The Charlie Kirk Show - Exposing the Ignorance and Evil Behind the “Pandemic” with Alex Berenson

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk Show, Alex Berenson, author of a very important new book, All the COVID Thought Crimes You Can Fit into One Episode, Vaccines, Lockdowns, Testing, All of It.

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00:01:36.000 Buckle up. 0.96

00:01:36.000 Alex Berenson is here. 0.96

00:01:38.000 Here we go.

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00:02:40.000 Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:02:42.000 I have been wanting to do this interview since March of 2020, but good things come to those who wait, I suppose.

00:02:48.000 Alex Berenson is with us, who I am a huge admirer of.

00:02:51.000 He is an honest, courageous, fact-first individual who is the author of a phenomenal new book called Pandemia, How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights and Lives.

00:03:02.000 Alex Berenson, in a prior life, was a reporter for the New York Times, a financial fraud reporter, and author of Tell Your Children the Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.

00:03:15.000 But we are here to talk about pandemia.

00:03:17.000 Alex, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:03:19.000 Well, thank you so much for having me.

00:03:21.000 And so, Alex, let's just start with the whole kind of theme of the book and your journey with this topic.

00:03:25.000 Let's start there, which is please.

00:03:28.000 The floor is yours.

00:03:29.000 It's interesting because you mentioned that I wrote about financial fraud for the Times, and I did, but for a number of years, I covered the drug industry.

00:03:38.000 And I think that that actually really informed a lot of pandemia and certainly my coverage of the vaccines in the last year.

00:03:47.000 Because it really taught me about the complexities of what drug companies do and the way they can manipulate clinical trial data and science without lying, but manipulate it in ways that really work to their advantage and to the disadvantage of the public.

00:04:02.000 But even going back before that, because I was a reporter who focused on finance, very sort of numbers heavy, I was not a political reporter.

00:04:10.000 I was not really a personalities reporter.

00:04:14.000 When I started to see stuff that didn't add up in terms of what the government was reporting, and not so much, it's not like I'm saying the government made up data.

00:04:23.000 What I'm saying is the way the data was presented was fundamentally untrue.

00:04:29.000 And so I had the confidence to speak out about that on Twitter from sort of very early on, from late March 2020.

00:04:36.000 And it made me, I guess, a prominent voice in the anti-lockdown community.

00:04:42.000 And it also made me hated by the people who I had worked with at the New York Times because, I mean, honestly, I think they viewed me as a class traitor.

00:04:49.000 I had these opinions that people who, you know, who they worked with weren't supposed to have.

00:04:54.000 Yeah, so let's just start there.

00:04:56.000 I mean, February 2020, you were like investigating marijuana and other things.

00:05:02.000 And then the virus comes and you just decided, I'm going to start looking into this.

00:05:06.000 And I started to come across your stuff on Substack where, you know, Aaron Ginn, who you might know, is another guy that was really into it in the early days.

00:05:15.000 And I was so outspoken about the lockdowns.

00:05:18.000 And I was, we were really into it because I really had nothing else to do.

00:05:20.000 Everything was locked down.

00:05:21.000 And I'm by no means an expert, but just my common sense instincts that something's wrong.

00:05:25.000 And you were so informative and so courageous early on.

00:05:28.000 Walk us through that because you probably never planned to be center stage of one of the most important medical issues that humanity's ever faced.

00:05:38.000 No, I certainly didn't.

00:05:40.000 And, you know, I was working on a book about really about U.S. drug policy that would have been, and I hope to write one day still, a follow-up to tell your children sort of broadly about this, you know, the epidemic of legalization, the sort of very broad campaign to legalize drugs that we've seen, and not just cannabis, but really all drugs that we've seen in the last 10 or 15 years.

00:06:03.000 And so I was working on that.

00:06:06.000 And then, of course, like everybody else, I saw the videos coming out of China.

00:06:09.000 I think we were all pretty nervous back in January and February.

00:06:13.000 And then, you know, in March 2020, and I do, I talk about this in pandemia, I've read that Neil Ferguson report, the Imperial College London report that said, oh, if we don't do anything, 2 million Americans will die.

00:06:24.000 But even worse, if we do mitigate a million Americans will die and we need to really lock down on society.

00:06:32.000 And within days, that started to happen in New York and California and everywhere else.

00:06:37.000 And then amazingly to me, Neil Ferguson totally changed his prediction.

00:06:43.000 10 days after releasing this report that really shocked the world and pushed the United States and Europe into lockdowns.

00:06:50.000 He basically said, oh, you know what?

00:06:51.000 I was wrong.

00:06:51.000 I was wrong by 95%.

00:06:53.000 Did I say 500,000 deaths?

00:06:55.000 I meant 20,000.

00:06:56.000 Okay.

00:06:57.000 So look, the science or the data was evolving very fast around the coronavirus back at that time.

00:07:04.000 And everybody's got the right to look at new data and change their views.

00:07:09.000 But what was shocking to me was that the media was not willing to acknowledge what Ferguson had done.

00:07:15.000 And so I tweeted this out and Elon Musk, you know, who was a coronavirus skeptic from the very first, retweeted it.

00:07:21.000 And then Donald Trump Jr. retweeted it.

00:07:23.000 And all of a sudden, I'd started with 7,000 followers.

00:07:27.000 I think by the end of within a month, I had 100,000.

00:07:30.000 And it just sort of took off from there.

00:07:32.000 And, you know, people I knew, you know, at first they were like, look, you got to just, you know, understand what's happening in New York City.

00:07:41.000 Bad things are happening.

00:07:42.000 You don't want to come across as callous. 1.00

00:07:44.000 And very rapidly that curdled into, you're just a jerk. 1.00

00:07:47.000 Forget you. 1.00

00:07:48.000 We don't want to hear what you have to say.

00:07:50.000 You are burning your bridges with the New York Times.

00:07:52.000 You know, not that I ever plan to work there again anyway.

00:07:54.000 I have been out for 10 years, but good luck getting a job in journalism.

00:07:58.000 It will be only Fox that will have you.

00:08:00.000 And I was sort of like, you know what?

00:08:01.000 I don't care what you say.

00:08:03.000 I know what this data is saying.

00:08:05.000 And I know that the hospitals in New York City are not collapsing.

00:08:10.000 And meanwhile, the hospitals in the rest of the country were empty.

00:08:13.000 I was like, we have numbers on this, and what you're reporting does not match them.

00:08:18.000 And I'm going to just keep saying that.

00:08:20.000 I don't care if you don't like it.

00:08:21.000 Yeah.

00:08:22.000 And so, Alex, let me just ask you a side question with that.

00:08:25.000 Why do you think the media was unwilling to adjust?

00:08:29.000 Is there a, there's a couple explanations from the most cynical to sinister.

00:08:35.000 What's your belief?

00:08:36.000 So I go into this in the book and I think that, you know, there are a couple of legitimate explanations.

00:08:41.000 One is that New York is obviously the home of a tremendous amount of the media, tremendous concentration of media.

00:08:48.000 And New York was hit hardest and first in the United States.

00:08:51.000 And so, and so I think it was pretty scary in New York in late March into early April.

00:08:57.000 And it was, and it was hard for people to see, you know, that it wasn't as bad as it looked, and that some of the wounds were self-inflicted with what was happening in the nursing homes.

00:09:07.000 And that, you know, New York has a pretty terrible public hospital system anyway that's bad at the best of times.

00:09:12.000 And so, so I think, I think that was hard.

00:09:16.000 And then the more cynical explanation is these people knew it was terrible for Donald Trump.

00:09:20.000 It was clear from the beginning that if the epidemic continued, it was going to be very hard for him to be reelected.

00:09:27.000 You know, he, first of all, it crashed the economy.

00:09:29.000 And second of all, it doesn't play to his strengths, right?

00:09:32.000 He's not an empathetic guy.

00:09:34.000 And I say this in the book.

00:09:35.000 He's a lot of things, some good, some bad, but he's not empathetic and he wasn't good.

00:09:40.000 And he said some things that really came back to haunt him.

00:09:43.000 And so the media really tried to run up the score on him.

00:09:48.000 And in doing so, they frightened a lot of people.

00:09:50.000 And it was very hard for them to back out.

00:09:52.000 But let's pull back even further.

00:09:55.000 That doesn't explain what happened in other countries.

00:09:58.000 And that doesn't explain why the sort of hyped crisis continued after Joe Biden won and took office.

00:10:06.000 And I think we don't fully understand that.

00:10:08.000 We don't really understand the dynamics at play and why the media has not just given up its watchdog role, but become a propaganda arm of the government and the WHO.

00:10:18.000 And we see it now with vaccines where they won't ask really basic questions about vaccine safety and efficacy.

00:10:24.000 And why that is, I mean, I don't know, Charlie, your guess is as good as mine.

00:10:28.000 I don't want to be conspiratorial, but it becomes hard not to ask that question or not to wonder.

00:10:34.000 Yeah, I'm just processing all this because it's these people have a lot of power and they have a responsibility to tell people the truth.

00:10:46.000 As we celebrate the Christmas season, we often pause to consider our many blessings.

00:10:50.000 Hillsdale College wishes to thank you for standing with them as they celebrate over 177 years of blessings.

00:10:56.000 Since 1844, the Beacon of the North, the last college, Hillsdale College, has held fast to its mission to provide the kind of education essential to preserving free government.

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00:11:10.000 Perhaps you receive in Primus for every month, or have taken one of Hillsdale's excellent online courses or attended one of Hillsdale's free regional events.

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00:11:35.000 So during the season of blessings, Hillsdale thanks you for partnership in extending its mission to the country.

00:11:40.000 To learn more about Hillsdale College and take their online courses, the Aristotle course, the Winston Churchill course, the Dying Citizen course, which I'm about to wrap up with Victor Davis Hansen.

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00:11:54.000 For parents out there, require your children to take at least one Hillsdale course before they get any Christmas gifts.

00:12:00.000 You see, I'm a very big fan of parents withholding good things unless kids do the necessary things.

00:12:08.000 Kids shouldn't just get Christmas gifts because they exist.

00:12:11.000 They should get Christmas gifts because they've earned them.

00:12:14.000 And by earning them, they need to take Hillsdale online courses to learn about Western civilization, learn about God, learn about Genesis, the book of Genesis, the Constitution, and more.

00:12:23.000 Charlie4Hillsdale.com, Charlie F-O-Rhillsdale.com.

00:12:30.000 So I want to just reiterate the book title, Pandemia, How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government Rights and Lives.

00:12:38.000 So let me ask you a broad question and we can kind of navigate it.

00:12:42.000 Has there been any evidence to show that the death count?

00:12:47.000 Is there a difference of dying with COVID or because of COVID?

00:12:50.000 Is there truth to that line of questioning?

00:12:54.000 So this is an interesting one.

00:12:56.000 And this is one where, you know, I think like because I'm not, you know, sort of a conspirator, conspiracy theorist, my view on this is quite a bit more nuanced than, you know, than it's made out to be.

00:13:06.000 And you, and you may have read or you may have heard, oh, only 6% of people who, you know, died from COVID actually died from COVID, you know, the CDC says.

00:13:15.000 And that's not true.

00:13:16.000 Okay.

00:13:16.000 What the CDC said was there were no underlying conditions in 6% of people.

00:13:22.000 Here's the thing.

00:13:23.000 COVID definitely killed a lot of Americans and people around the world last year and this year.

00:13:27.000 We know that because, and I go into this in the book, overall deaths were up quite a bit last year in the United States and Europe and in other parts of the world.

00:13:36.000 I mean, they weren't up nearly as much as the, you know, as you would think if you'd watched CNN and MSNBC all the time, but they were still up.

00:13:42.000 A couple million people died from COVID last year.

00:13:46.000 And, you know, 60 million people die worldwide, a couple million from COVID.

00:13:49.000 So it's a real killer, but it isn't, you know, it isn't a top five killer.

00:13:53.000 Here's the other thing.

00:13:54.000 And this is the most important lie about COVID that was told from the very beginning.

00:13:59.000 Most of those people were very old and very sick.

00:14:04.000 And many of them who weren't very old or very sick were morbidly obese, meaning their life expectancies, in many cases, they might be three months, six months, a year, two years.

00:14:14.000 The idea that COVID strikes down people, not just in the prime of their lives, but sort of healthy 60-year-olds, is just not true.

00:14:22.000 I mean, look, can it happen?

00:14:24.000 Yes, it happens.

00:14:25.000 But so when people say, oh, you know, there were all these people who had car accidents and they, you know, they're listed as COVID deaths because they happened to have COVID at the time they died.

00:14:35.000 That's not really true.

00:14:37.000 But what people are trying to get at is this idea that most of the people who died from COVID were very sick and would have died soon anyway.

00:14:46.000 And let me give you a personal example of this because my dad last year, he died of leukemia and he was in New York City.

00:14:52.000 Okay.

00:14:53.000 He'd had leukemia for a couple of years and, you know, and as it goes with leukemia, he seemed to be battling it.

00:15:00.000 And then at the end, he took a sharp turn down and he died.

00:15:02.000 And that was in May of 2020.

00:15:05.000 He could easily have contracted COVID in April and he would have been listed as a COVID death.

00:15:12.000 And he would have died from COVID, but he would have died a couple weeks in this case earlier than he did die.

00:15:20.000 And so a lot of that happened in the United States in the last 18 months.

00:15:27.000 And we may never know the number.

00:15:29.000 The problem, though, is that the numbers were being used to impact policy and then create your word.

00:15:37.000 Hysteria is the right thing, right?

00:15:39.000 Because if all of a sudden the legitimate death total is 80% lower, then that doesn't justify the type of reaction.

00:15:49.000 Or if once you understand who's dying, you have to ask yourself, why are we sacrificing children and their schooling and young adults and forcing them to stay home so they get depressed?

00:16:02.000 And, you know, and business owners who've put their lives into, you know, whatever.

00:16:06.000 It could be a small little business that's, but it's theirs, dry cleaning or whatever.

00:16:11.000 And we've taken that from them.

00:16:13.000 And at best, we are helping people who are very sick live a couple extra months.

00:16:18.000 And look, does that mean we should be callous?

00:16:21.000 No, we should not be callous.

00:16:22.000 We should do what we can to protect those older people, but we need to understand the choices that we're making and that the trade-off is real.

00:16:30.000 And we were never having a mature conversation about this, right?

00:16:35.000 We were never having a conversation.

00:16:37.000 We know everything in life is a choice.

00:16:39.000 We know that when you get an automobile, it's a choice.

00:16:41.000 We know if you buy a home with a pool, it's a choice.

00:16:43.000 And those choices are that if you have an infant, that infant might go into the pool and die.

00:16:48.000 That's a real thing that happens a lot in this country, more than people are comfortable with, right?

00:16:53.000 Life is a series of cost-benefit analysis.

00:16:57.000 But the whole conversation, Alex, that frustrated people like me, not a scientist, whatever that means anymore, is that we were never being honest about the risks that are just embedded with daily existence.

00:17:10.000 You're absolutely correct.

00:17:11.000 And you make an interest, I mean, when you say not a scientist, those choices aren't really in the realm of science.

00:17:18.000 They're in the realm of politics and of leadership and of choices we make as a society.

00:17:23.000 Yes.

00:17:24.000 And the analogy that I've used about this, and I don't use it in the book, but I kind of wish I had is, you know, Oppenheimer and those scientist and those brilliant scientists during World War II created, you know, the atomic bomb, but they didn't choose to drop it.

00:17:38.000 Harry Truman dropped it.

00:17:39.000 That was a political and military decision.

00:17:42.000 Not a scientific decision.

00:17:42.000 That's such a great question.

00:17:44.000 And Fauci should never have been granted the power that he was.

00:17:48.000 And, you know, Donald Trump's, you know, his greatest mistake in this was not saying, I'm in charge and these are hard choices.

00:17:56.000 You don't get to make them.

00:17:57.000 I'll make them on behalf of the country.

00:17:59.000 I totally agree with that.

00:18:00.000 And I think that putting Fauci on a committee and just kind of just putting him off the pasture would have been the best thing, right?

00:18:06.000 That you make him one amongst 30, right?

00:18:08.000 Like this is our COVID committee.

00:18:10.000 They don't get press availability and they could issue us a letter, right?

00:18:14.000 I'm not sure, but see, Trump would have had to deal with the fallout, the media fallout of that.

00:18:20.000 And I don't know that he could have.

00:18:23.000 I mean, remember how crazy it got in, you know, sort of March through June.

00:18:29.000 There was a moment when they even tried to sideline Fauci a little bit and the media went crazy.

00:18:34.000 No, I know, but I think I agree with that.

00:18:36.000 All things being equal, outside of, I don't think he should have fired him, just to be clear.

00:18:40.000 I think he could have put him among, make him one among 20, right?

00:18:46.000 That, oh, we now have a whole committee because I think firing Fauci would have turned him into a public relations martyr that would have been on television every day.

00:18:55.000 I told you, I told you, I told you, I told you, right?

00:18:59.000 And so there could have been a strategy there.

00:19:00.000 So I want to ask you another part of this, which is one of the things that I think Trump deserves credit for was his original instincts.

00:19:08.000 His original instincts was about treatments, not vaccines and not lockdowns.

00:19:14.000 And I remember being on the phone with Mark Meadows issuing, you know, a word I'd never heard before.

00:19:20.000 It was called hydroxychloroquine, never heard of it before, right?

00:19:23.000 That it was working other parts of the world.

00:19:25.000 And I wasn't the only one.

00:19:26.000 Other people were telling the White House this.

00:19:27.000 Trump got word of it.

00:19:29.000 He said, and it was very rational question.

00:19:31.000 Wait a second.

00:19:32.000 If there is an anti-malarial that could potentially help, why don't we tell people about it?

00:19:38.000 Alex, talk about how we had one of the most, I would say, nearly diabolical campaigns against the conversation when it came to treatments.

00:19:49.000 So I mean, it's interesting because hydroxychloroquine, unfortunately, probably does not work very well against COVID.

00:19:55.000 But that doesn't mean that there wasn't good evidence to support testing it, you know, and testing it thoroughly.

00:20:02.000 And it's the same thing now with ivermectin.

00:20:04.000 Ivermectin may or may not work against COVID, but it should have been tested by the NIH and by sort of American scientists in a way it has not been.

00:20:13.000 And there's three or four other drugs that I could mention that fall in that category that are older, that are cheap and off-patent and widely available.

00:20:22.000 And there's really no reason that they shouldn't have been tested except that, you know, Fauci seems to be totally in love with vaccines and expensive new therapeutics.

00:20:30.000 And so, and so Donald Trump, it's interesting you say it because, look, Trump, I think actually in some ways, Trump's scientific instincts actually were not bad here, but his political instincts were terrible.

00:20:41.000 So he'd say things like, you know, I don't want to let those people on the cruise ship off because it'll make the numbers look worse.

00:20:47.000 And, you know, he got beaten over the head with that.

00:20:49.000 And, you know, and rightly so.

00:20:50.000 But at the same time, he was saying, I think that the, you know, the death rate is actually lower than we realize because so many people who get this don't get really sick and aren't counted in the case counts.

00:21:01.000 Guess what?

00:21:02.000 Donald Trump was right about that.

00:21:04.000 And he was right very early about that.

00:21:07.000 And you're right.

00:21:08.000 Like his gut about therapeutics was correct.

00:21:12.000 And it looks to me now like therapeutics.

00:21:14.000 And there's a new Pfizer drug, which if the numbers hold up will work, you know, that it works quite well.

00:21:20.000 That could help get us out.

00:21:22.000 Maybe some of these older off-patent drugs, if we ever test them properly, we'll find they can help get us out.

00:21:28.000 But you're right.

00:21:28.000 Once Trump said hydroxychloroquine, it became, there was a campaign, a coordinated campaign, not just in the media, but in some of the best scientific journals in the world to prove that it didn't work.

00:21:40.000 And in fact, they embarrassed themselves.

00:21:42.000 They published data based on a fake data set, the Lancet, which is again a tough journal 2020, just in an effort to prove that Donald Trump was wrong.

00:21:53.000 So I mean, let me pull back even further again.

00:21:58.000 People on the left say, well, you know, how did this get politicized?

00:22:02.000 Everyone's entitled to, you know, views about masks or everyone's entitled to, you know, we shouldn't politicize a discussion of the vaccines.

00:22:11.000 Okay.

00:22:11.000 I agree.

00:22:12.000 Like people are entitled to their own opinion about masks and people are entitled to look at the data about vaccines and try to make a decision.

00:22:20.000 Hey, maybe this isn't good for my kids.

00:22:22.000 Maybe it's good for my, you know, my elderly mother.

00:22:24.000 I'm in the middle somewhere.

00:22:26.000 I'll try to figure it out.

00:22:27.000 It's not the right that is saying don't have that conversation.

00:22:31.000 The left is saying, we are going to make you do this.

00:22:36.000 They are turning a medical discussion and a scientific discussion into a political discussion.

00:22:41.000 It is the left and not the right that has politicized this.

00:22:48.000 I recently received a question from a listener.

00:22:49.000 She wanted to know if it was possible to avoid digestion problems by eating only healthy organic food.

00:22:54.000 It was a nice thought, but unfortunately, it's just not possible.

00:22:57.000 You see, your natural ability to digest food declines with age.

00:23:00.000 This is because your body produces fewer enzymes.

00:23:03.000 Proteins responsible for digesting food.

00:23:05.000 Fewer enzymes mean more difficulty digesting food.

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00:24:10.000 So now I want to transition towards, and you cover this in the book, Pandemia, about the vaccine, right?

00:24:16.000 Because that's a whole separate kind of element to this, which is, okay, we shouldn't have locked down.

00:24:22.000 We should have had honest reporting.

00:24:24.000 We should have had a focus on therapeutics.

00:24:26.000 We should have been honest about legitimate ways to mitigate.

00:24:30.000 We never talked about natural immunity, but then we all of a sudden had the rollout of the vaccine.

00:24:35.000 I was a skeptic from the very beginning for a variety of different reasons.

00:24:41.000 But Alex, you've been so good on actually saying, wait a second, this vaccine might not actually be doing what they say it's doing.

00:24:50.000 There might be some adverse events.

00:24:51.000 Talk just broadly about the vaccine, because this right now is considered to be like the most forbidden topic to discuss in America right now.

00:25:02.000 It is.

00:25:03.000 And frankly, I've been disappointed in the right on this.

00:25:06.000 And I've been disappointed in sort of, you know, the people I called Team Reality who, you know, who are very willing to look and question lockdowns and question masks and question school closures.

00:25:15.000 And when the vaccine came out, it was as if they just, everybody just wanted this to be over.

00:25:20.000 I totally agree with you on this, by the way, 100%.

00:25:23.000 You know, if we have to get a couple shots, so be it.

00:25:26.000 And people, you know, if people are afraid to question science sort of broadly, they're really afraid to question drug development and discovery.

00:25:33.000 And so, and so here's, here's where my being a reporter for the Times and having covered these companies really mattered.

00:25:42.000 One of the most important aspects, and this was very early on, this was before any of the more recent questions about the vaccine.

00:25:49.000 One of the most important things you do as a drug company is design your clinical trials.

00:25:53.000 And if you have a new product, whether it's, you know, it could be a new antidepressant or a heart medicine or whatever it is, they spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to figure out how to design clinical trials that will make their drug look the best and give it the best chance of approval.

00:25:53.000 Okay.

00:26:10.000 And that doesn't always mean, by the way, the most honest design.

00:26:14.000 It means the design that's going to work the best to get the drug approved.

00:26:18.000 And what you saw with the vaccines was the companies, Pfizer and Moderna, ran these huge clinical trials.

00:26:27.000 Okay, that's good.

00:26:27.000 We want a huge clinical trial.

00:26:29.000 But in these 40,000 person clinical trials, 30,000 in the case of Moderna, there were a literal handful of people who were at high risk of death from COVID.

00:26:40.000 In other words, most of the people in the trials were under 65 and a few were between 65 and 75 and a tiny number were 75 and over.

00:26:50.000 Okay.

00:26:50.000 If you want to know whether these vaccines actually protect people from severe disease and death, you have got to give it to these older people who are at high risk of severe disease and death.

00:27:02.000 And by the way, that's why we know the monoclonal antibodies work because we tested those in older people.

00:27:07.000 They went to nursing homes and they enrolled people who could actually die from COVID.

00:27:13.000 And so the companies did not do that.

00:27:16.000 The regulators did not make them do that.

00:27:18.000 And you can go back.

00:27:19.000 Well, you can't go back because Twitter has now banished me.

00:27:21.000 And this is something else in the book about how new media and old media have colluded to suppress dissension, not just around vaccines, but especially around vaccines.

00:27:30.000 But you can go back, or I can go back and look at my tweets from November 2020 and see tweets that are positive about the vaccines.

00:27:40.000 As I said, this looks really good.

00:27:41.000 This table looks really good.

00:27:43.000 And it was only when I realized that there was this fundamental flaw intentionally in the clinical trial design that I started to become suspicious of the vaccine.

00:27:54.000 And unfortunately, my suspicions grew over time as I looked at sort of the preclinical work that had been done, as I looked at the FDA and EMA, the European Medicines Agency briefing books, as I looked at some of the papers that had been written.

00:28:09.000 And then as we saw that congruent with the rollout in Israel, and Israel and the UK were the first two big countries, the first two Western countries to roll out the vaccines, they saw huge spikes in infections and deaths in that first couple of weeks after the first dose, which the media would not talk about.

00:28:28.000 And I thought to myself, look, these things, the overall benefit may still be great for people.

00:28:34.000 Although, even by then, I was really questioning whether or not mandates made sense.

00:28:39.000 But why can't we talk about what's actually happening here and what some of the risks are?

00:28:43.000 And that's where I've really been ever since.

00:28:46.000 And unfortunately, after a brief period of time, which I, you know, on my sub stack, I call the Substack, we haven't really talked about, but it's this platform that I went to following my banishment from Twitter.

00:28:58.000 And I have a newsletter there called Unreported Truths that people can go see.

00:29:02.000 But on my sub stack, I started to call this the happy vaccine valley, that there's this period where after the second dose, where you do have a lot of antibodies and you can see cases and infections go down, you know, basically everywhere.

00:29:16.000 Unfortunately, that period does not last.

00:29:18.000 Within a couple of months, the vaccines start to fail, their efficacy fails.

00:29:23.000 And so that's why there's this desperate push for boosters to sort of temporarily amp up antibodies again, which unfortunately, and the good news is that actually does work to amp up your antibodies.

00:29:35.000 The bad news is nobody, not even the companies, has any idea what the long-term effects of repeated dosing is going to be.

00:29:43.000 So my view has gotten more negative over time, but it really began in December 2020 when I realized that the clinical trials didn't say what they seem to say.

00:29:53.000 And there's so many different components that I'd like to unpack with you.

00:29:56.000 We could go to the adverse events, which are legitimate, that people are experiencing adverse events to these vaccines, and we're not allowed to talk about it.

00:30:03.000 And I just want to be very clear.

00:30:05.000 And just for your sake, Alex, and the audience knows this, I've been completely uninterested in the vaccine topic my entire life.

00:30:12.000 I've always been approached by people with big binders. 0.99

00:30:15.000 People were trying to come on my show.

00:30:16.000 It was never for me.

00:30:17.000 Do you know what I mean?

00:30:18.000 It was just like, it's really not a big deal for me.

00:30:22.000 And I've totally changed my opinion on that, obviously.

00:30:25.000 Not that I'm against it.

00:30:26.000 I'm just curious why I can't talk about it.

00:30:29.000 Why is it I know people in my own immediate circle that can't walk anymore after they got the vaccine?

00:30:34.000 People are dropping dead mysteriously.

00:30:37.000 Alex, when I go to a turning point USA event, we just did one in Tucson, Arizona.

00:30:41.000 We did one in Alabama.

00:30:42.000 And I ask the room, I say, raise your hand if you or someone you know personally has had an adverse event, a serious adverse event to the vaccine.

00:30:50.000 Every hand goes up.

00:30:51.000 Now, that's a lot different.

00:30:53.000 Let's pretend half of them are lying, right?

00:30:56.000 That's a scandal.

00:30:58.000 And so talk a little bit about that, Alex.

00:31:00.000 What's going on with the adverse events to the vaccine?

00:31:02.000 Is it overblown or is there something really here?

00:31:05.000 No, I don't think it's overblown at all.

00:31:07.000 I mean, you know, it's the vaccine fanatics, as I like to call them, will say, oh, well, VARES, which is the vaccine adverse events reporting system, which is the U.S. database of adverse events.

00:31:19.000 We don't know.

00:31:20.000 Those are unverified.

00:31:21.000 Anybody can submit, maybe people are making fake reports.

00:31:24.000 There's actually very, very little evidence of any substantial number of fake reports.

00:31:29.000 And in fact, it appears to be the other way around: that this routine adverse events simply are not reported to bears because at this point, there are so many of them.

00:31:37.000 And then, even if you look at really severe adverse events, and this was very interesting because you know, there's this, the Johnson and Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines can cause this very rare, but sometimes deadly, very unusual clotting, especially in young women who get vaccinated.

00:31:55.000 And when the UK, so the UK picked up on this and they had a few cases and they said to doctors, you need, we're going to require, legally require you to report all the cases you see.

00:32:07.000 And within a few weeks, they've gone from, and I, and I don't want to quote the numbers exactly, but it was something like 15 cases to 100 or more cases.

00:32:16.000 And so, what that said to me was, even for this very unusual event that was very serious, that doctors would be inclined to report, there was substantial under-reporting of cases.

00:32:28.000 And the UK system is just like bears.

00:32:30.000 You're supposed to report these events, but it's voluntary.

00:32:33.000 So, you have a system that's a little bit clunky to use, and you have a system that's voluntary for providers and certainly for patients to use.

00:32:41.000 It's not going to pick up on a lot of events.

00:32:43.000 And the truth, Charlie, is we have better systems, okay?

00:32:46.000 We have what you know, the U.S. is not as good at this as countries that have sort of national health care and national identifiers.

00:32:54.000 You know, there's lots of problems with those things, but one thing they do let you do is track hospitalizations post-vaccination better.

00:33:01.000 But we do have electronical medical, I'm sorry, electronic medical records, and we have big databases.

00:33:06.000 And if we wanted to, we could search those databases and really look for what, you know, whether within, let's say, a month of vaccination, there were an excess in heart attacks.

00:33:18.000 Okay.

00:33:19.000 And we could look at a population of 10 million people.

00:33:22.000 You said, so what you do is you say you look at those 10 million people the month before vaccination, you look at them the month after vaccination.

00:33:29.000 Do you see any excess in heart attacks in the month after compared to the month before?

00:33:34.000 And if so, that doesn't prove the vaccination caused the heart attacks.

00:33:37.000 There could be other explanations, but that's a signal.

00:33:40.000 And that work basically is not being done in the United States.

00:33:45.000 And again, it looks, and that's, you know, that's why stories like yours, that's why people I think are increasingly scared.

00:33:53.000 They, they, all they have is these anecdotes, and the media is telling them that what they're seeing with their own eyes is not real.

00:34:00.000 And if we, you know, if we weren't so terrified of doing a real cost-benefit analysis of the vaccines, we could.

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00:35:02.000 Yeah, and that would, again, require challenging this incredible monolith that is these vaccine companies that pay a lot of bills for a lot of important people.

00:35:13.000 They sponsor news segments.

00:35:15.000 They have, they have an incredible, I mean, when you're, when you're able to mandate something for every human being in the Western world, you're going to have a lot, you know, that you could distribute.

00:35:25.000 And so, of course, it's a money incentive, obviously.

00:35:28.000 And here's an amazing fact.

00:35:30.000 These are the most profitable product in the history of medicine.

00:35:34.000 They may be like next to the iPhone, the most profitable product ever made.

00:35:39.000 And we're not even allowed to question it, right?

00:35:42.000 Which is, which is what's so interesting is that.

00:35:44.000 And I'm open-minded about this stuff.

00:35:46.000 I'm trying not to be dogmatic.

00:35:47.000 I obviously like markets.

00:35:49.000 I like entrepreneurs.

00:35:50.000 I don't like scam artists.

00:35:52.000 Where are all of these, like the Elizabeth Warren types that are trying to like price gouging? 1.00

00:35:57.000 And like, maybe they're not saying what they're, their whole shtick is about like corporate malfeasance, right?

00:36:03.000 That's a great question.

00:36:04.000 Where'd they go?

00:36:05.000 I don't know.

00:36:06.000 And I've never been on either side of it.

00:36:08.000 I think that anyone could act corrupt.

00:36:10.000 I obviously think generally markets are good, but I just, I would appreciate like a little bit of, you know, like table pounding by the, you know, that whole, you know, anti-capitalist wing of the party.

00:36:21.000 I think it would actually be interesting, but they're totally silent on this.

00:36:25.000 So, Alex, I want to be respectful of your time.

00:36:26.000 It's pandemia, how coronavirus hysteria took over our government rights and lives.

00:36:31.000 I want to get to this five minutes remaining because we have so many parents and kids that are misled on the weed issue, right?

00:36:37.000 On marijuana.

00:36:38.000 They're like, oh, it's so cool.

00:36:39.000 Marijuana is great and all of this.

00:36:41.000 You wrote a phenomenal book.

00:36:44.000 And I got about halfway through it.

00:36:45.000 And it's just terrific.

00:36:47.000 And the title, I want to make sure I get the title right though.

00:36:49.000 You could tell us the title here.

00:36:50.000 It is.

00:36:51.000 Sure.

00:36:51.000 It's tell your children.

00:36:53.000 Tell your children.

00:36:55.000 And let me, before even you ask a question about this, I want to say something about tell your children because I think it's actually very important.

00:37:00.000 And I talk about this a little bit in pandemia.

00:37:03.000 What I saw with the response to tell your children helped me understand what was happening with the media's response to the pandemic, which is to say, look, you can read Tell Your Children and think, you know what?

00:37:16.000 Yeah, there are going to be some people who have bad reactions to cannabis.

00:37:19.000 It happens.

00:37:20.000 Plenty of people drink too much.

00:37:22.000 And sometimes those people get in car accidents and die and alcohol is legal.

00:37:26.000 So be it.

00:37:27.000 You can think that.

00:37:29.000 I don't agree, but you're welcome.

00:37:31.000 I mean, that's a totally natural response.

00:37:33.000 Okay. 0.96

00:37:34.000 And you can think, you know what, there's too many black people who get their lives ruined because they got arrested smoking a joint on the street.

00:37:40.000 Again, it's that that's somewhat exaggerated, but it does happen.

00:37:43.000 Let's be honest.

00:37:44.000 Okay.

00:37:45.000 That was not the response to tell your children.

00:37:47.000 The response was, this guy's making this up. 1.00

00:37:50.000 He's an idiot. 1.00

00:37:51.000 He doesn't understand correlation and causation. 1.00

00:37:54.000 He doesn't understand how to read scientific papers.

00:37:56.000 And this was from people who never read the book.

00:37:58.000 And then the second response was, we're just not going to let him off.

00:38:02.000 So NPR had me, you know, scheduled for an interview.

00:38:05.000 They canceled it.

00:38:06.000 The Times where I had worked didn't review the book.

00:38:09.000 Other places, you know, didn't review the book.

00:38:12.000 And so what that told me was: if you step out of line on an issue that is important to sort of the, you know, the propaganda instincts of the media, the a politically important issue on which there's a lot of groupthink, you are going to have an impossible time breaking through, no matter how good the science.

00:38:34.000 I have to interject for a second.

00:38:35.000 What a weird issue to like blacklist you on, though.

00:38:38.000 It's marijuana legalization.

00:38:41.000 Like, really?

00:38:42.000 Like, that's the one that they're going to kick you off NPR?

00:38:45.000 It's not like all of a sudden you were going to go after like the transgender issue, right?

00:38:49.000 I mean, no, I think, well, it's really funny you say that.

00:38:53.000 One of the saddest things that I heard in 2019 was David Remnick, okay?

00:38:58.000 The editor of The New Yorker, one of the great, you know, the great men of American journalism and a real journalist, okay?

00:39:07.000 He's interviewing a New Yorker writer who's about 30 years old. 0.97

00:39:12.000 And he's basically kissing her butt about cannabis and sort of giggling when he asked her about it. 0.87

00:39:20.000 And I thought to myself, you're David Remnick. 0.98

00:39:23.000 You don't have to do this.

00:39:24.000 But like, this is a way for middle-aged white men to make believe that they're cool.

00:39:30.000 And there's nothing.

00:39:30.000 I totally agree with you.

00:39:32.000 There's nothing less cool than saying you don't like pot.

00:39:35.000 You know, it's very weird.

00:39:37.000 Well, no, it's this like weird social currency.

00:39:40.000 Like, I'm going to be allowed into the party because I think all the kids should be able to do psychedelic laced weed at age seven or whatever.

00:39:50.000 So that's true.

00:39:51.000 So in short, we have two minutes remaining.

00:39:54.000 Talk about some of the findings from the book.

00:39:56.000 Is marijuana everything we're told?

00:39:58.000 We're told it's not harmful.

00:39:59.000 It's perfectly fine.

00:40:01.000 You know, it actually has all these benefits.

00:40:03.000 What did your research, not your opinion, what did your research conclude?

00:40:08.000 Listen, 20% THC cannabis, much less the pure sort of stuff you vape or wax or the wax you smoke or the or the or the oil you vape.

00:40:19.000 No, this is an incredibly powerful intoxicant.

00:40:22.000 It has psychedelic properties.

00:40:26.000 And the idea that it's medicine in any way, shape or form is total nonsense.

00:40:33.000 It's medicine the same way alcohol is medicine, right?

00:40:35.000 You know, like you, during Prohibition, there were doctors who would write prescriptions for alcohol.

00:40:40.000 First of all, there were people who were addicted to alcohol and couldn't function without it.

00:40:44.000 But can alcohol help reduce pain slightly?

00:40:47.000 Yeah, it can dull your pain, but it's not.

00:40:49.000 It's not medicine and neither is cannabis.

00:40:51.000 And so that's A. B.

00:40:53.000 So if you're going to use it, know why you're using it.

00:40:55.000 You're using it to get high.

00:40:57.000 As somebody joked to me two years ago, the condition that cannabis treats is called not being high.

00:41:03.000 And so that's A. B, is it harmful?

00:41:07.000 Yeah, it's harmful.

00:41:08.000 Now, it's not physically harmful the way alcohol is, although some people get this very weird syndrome called scrommeting, where they wind up with uncontrolled vomiting after using it for long periods of time.

00:41:22.000 But it is certainly harmful to the brain and it can cause psychotic episodes.

00:41:27.000 I mean, people who use joke about it.

00:41:30.000 You know, I had a bad trip.

00:41:31.000 I wound up in the ER because I got really paranoid.

00:41:33.000 Well, those are psychotic episodes.

00:41:35.000 And if you wind up using a lot, especially if you start when you're young and you have a, you know, you might have a family history of mental illness, you are substantially increasing your chances for real permanent mental illness.

00:41:49.000 And that is devastating.

00:41:51.000 I say this and tell your children, it would be much better to get lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking than get schizophrenia after five years of using pot because schizophrenia is a terrible disease.

00:42:02.000 I completely agree.

00:42:03.000 I don't know if you ever talked to Joe Rogan about this.

00:42:05.000 If you have, I you have?

00:42:06.000 I gotta.

00:42:07.000 Yep.

00:42:07.000 Because I'm sure he has a difference of opinions.

00:42:10.000 I would love to see that clip because he's obviously very pro-marijuana.

00:42:13.000 But what was his reaction to?

00:42:15.000 We should talk to him about it because he, although he likes, you know, he likes using cannabis, he's well aware that can have this effect.

00:42:21.000 Okay, good for you.

00:42:22.000 He's honest.

00:42:22.000 I mean, he's always been team reality on all these issues.

00:42:25.000 And so I would expect him.

00:42:27.000 I would just think he would have a different, I think he'd say, oh, the costs outweigh the, you know, the benefits outweigh the costs.

00:42:32.000 Alex Berenson, pandemia.

00:42:34.000 Also, go buy the weed book.

00:42:35.000 Tell your children, you know, you have one of the great scams happening in America is all these conservatives.

00:42:41.000 You're like, yeah, it's the cool thing.

00:42:42.000 It's not that bad.

00:42:43.000 They have no idea what they're talking about.

00:42:44.000 No idea.

00:42:45.000 It will destroy lives.

00:42:46.000 Pandemia, Alex Berenson, how coronavirus hysteria took over our government rights and lives.

00:42:50.000 Alex, thank you so much for joining us.

00:42:52.000 Can't wait for the next time.

00:42:53.000 Thanks, Charlie.

00:42:54.000 Talk to you soon.

00:42:57.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:42:59.000 Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com and come to AmericaFest, tpusa.com slash AMFBSD.

00:43:05.000 Use promo code Charlie for 25% off.

00:43:10.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - December 08, 2021

Exposing the Ignorance and Evil Behind the “Pandemic” with Alex Berenson

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