:13:50.000So, the notion that all masks are equivalent is a bunch of garbage.
00:13:54.000Mehdi Hasan is asking him about that, and Fauci just ignores it completely.
00:13:57.000Hey, the reality is blue surgical face masks do nearly nothing, according to a study from the University of Waterloo.
00:14:03.000The study shows N95 or KN95s do the best job of containing aerosol droplets from the wearer's mouth, but blue cloth surgical masks, which are popular because they are more comfortable.
00:14:13.000When I go out in public and I have to wear a mask, when I was in LA, for example, and they mandated it.
00:14:18.000Then I wore a blue surgical face mask.
00:14:34.000The study leader, Sergei Yarusevich, a professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering, said, quote, there's no question it's beneficial to wear any face covering.
00:14:43.000However, there's a very serious difference in the effectiveness of different masks when it comes to controlling aerosols.
00:14:50.000That study is being done by mechanically shooting the virus at the mask.
00:14:55.000It is not being done how people actually wear masks, which is you put the mask on, you take the mask off, you put the mask back on, you spit all over the mask, it's wet, you have more aerosol droplets now exiting because the mask is no longer dry.
00:15:06.000Yaroslavich and his team said many people wear masks that don't fit their faces.
00:15:10.000This causes the aerosol droplets to escape through multiple openings between a person's face and the cloth mask, which could spread COVID-19 in populous areas.
00:15:17.000By the way, even the N95 was only able to filter 50% of aerosol droplets.
00:15:24.000The other half is dispersed around the wearer's head.
00:15:26.000Nerocevic's team added that ventilation tests revealed even modest ventilation rates provide about the same level of protection as the highest quality masks.
00:15:35.000So if you have like a HEPA filter and some open windows, he's saying that provides the same level of protection as if everyone's wearing an N95.
00:15:44.000Earlier this month, of course, Michael Osterholm said on CNN that cloth masks basically don't do anything.
00:15:52.000Because how dare you contradict the science, which is not even science.
00:15:59.000So you've got Anthony Fauci recommending, and then when Anthony Fauci at the very end, he says, and if you're vaccinated, and if you get it, you could pass it on to somebody who you don't even know.
00:16:17.000And then he's like, and people couldn't get that.
00:16:19.000OK, well, if they can't get vaccinated and they are peculiarly vulnerable, they should not be out in public places in the first place or they should be wearing an N95 or both.
00:16:41.000What if somebody is handling your body?
00:16:43.000And it gets on the hands and then they put it in the eyes.
00:16:45.000And then they innocently pass it on to a child.
00:16:49.000What if you die and we put you in the grave and you don't wear a mask and now a tree grows its roots into your grave, into your body and now the virus explodes outward into the tree and it has fruit and the child picks the fruit and eats the apple and the apple has the COVID.
00:18:15.000And that natural infection has also created an enormous number of people who not only have antibodies, but T cell immunity.
00:18:22.000And one of the big problems with some of the studies that are now being done on the effects of the vaccine is that they are attempting to measure antibody levels.
00:18:30.000Antibody levels wane over time for pretty much every vaccine.
00:18:35.000The question is T cell immunity, which is harder to measure.
00:18:38.000So we've been using studies that measure antibodies, even though the real question is whether T cell, it's like your memory cells, whether your T cells actually have developed the immunity.
00:19:07.000You don't have tremendous antibodies running around your system for MMR because you currently don't have measles, mumps, and rubella in your system that your body is attempting to fight off.
00:19:16.000And by the way, you've had boosters on all of these shows.
00:19:18.000Like, everybody who's saying that boosters themselves are sort of an undercutting of the vaccine.
00:19:23.000When you're a kid, you have boosters all the time.
00:19:26.000And if you've had natural immunity, there's good evidence right now from Israel that natural immunity is actually superior to the vaccine-induced immunity if you have to choose between one and the other, for example.
00:19:36.000But again, so much of the crisis mentality is driven by the need for the political win.
00:19:41.000This is why you have Joe Biden trying to, yesterday, say, we need to mask kids.
00:19:46.000Hey, the data on masking kids does not exist.
00:20:54.000OK, it is untrue that your kids are at vast risk from COVID.
00:20:59.000361 kids under the age of 18 have died, according to the CDC, over the course of the last year and a half Okay, out of 73 million people in that subpopulation.
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00:22:29.000This is according to David Zweig from New York Magazine.
00:22:31.000Quote, the science of masking kids at schools remains uncertain, which is the reason why, for example, the UK, Ireland, Scandinavia, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy have exempted all kids, right, under the age of 12 particularly, from wearing masks in classrooms.
00:22:46.000Conspicuously, there is no evidence of more outbreaks in schools in those countries relative to schools in the United States.
00:22:52.000Not only that, basically this is all politics.
00:22:56.000The CDC released guidance saying that kids should wear masks and then the American Academy of Pediatrics said everyone in school over the age of two should wear masks.
00:23:06.000And then the American Academy of Pediatrics actually took down their own guidance on why kids need to see faces.
00:23:13.000This is how much the science matters to people in political positions.
00:23:17.000But as New York Magazine says, There was a study.
00:23:21.000It was published by the CDC and covered more than 90,000 elementary school students in 169 Georgia schools from November 16th to December 11th.
00:23:29.000It was the first to compare COVID-19 incidents in schools with certain mitigation measures in place to other schools without those measures.
00:23:36.000There was a provision in this study that said there was no difference between the schools that masked and the schools that didn't.
00:23:43.000They didn't bother to actually publish that finding.
00:23:45.000Instead, they did what they what is called file drawing.
00:23:48.000They didn't like the results, so they just buried it.
00:23:57.000They said masking of staff might have made a difference, which makes sense because adults are getting sick, but it made no difference with regard to kids.
00:24:03.000And yet you have Joe Biden saying you must mask your kids.
00:24:54.000If the goal is to protect them, then this is a free country, and you get to decide whether you want to be protected against a given form of disease.
00:25:01.000If the goal is to protect others, everyone else has had the same opportunity to get vaxxed that you or I have had.
00:25:08.000And yet here is Joe Biden trying to use the power of government to cudgel private industry to do his work.
00:25:14.000Today I'm calling on more country, more companies I should say, in the private sector to step up with vaccine requirements that'll reach millions more people.
00:25:25.000If you're a business leader, a non-profit leader, a state or local leader who has been waiting for full FDA approval to require vaccinations.
00:25:33.000I'm calling you now to do that, require it.
00:25:37.000Do what I did last month, require your employees to get vaccinated or face strict requirements.
00:25:43.000Okay, so he's actively calling on people to restrict other people in the United States.
00:25:51.000By the way, it is worth noting here that we were told that once you reached like 80% of people who are vaccinated in a given society, you would be on the verge of herd immunity, right?
00:26:00.000Herd immunity apparently really does not apply to the COVID Delta variant.
00:26:10.000According to ABC News in Australia, Life is set to be very different once 80% of Australians are vaccinated, but one country has shown the dangers of being too confident and throwing out the rest of the COVID toolkit.
00:26:21.000Israel, which has a population only slightly larger than New South Wales, reopened completely after reaching the 80% mark and took a giant step backward.
00:26:29.000Israel shot to an early lead in the race to vaccinate, inoculating its citizens at an eye-watering pace to deliver the world's fastest vaccine rollout.
00:26:36.000Around 78% of the eligible population are now vaccinated.
00:26:39.000But in recent weeks, Israel has been hit by a surprising resurgence of COVID-19, with seven-day average daily case numbers surging past 6,500.
00:26:48.000So bottom line is, if there is no return to normality based on the percentages of people who are vaxxed, then again, no limiting principle.
00:27:25.000That's according to Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, who's kind of a COVID hawk.
00:27:29.000I thought there was an indication that the South was peaking, and I think it's very clear right now the South has peaked.
00:27:35.000I mean, it doesn't feel that way because we still have a lot of new infections on a day-over-day basis, and the hospitals still have some very hard weeks ahead.
00:27:42.000They're going to continue to get maxed out even after the infections start to decline, but there's very clear evidence.
00:27:47.000You look at states like Arkansas and Louisiana, you see the cases coming down, but if you look at sites like covidestim.org, the RT, the rate of expansion of this epidemic, is below one in most of the South.
00:28:02.000You're not going to hear that from most of the media.
00:28:03.000The media is going to continue to do the COVID panic routine about the South.
00:28:07.000And then they're going to ignore the fact that the reason that there has been a COVID spike in the South is because it's very, very hot outside and we're all in crowded quarters, right?
00:29:20.000The truth is you're probably more, I think, significantly more likely to die in a car accident than you are to die skydiving.
00:29:26.000But, one immediately goes to, I'm jumping out of a plane.
00:29:29.000That sounds riskier than getting behind the wheel of a car.
00:29:31.000So, one is risky and one is not risky.
00:29:33.000In your mind, driving around every day is a risk factor of zero.
00:29:36.000In reality, your risk factor driving around is significantly higher, depending on your age bracket, and certainly post-vaccination, than your risk of dying from COVID.
00:29:44.000This is just statistically the reality.
00:29:47.000Post-vaccination, there's no question, you are significantly more likely to die in a car accident than you are to die from COVID-19 after you're vaccinated.
00:29:54.000And you see vaccinated people who have put living normal life in the category of very risky, living without a mask in the category of very risky.
00:30:03.000And so the question for those people is, okay, so the question, so when it comes to freedom, We all recognize in normal areas of life, sort of in the back of our mind, we recognize that there's a risk of death to freedom.
00:30:14.000Anytime you go to a ballgame, there could be a terrorist attack.
00:30:16.000Anytime you go out driving, you could get in a car accident.
00:30:19.000Anytime you walk out your front door, there's a risk of something bad happening to you.
00:30:22.000And we all accept that as part of normal life.
00:30:25.000And so the question is, how much risk are you willing to accept in order to continue normal life?
00:30:28.000And the answer is post-vaccination, you should be living your normal life.
00:30:32.000Post-vaccination, we should all get back to living our normal life post-vaccination because there is no alternative but to do so.
00:31:06.000In Australia, the answer is all of it.
00:31:09.000This should scare everybody in the West.
00:31:11.000In Australia, the answer is literally all the freedom.
00:31:14.000Australia is a country of some 25 million people.
00:31:18.000The Australian COVID death rates, day on day, are like three.
00:31:23.000Australia has been having about three deaths a day from COVID.
00:31:28.000They're having 800, 900 cases of Delta because it turns out you cannot just shield yourself behind Fortress Ocean forever, which is what Australia tried to do.
00:31:37.000For a year, Australia basically made it that you could not travel into Australia.
00:31:41.000They basically tried to have a plague city, right?
00:31:43.000They were just going to cut off all outside contact with the outside world.
00:31:47.000And then one person entered with Delta, and now they have an explosion in new cases.
00:31:52.000By the way, they did not bother to get everybody vaccinated because they were so confident in their ability to shut out the outside world that their vaccination rate in Australia... Remember, America's terrible for our vaccination rate, right?
00:32:03.000It doesn't matter that the vast majority of adults in the United States above the age of 18, like over 70%, have had the vaccine already.
00:32:10.000In Australia, the number of adults, the percentage of adults who have been vaccinated in Australia is about 25%, about one quarter.
00:32:16.000They have a huge, unvaccinated, vulnerable population.
00:32:20.000So because of that, Australia has decided they're going to crack down.
00:32:23.000And when they say they're going to crack down, I mean they are going to crack down.
00:32:26.000So here is a little bit of tape from Nine News in Australia talking about the measures they are taking.
00:32:32.000This is full authoritarian lockdown with no limiting principle in sight.
00:32:37.000There's little sympathy for anyone ignoring the health orders.
00:32:41.000Even this group of teenagers caught partying after dark at the bottom of the North Bondi cliffs.
00:32:49.000Herded to higher ground by Polaire's spotlight and speaker, the eight boys were placed in handcuffs and left to explain a thousand dollar fine to mum.
00:33:01.000681 penalty infringement notices issued in the last 24 hours.
00:33:04.000More than 400 of those notices were again for people being outside of their home.
00:33:25.000In fact, we were told yesterday on the program by a journalist from Australia that they have outlawed even saying things in favor of protests in Australia because that would be promoting breaking the law.
00:33:37.000So what kind of tyranny are you willing to undergo In order to never get back to real life and avoid all risk forever.
00:33:43.000And then you're going to have to ask another question, which is how much pressure are you willing to bring on the unvaccinated?
00:33:50.000In order to get them to vaccinate, again, in order to protect their own lives.
00:33:54.000There's a story on MSNBC that was making the rounds yesterday.
00:33:57.00075 doctors claimed that they walked off the job to protest the unvaccinated.
00:34:00.000In reality, that's not really what was happening.
00:34:02.000Apparently, what was actually happening is they exited the building to encourage people to get vaccinated, which is fine, right?
00:34:08.000You want to encourage people to get vaccinated, that's fine.
00:34:10.000MSNBC covered it as though these doctors were saying that they did not want to care for the unvaccinated.
00:34:17.000Here is a little bit of the tape from MSNBC.
00:34:19.000As I step out here, I can see they're all standing here in white jackets, some coming off of their shifts.
00:34:25.000Your thoughts about why it's gotten to this point that people are gathered like this?
00:34:30.000We feel that people think it's political, and it's not.
00:34:42.000And we're very passionate about it because we're honestly tired of seeing unvaccinated people come in sick and have to be admitted.
00:34:49.000Okay, so the way that the left covered this is their suggestion was that the doctors were refusing to care for the unvaccinated.
00:34:55.000And there was a lot of talk in the media about how we should be triaging in favor of the vaccinated over the unvaccinated, as opposed to triaging based on who's most likely to survive in a crisis scenario, which is usually how you triage, right?
00:35:06.000You actually look at the health conditions of the people underlying.
00:35:09.000Is it an 85-year-old with terminal cancer?
00:35:12.000Or is it a 30-year-old who's generally healthy but has the disease and now can be triaged?
00:35:17.000The attempt here is to suggest that people don't deserve medical care if they're unvaccinated.
00:35:24.000Now, I've said that if you're unvaccinated, that is on you.
00:35:27.000But it is also true that doctors care for everybody no matter how they got sick.
00:35:31.000If somebody wheels a person into the ER who was shot in a gang duel, in a bout of gang violence, the doctors don't say, well, you know, they kind of brought it on themselves.
00:35:39.000They were in a sort of gang violence scenario.
00:35:44.000If somebody comes in and they're morbidly obese and they've been told by their doctor for literally their entire life that they need to start eating healthy and lose weight and now they have heart disease, the doctor isn't like, well, I did tell you, you shouldn't do that.
00:35:55.000That is not how medicine is practiced.
00:35:56.000And I find it rather dystopian and scary that there are people on the left who are saying People on the left are saying this.
00:36:01.000They're saying if you're unvaccinated and you come into the hospital, the hospital shouldn't treat you.
00:36:05.000I'm amused to see, however, many people on the left say things like, if you come into the hospital unvaccinated, you should be responsible for your own medical bills.
00:36:49.000The real goal, of course, is to distract from the giant.
00:36:51.000The reason we're doing that this week right now, the reason we've upped the ante is not because the stats show that we should up the ante this week as opposed to like three or four weeks ago.
00:37:00.000The reason that we are doing this right now is because Joe Biden needs to redirect away from the gigantic failure we are currently experiencing in Afghanistan and the crisis that is likely to materialize over the course of the next week.
00:37:10.000We'll get to that in just one moment first.
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00:38:13.000Alrighty, if you're looking for an alternative to legacy media that actually values the truth, it's time for you to take a look at the Daily Wire Reader's Pass.
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00:40:39.000Okay, but Adam Schiff, Who can always be counted on to back whatever is the Democratic talking point of the moment?
00:40:45.000He did not when it came to Afghanistan yesterday.
00:40:48.000It was very unfortunate for the Biden administration.
00:40:51.000According to The Hill, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said it was very unlikely the U.S.
00:40:57.000will complete its evacuation of Afghanistan by the August 31st deadline.
00:41:01.000He said, quote, I think it's possible, but I think it's very unlikely given the number of Americans who still need to be evacuated.
00:41:06.000It's hard for me to imagine that all of that can be accomplished between now and the end of the month.
00:41:10.000I'm encouraged to see the numbers of people evacuating increasing readily to the point where we evacuated 11,000 people in a single day.
00:41:16.000Nonetheless, given the logistical difficulties of moving people to the airport and the limited number of workarounds, it's hard for me to see that could be fully complete by the end of the month.
00:41:25.000He said, I'm certainly of the view we maintain a military presence for as long as is necessary.
00:41:48.000It is one runway and the gates are not properly guarded.
00:41:51.000And the people who stand between ISIS and the Americans are the Taliban.
00:41:56.000And finally, Schiff admitted that the intel community knew from the beginning that the Afghan government was likely to collapse if the United States pulled out, and the Taliban was likely to take over, which means that Joe Biden was just lying.
00:42:10.000Intel committee member Jason Crowe, another Democrat, said, I do not believe at this point that I have any evidence of an intelligence failure.
00:42:16.000So, um, then it's just, then it's just Joe Biden's fault, which is why he has to distract.
00:42:23.000So Jen Psaki yesterday just gave an astonishing statement.
00:42:27.000She was asked by Peter Giussi about the Americans currently stranded in Kabul.
00:42:30.000Her answer was to play semantic games over whether they are actually stranded or not.
00:42:36.000I'm pretty sure that the Americans who are now being relegated to their apartments in Kabul and are deathly afraid of walking out the front door for fear they will be beaten by the Taliban and there's nobody coming to get them, they probably feel a little stranded.
00:42:58.000Does the president have a sense that most of the criticism is not of leaving Afghanistan, it's the way that he has ordered it to happen, by pulling the troops before getting these Americans who are now stranded.
00:43:19.000We are in touch with them via phone, via text, via email, via any way that we can possibly reach Americans.
00:43:25.000to get them home if they want to return home.
00:43:27.000There are no Americans stranded is the White House's official position on what's happening in Afghanistan.
00:43:33.000I'm just calling you out for saying that we are stranding Americans in Afghanistan when I said, when we have been very clear that we are not leaving Americans who want to return home.
00:43:50.000And she's like, no, I'm just, I'm just saying that we're going to go get them.
00:43:54.000That's like saying there were not men stranded on the beach at Dunkirk.
00:43:57.000Okay, they were, and then people went and got them.
00:44:00.000There are Americans currently stranded in Kabul.
00:44:02.000The question is, are you going to go out there and are you going to save them?
00:44:04.000Well, one of the questions that needs to be answered before you even get to that is how many Americans are there even in Kabul?
00:44:10.000Well, the good news is the American government has no damned idea.
00:44:13.000In fact, the American government is not even willing at this point to say how many Americans they've gotten out.
00:44:18.000They're giving you broad numbers as to how many people they've gotten out.
00:44:21.000A huge majority of those are Afghan nationals who worked with the United States, which is fine, but They are not willing to say how many Americans are among that group.
00:46:00.000If they won't even tell you how many Americans they've actually gotten out at this point, things must be going just spectacularly.
00:46:05.000Meanwhile, the Taliban has set a red line.
00:46:08.000The Taliban has said openly that if you stay beyond August 31st, then bleep gets real.
00:46:13.000Here's a Taliban spokesperson saying this yesterday to Sky News.
00:46:17.000If the US or the UK wanted to extend the 31st of August deadline in order to continue evacuations out of the country, would you agree to that?
00:46:32.000This is something you can say it's a red line.
00:46:36.000While there is no need for that, I think it will deteriorate the relation, will create mistrust between us.
00:46:45.000If they are intent on continuing the occupation, so it will provoke a reaction.
00:46:52.000And the bleep is about to hit the fan, because we're not getting everybody out by August 31st, and the Taliban have said that's the deadline.
00:46:58.000So, what is Joe Biden willing to risk here to get Americans out?
00:47:01.000We're about to find out in very short order.
00:47:03.000The military says he has one week to decide to extend the deadline, and that's it.
00:47:07.000And past that, they don't know what they can do.
00:47:09.000All right, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of The Ben Shapiro Show coming up soon.