Ben Shapiro asks the question, "How bad is the risk of getting the Ebola virus? And if so, what are the odds of you actually getting infected with it?" The answer is much higher than the chances of getting hit by a car or getting struck by a lightning bolt, and yet everyone is panicking about the possibility that you could die from it. Ben Shapiro is a conservative commentator and writer. He is the host of the conservative radio show "The Ben Shapiro Show" and is a regular contributor to the conservative media outlet Accuracy in the Middle East. His latest book, "Vaxxed" is out now, and it's available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and VaynerSpeakers. See link below for the link. The show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. For peace of mind wherever you go online, visit ExpressVpn.org/BenShapiro and use the promo code SHAPIRO for $5 off your first month of service. That's $5 and gets you an entire month of free voice mails, unlimited access to all the latest news and information, including access to the latest breaking news, including blogs, podcasts, and social medias, blogs, and blogs, plus hundreds of other valuable resources, including The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, NPR, and the New York Post. You can read all of these links below to sign up for a FREE copy of the show on your preferred version of The Ben Shapiro's newest book "Ben Shapiro's latest book "The Besties: How to Get Ridiculous in 2020." and much more! Learn more about your ad-free version of his new book "How to Deal with Ebola, How to Deal With It All of That." here. Watch the video version of "The Ebola Virus" here: bit.ly/Ben Shapiro s latest book: "Ebola Is a Virus That's Not Going to Kill You, You're Not Going To Die of It?" Subscribe to "The Virus Is Not a Threatened by Ebola? Watch this video on the Ebola Virus Is Real, Subscribe to The Virus Is There's No Threatening You'll Learn How To Fight It, Learn More About It's Real, Will It Will It's Not Killing You, Is It Really Killing You From Ebola, or Will It Help You Get Rid Of It? and Learn How to Protect It, or Learn About It, Or Not?
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00:01:50.000The media continued to proclaim that you were going to die of COVID because COVID was super-duper-duper scary, no matter the fact that if you were young, you had about 1,000 times less a chance of dying than if you were elderly in the United States, or that if you were obese, you had a far higher chance of dying than if you were healthy.
00:02:05.000There are very obvious striations in terms of risk when it came to COVID from the very start.
00:02:28.000But nobody lives their life in fear of lightning bolt.
00:02:31.000So the question is whether we are talking about a lightning bolt coming down from the sky, or whether we are talking about the chances they're gonna get hit by a car, Or whether we're talking about the chances that you're going to die of cancer over the course of your lifetime.
00:02:44.000And the media continually refuse to assess the risk.
00:02:47.000Well, now they're doing the exact same thing with Omicron.
00:02:51.000Omicron is supposed to be the scariest thing ever.
00:02:53.000And the reason that Omicron is super scary is because it is evading vaccines when it comes to preventing infection.
00:03:00.000And because it is really, really transmissible, and so everybody's going to get it.
00:03:03.000Now, your first question should be, when somebody says, you are about to get hit with a virus, your first question should be, okay, how bad is it going to be?
00:03:10.000That would be the normal first question, right?
00:03:27.000I probably won't even stay home from the office.
00:03:29.000I'm just going to take a little day quill and go into the office because it turns out that even if I give it to everybody else in the office and they all get the common cold, then whatever, man, because that's life.
00:03:37.000You know, we can't all live in a society together without some people getting mild illness sometimes, right?
00:03:43.000That's just a normal fact of everyday life.
00:03:47.000The media have decided that any time there is a mild illness that everybody is going to get, we are supposed to freak, we're supposed to freak out.
00:04:01.000New York City's COVID-19 positivity rate doubled in just three days as the city battles a virus surge ahead of the holidays.
00:04:11.000Dr. Jay Varma, a top health advisor to Mayor Bill de Blasio, tweeted Thursday, um, we've never seen this before in New York City.
00:04:17.000From December 9th to December 12th, the percentage of positive tests in the city spiked from 3.9% to 7.8%.
00:04:21.000Varma said this is SARS-CoV-2 evading both vaccine and virus-induced immunity against infection, unlike any variant before.
00:04:29.000Now notice, he's not saying that it is evading vaccine or virus-induced immunity against hospitalization and death, which is the thing you actually care about.
00:04:38.000Again, if I were going to tell you, That you already had COVID.
00:04:43.000That means that if you get COVID again, you're not gonna die, you're not gonna be hospitalized, you're gonna be sick for like a day.
00:04:46.000You're like, oh, okay, well, you know, that's life.
00:04:49.000But the way that they constantly conflate in the media, immunity against infection versus immunity against hospitalization and death.
00:04:58.000I don't care about being infected with the virus if it means that I have the sniffles.
00:05:51.000The measures that are being recommended right now by your public health establishment are completely disconnected from the conditions on the ground.
00:05:57.000They're completely disconnected from the data on Omicron.
00:06:22.000That study from Malaysia, the one that they're constantly citing about how effective masks are, and there are serious questions about that study in the first place.
00:06:50.000But again, the media have to push this thing like it's the end of the world.
00:06:53.000Positivity rates are rising, says CNBC, as the Omicron variant spreads.
00:06:57.000According to data released Wednesday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, New York and New Jersey are the two states with the most rapid spread of the newly identified variant.
00:07:04.000OK, by the way, this should show you that all of the government's talk about how lockdown measures are going to save us all.
00:07:09.000You notice two of the most locked down states still are New Jersey and New York in the country.
00:07:14.000They're also two of the states with the highest vaccination rates.
00:07:40.000I don't care about the politics of masking.
00:07:42.000I don't care about the politics of lockdowns.
00:07:43.000I don't care about any of the politics of it, because it's irrelevant.
00:07:46.000The question is going to be, how do you balance the everyday needs of Americans with the risk factors from the virus?
00:07:53.000And all balances were deemed verboten from day one by the media and by the government.
00:07:56.000If you said, we have to balance these two factors, how you live your life and the risks of the virus, they would say, no, no, no.
00:08:01.000You have to treat the risks of the virus, not only as completely outsized, like wildly out of proportion with what the actual risks of the virus are, you have to completely disregard any other associated costs.
00:08:13.000And if you don't do that, you're a bad person.
00:08:14.000If you don't do that, you want to kill grandma.
00:08:21.000Somehow people are still falling for this thing.
00:08:24.000Listen, if you are elderly, you should be scared of pretty much anything that is disease related.
00:08:31.000It's funny, I was at dinner last night with an ophthalmologist friend, and it's a really large practice, and he was talking, he gave me a statistic I found fascinating.
00:08:42.000The dirty little secret about medicine in the United States is that the people in the United States who die are old.
00:08:47.000Now, I know, that's a shock to you, but that is the reality.
00:08:49.000Whenever you hear that something kills a lot of Americans, understand that virtually everything we are talking about is a thing that kills a lot of old Americans.
00:08:56.000Because it turns out, as you get old, you get closer to death.
00:10:20.000Because there are a lot of people above the age of 65 who are 80.
00:10:24.000There are a lot of people above the age of 65 who are 90.
00:10:27.000So, yeah, that is not a shocking statistic, particularly.
00:10:30.000The reason this makes a difference, folks, is because when you are constructing systems for the entirety of humanity, when you're constructing systems that don't just affect 80-year-olds in nursing homes, but affect 30-year-olds at work or 5-year-olds at school, and you don't treat them differently, it's because you are doing bad public policy.
00:10:46.000It's because you're an ignoramus or you're badly motivated.
00:10:48.000Those are the only two possibilities here.
00:10:50.000It is certainly not driven by public health.
00:12:09.000Okay, here is the way usually COVID works.
00:12:11.000The way COVID works is usually you have a spike in cases.
00:12:13.000Then about two weeks later, or a week later, you have a spike in hospitalization.
00:12:17.000And then about three weeks later, or to a month later, you have a spike in death.
00:12:22.000So I'm looking at the South African stats right now.
00:12:24.000Okay, South Africa, started to spike in terms of cases, basically mid-November.
00:12:30.000So they went from their seven-day running average of cases being essentially 245, 275, somewhere in that neighborhood, in the beginning of November.
00:12:40.000And then in mid to late November, about a month ago, it spiked.
00:13:42.000The South African scientists said this at the time.
00:13:45.000The people who discovered the variant, we played clips of them on the show talking about how this thing was basically manifesting as a cold or asymptomatically.
00:13:54.000And yet we're going to go crazy anyway.
00:13:57.000And we're going to design public policy that is not rooted in anything remotely resembling reality.
00:14:02.000We'll get to more on this in just a second.
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00:15:21.000According to The Hill, a new study says that while the COVID-19 Omicron variant infects the human body 70 times faster than previous coronavirus strains, the infections appear to be less severe.
00:15:30.000Researchers from the University of Hong Kong's LKS Faculty of Medicine found that after 24 hours of infection, the Omicron variant multiplied in the human bronchus 70 times faster than the Delta variant and the original coronavirus strain.
00:15:44.000They also discovered that the Omicron infection in the lungs was significantly lower than the initial COVID-19 strain.
00:15:50.000Okay, well that would be the thing, right?
00:15:52.000If you look at, my wife was showing me x-rays of this the other day, what a typical Delta or original variant COVID patient with severe COVID ends up looking like.
00:16:01.000And the lungs are pretty heavily damaged, right?
00:16:03.000You can see the cloudiness of the lungs because this is a respiratory ailment.
00:16:09.000When people die of COVID, it's because they're having respiratory problems.
00:16:11.000Okay, well, if it's not affecting the lungs, who cares?
00:16:13.000You have like a mild cough, you have like a cold.
00:16:17.000The strain replicated in human lung tissue at a rate that was more than 10 times lower than the original COVID-19 strain, which suggests it may cause less severe illness.
00:16:28.000Super infectious, gonna be almost impossible to stop people from getting it because it is resistant to the vaccines in terms of infection.
00:16:37.000According to a study authored by more than 20 scientists at Columbia and University of Hong Kong, a striking feature of the variants is the large number of spike mutations that pose a threat to the efficacy of current COVID-19 vaccines and antibody therapies.
00:16:48.000Because the way that the vaccines were constructed is they were constructed to target spike proteins to resist infection, right?
00:16:55.000This particular mutation has evolved to become less deadly, but more infectious, which is very often how these viruses work, right?
00:17:02.000If you're a virus, and I understand viruses don't have brains, but if you are thinking in sort of the Richard Dawkins selfish gene notion, if these viruses are attempting to replicate, then the goal would not be to kill the host, it would be to get the host to infect as many human beings as possible.
00:17:16.000So that means that viruses tend to become more infectious and less deadly over time.
00:17:51.000So the body knows how to fight it now.
00:17:53.000Basically, vaccines do a couple of things.
00:17:55.000To prevent infection, they target the spike proteins that can prevent the infection, but they also train the body so that the body remembers how to fight the infection once the infection occurs.
00:18:05.000It's basically like a dojo for your body's immune system.
00:18:10.000We've seen that Pfizer, for example, the resistance rate to infection for two doses has dropped to like 33% for people with Omicron.
00:18:17.000So, you're probably going to get infected even if you have two doses.
00:18:21.000It also means that the resilience against hospitalization and death remains incredibly high.
00:18:27.000There is an article over at Medpage Today talking about the early data with regard to Omicron and how exactly the vaccines are responding to it.
00:18:38.000Two-dose series performs well in real-world analysis from South Africa's largest health insurer.
00:18:43.000An analysis by Insurer Discovery Health from the first three weeks of the Omicron wave showed 70% protection against hospitalization for those who received the two-dose series compared with the unvaccinated.
00:18:53.000Though that's a decline from the 93% protection seen during Delta, it's still regarded as very good protection, according to the report, which was published in a press release on the company's website.
00:19:02.000Protection against hospitalization was maintained across all people aged 18 to 79.
00:19:07.000There was slightly lower level of protection for those aged 60 to 69, about 67%, and 70 to 79, 59%, according to data shared during the briefing.
00:19:16.000Overall protection against infection fell to 33%.
00:19:19.000It means that there's a good shot that even if you're double-dosed, even if you're triple-dosed, that you will get infected, but the chances that you're gonna die are really low.
00:19:26.000And the reason they're low is because, number one, the disease itself is now less deadly.
00:19:29.000And number two, because you have retained prior immunity against actual hospitalization and death, which is the thing we used to care about.
00:19:37.000By the way, some monoclonal antibodies are still working.
00:19:42.000But it turns out, Regeneron said that it might not be as effective against the new variant, but data confirms it has diminished potency, but that's not true for AstraZeneca.
00:19:51.000So AstraZeneca said that their coronavirus antibody cocktail was retaining neutralizing activity against Omicron.
00:19:57.000And we'll get new data, I'm sure very soon, as to whether the Pfizer pill will still apply against Omicron.
00:20:02.000But again, Omicron is likely not going to kill you because most cases are like a severe cold.
00:20:07.000I'm gonna bring you that data in just one second again.
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00:21:26.000According to Professor Tim Spector, most cases now appear like a severe cold.
00:21:30.000Omicron appears to produce fairly mild illness.
00:21:34.000He's the chief scientist on the ZOE app, which is a major study that tracks COVID symptoms.
00:21:39.000He says the majority of infected people no longer have the classical triad of persistent cough, fever, and loss of smell and taste.
00:21:44.000He says his team has yet to gather complete data on Omicron symptoms, but initial findings suggest they are not much different from Delta, which already showed milder and more cold-like symptoms than previous variants as well.
00:22:40.000The CDC is suggesting that 18,500 people could be dying per week.
00:22:46.000The reason that they are suggesting this is because the thing is so infectious.
00:22:51.000So according to the Daily Mail, grim new figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have predicted that U.S.
00:22:55.000COVID-19 deaths will soar by 73% to 15,600 a week by January 8th.
00:23:01.000Cases will rocket to 1.3 million a week by Christmas Day.
00:23:04.000The agency revealed its projections on Wednesday afternoon that show America will suffer up to 15,600 new COVID deaths a week as of January 8th, or 2,200 deaths per day, a 58% increase from 8,900 deaths currently being recorded each week, which is equivalent to about 1,285 deaths per day.
00:24:23.000Really, you can mask everybody on Earth.
00:24:25.000And unless they're wearing N95s, You know, very, very strong particle filters.
00:24:30.000The chances that it's going to stop Omicron, which again is 70 times as infectious as Delta, and Delta was not even tested with regard to surgical masks.
00:24:42.000And I'm frankly kind of puzzled by the strategy here.
00:24:47.000By the way, in order to, before Omicron, because there's a study out by Aaron Prosser, Bartosz Helfer, and David Schreiner in MedRx, Okay, which is the preprint server for health sciences.
00:24:59.000They tried to analyze the number of unvaccinated people who would need to be excluded to prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmissions, right, for vaccine passports.
00:25:06.000This is before Omicron, which is way more infectious.
00:25:09.000Like so much more infectious that huge parties of people who are already vaccinated are getting it.
00:25:17.000So, this study suggests, this is before, remember, before Omicron, which is way more infectious, in order to prevent one infection, you would need to exclude 1,000 unvaccinated people.
00:25:27.000Quote, our study suggests that at least 1,000 unvaccinated people likely need to be excluded to prevent one SARS-CoV-2 transmission event in most types of setting for most jurisdictions, notably Australia, California, Canada, China, France, Israel, and others.
00:25:42.000So you'd have to exclude 1,000 humans who are unvaccinated to prevent one transmission.
00:25:46.000Now, what do you do with a variant that is way more infectious than Delta?
00:25:52.000Like really, are lockdowns likely to work?
00:25:55.000And once again, let me point out that if you are young, your chances of dying from Omicron if you're young are minute.
00:26:02.000By the way, even during the pandemic, during the pandemic itself, like the worst of the pandemic, if you were 18 to 49, you were now more likely to die of fentanyl overdose than you were to die of COVID.
00:26:15.000Families against fentanyl released some stats.
00:26:17.000They showed that between 2020 and 2021, nearly 79,000 people between 18 and 45 died of fentanyl overdoses.
00:26:25.000The number of people who died of COVID-19 between those ages, between the dates January 1, 2020 and December 15, 2021 was 53,000.
00:26:30.000So not only did more people die of fentanyl overdose between 18 and 45 during that date, it was like 50% more people died of fentanyl overdose.
00:26:37.000Between 18 and 45, during that date, it was like 50% more people died of fentanyl overdose.
00:26:42.000Out of the 800,000 Americans who have died of COVID-19, this means of the 800,000 people, the grand total number of people under the age of 46 who have died of COVID is about 54,000, right?
00:26:59.000Which again, it is heavily striated toward the elderly because death is heavily striated toward the elderly.
00:27:06.000But instead of figuring out, okay, what do we need to do to theoretically protect the elderly more?
00:27:11.000Instead, they're still trying to push lockdowns.
00:27:13.000Here's Joe Biden's spokeswoman yesterday.
00:27:17.000Karine Jean-Pierre, saying we can't rule out more lockdowns.
00:27:21.000Of course you can't, because you kind of want them.
00:27:23.000You've made a box and now you can't get out of it.
00:27:25.000You suggested you were going to end COVID.
00:27:29.000And yet you have to maintain the myth.
00:27:32.000As it relates to shutdowns, which is what I was trying to convey to Jeff as he asked me this question, look, you know, we've been very clear.
00:27:42.000Our public health experts have been very clear.
00:27:46.000We know what works and we're going to continue to do what works, which is making sure that, you know, we do everything we can to get folks vaccinated.
00:27:54.000We're at 71% of people being fully vaccinated.
00:27:57.000That's a huge difference to where we were a year ago, as I just stated.
00:29:03.000The fact that more people are going to get Omicron does not change that.
00:29:06.000In fact, theoretically, Omicron is a better thing to get than Delta.
00:29:10.000I mean, as an individual, not on like a broad nationwide plane because more cases lead to more absolute deaths, but on an individual level, your personal chances of dying from Omicron are apparently significantly lower than your personal chances of dying of Delta.
00:29:22.000So if you're going to get one of these diseases anyway, you may as well get Omicron.
00:29:25.000You're going to have to You're going to get one of them.
00:29:31.000Omicron replacing Delta on a broad statistical level is a good thing if everybody's going to end up with Delta anyway.
00:29:39.000Nonetheless, Joe Biden continues to push the idea that it's boosters and boosters and the unvaccinated are the true risk.
00:29:44.000Again, the unvaccinated were at risk from COVID.
00:29:48.000Depending on your age, it was either a high risk if you were elderly or a fairly low risk if you were 20.
00:29:54.000The unvaccinated were and they are currently at the exact same risk, maybe a lower risk now if you're unvaccinated.
00:29:59.000Because again, if you're unvaccinated and you get Omicron, it's way milder.
00:30:02.000So maybe you are at like a way lower risk than you were with Delta.
00:30:05.000So in other words, Omicron replacing Delta, if you were if you were like driven to get a vaccine, like driven, driven, driven, not.
00:30:12.000Sorry, if you were driven not to get a vaccine, like you really didn't want to get a vaccine.
00:30:16.000And the reason that you didn't want to get a vaccine is not because you were afraid of infection, but you felt like the infection was going to be less problematic for you than the vaccine, and this is why you didn't get the vaccine.
00:30:26.000Or you felt that you already had COVID, and that means that you have T cell and B cell immunity.
00:30:31.000If that was your logic, Omicron not only does not change your logic, it exacerbates your logic.
00:30:37.000Because if you're one of the people who didn't get the vaccine because you were afraid that the vaccine was more severe than Delta, and Omicron is less severe than Delta, by the transit of property, you should now be less afraid of not getting the vaccine than you were before.
00:30:52.000The only reason that you were interested in getting the vaccine was to evade the consequences of the disease.
00:30:58.000If Omicron is less deadly than Delta, then the math on why you should get a vaccine is actually worse, not better.
00:31:10.000The logic has not changed for the people who are unvaccinated, which is part of the problem.
00:31:12.000Again, if you want to get vaccinated, you should get vaccinated.
00:31:14.000If you don't want to get vaccinated, I may think you're wrong, but you have that right in the United States.
00:31:19.000But Joe Biden is going to continue to push this.
00:31:20.000He says the unvaccinated are looking at a winter of severe disease and death.
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00:34:09.000Alrighty, we'll get to more on this in just one moment because again, Everybody is rushing to the cameras and the microphones to announce policies that make no sense.
00:34:45.000It's completely different than anything I've ever done.
00:34:47.000Instead of me just interviewing somebody in sort of probing fashion, which is what you'll get on the Sunday special, it's something different.
00:34:53.000It's how I actually talk with my friends, who happen to be some of the most famous and influential people.
00:36:35.000And yet, you have the NFL has announced a return to universal masking and other protocols amid COVID-19 outbreak.
00:36:41.000The NFL said, throughout the pandemic, we have continuously evolved our protocols to meet our goal of advancing the safety of the players, coaches, and staff.
00:36:48.000The changes we are making today aim to address the increasing cases and the advent of the Omicron variant.
00:36:54.000They say effective immediately, all clubs will implement preventative measures that have proven effective.
00:37:36.000And again, they're just going to keep pushing it.
00:37:38.000So you got ESPN's Jeff Van Gundy saying the NBA is going to have to pause or bubble.
00:37:42.000These are the healthiest human beings on planet Earth, and they're going to have to bubble or pause because people are getting mild colds in South Africa.
00:38:55.000So question, who's going to support all the people who are sitting in their homes because they're afraid of COVID, which is not going to kill them if it's Omicron and if they are not?