Tucker: Politicians can't part with the enormous amount of power they amassed
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host explains why the nation is confused about latest COVID guidance
Have you been reading the news recently? How would you describe to your grandchildren the moment we’re living through?
If you’re looking for a single snapshot that perfectly distills the pure, hallucinogenic absurdity of the moment we’re living in, consider the Biden administration’s new guidance on COVID. We learned yesterday that America’s children will spend yet another year with covered faces. This, despite the fact that masks are demonstrably terrible for kids, and kids face no meaningful threat from coronavirus. Doesn’t matter. The White House says kids have to mask up. And so they will.
We also learned yesterday that the administration will force federal employees to take the COVID vaccine. This mandate will start with government health care workers. Some of these health care workers – for reasons that no one has bothered to explain – have so far refused to get the shot.
But now, Kamala Harris will make them. Ponder that for a moment. Willie Brown’s girlfriend is claiming she knows more about medicine than doctors and nurses do. She’s an expert on the subject. So, by the way, is her 78-year-old business partner, the one who seems adrift in fantasy a lot of the time, and tends to nod out in mid-sentence. He’s a medical expert too. He explained that, once you’ve had the vaccine, you don’t need to wear a mask.
JOE BIDEN: I think it’s a great milestone. A great day. It’s been made possible by the extraordinary success we’ve had in vaccinating so many Americans so quickly. … When your country asked you to get vaccinated, you did. The American people stepped up. You did what I consider to be your patriotic duty. That’s how we’ve gotten to this day. … If you’ve been fully vaccinated, you no longer need to wear a mask. Let me repeat: If you are fully vaccinated, you no longer need to wear a mask.
"Let me repeat: If you are fully vaccinated, you no longer need to wear a mask." And we believed that. It made sense. That was the settled science just two months ago, in May. Only Russian spies and White supremacists questioned that science. Of course, you don’t need a mask once you’ve had the vaccine. Why would you? The COVID vaccine is a miracle, like the moon landing. It’s foolproof. It’s all you need. We actually believed that, because why wouldn’t we? It made sense.
And then we saw something very strange Kamala Harris and her husband – whose name is either Doug or Douglas, depending on the source – kissed each other in public with masks on. And this is strange because we knew that both had been vaccinated. That’s when we started to wonder. Either this was some sort of weird fetish ritual they’re into – get the mask, it’s time to kiss! – or else the White House wasn’t telling us everything about the vaccine. They’re still not telling us everything, but yesterday they dropped more clues.
The administration now says that all people, including people who have been vaccinated, will have to wear masks, but only depending on where they live. If you’re in something called "high or substantial COVID" region, prepare to put on your mask. What does that mean exactly? For the answer, we turn to the man who helped to create COVID in the first place.
FAUCI: The recommendations and guidelines have been changed to say If you are vaccinated, even though you are vaccinated when you are in an indoor public setting in an area of the country with a high degree of viral dynamics, namely the red and orange sections on the CDC chart, then you need to wear a mask even though you are vaccinated.
Well, that makes total sense. Of course, you’re required to wear a mask, even if you’ve been vaccinated, depending on where you live. Well, how do you know if you live in one of those places? According to Dr. Fauci, just check the "red and orange sections on the CDC chart." Oh, right! The chart you keep in your wallet next to your AAA card. Look carefully and you’ll see the "red and orange" account for more than 60% of the entire country.
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Union County, Oregon, for example, is on that map. It’s got a population of 25,000 people. It’s small, it’s pretty, people who live there think it’s nice. The CDC calls it dangerous. That’s strange, Union County hasn’t had a single COVID death in nearly two months. But be sure to wear your mask if you wind up there if you dare.
Same with Washington, D.C. It was a "red and orange zone" as of yesterday afternoon. Officials in D.C. report just two people have died of COVID in the past two weeks. But it doesn’t matter. The administration will be requiring mask use there anyway. According to Willie Brown’s girlfriend, that’s science.
But is it? The numbers in the U.K. have been low since April, but what’s interesting is that they've stayed low, even after the British government lifted its mandatory mask mandate. Huh, that’s weird.
As one economist who studies the subject at J.P. Morgan put it, "the current delta wave is turning out to be much, much milder than we anticipated." Oh, wow, that sounds like good news. Has anybody told the politicians? Don’t bother, they don’t want to hear it.
But don’t tell the politicians that. In Los Angeles, officials brought back the mask mandate when COVID cases moved up so slightly it's hard even to measure the rise on a chart. That's the so-called "spike" they cited as justification is barely noticeable on a chart. Do politicians in Los Angeles know something we don't know? We can't be sure. We do know, fairly certainly, the news media are lying about science in order to justify the new restrictions. Why would they want to do that? We have no idea.
But here’s one example: In Florida, the Sun-Sentinel newspaper recently ran this headline. "New COVID cases nearly double in Florida – the worst in the nation." Holy smokes. Better run to Georgia.
And to show how scary this is, they included a chart that shows an uptick in positive test results, and it looked terrifying. But those are the test results. But actually, who cares? What matters is the harm. What they didn't include is the chart showing COVID deaths. I wonder why? Because those are near zero. That’s a very different picture, and it’s the one that actually matters.
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It wasn't long ago that all of us understood that. People like Tony Fauci, in fact, told us the goal was keeping people from dying from COVID. That sounded reasonable to everybody. That’s why they said we needed the vaccine. That’s why millions took the vaccine. Now that they have taken the vaccine, politicians have decided that actually, they can’t part with the enormous, unprecedented amounts of power they’ve amassed over the last year, so they’re going to keep ordering us AROUND, regardless of the science. And of course, Tony Fauci will defend it all, because in the end, he’s one of them.
FAUCI: Something has changed and what has changed in the virus. The CDC hasn’t changed and the CDC hasn’t really flip-flopped at all.
Yeah, no flip-flops at all. They’ve been totally consistent. If it looks like we’ve repainted the slogans on the side of the barn – all animals are created equal but some more equal than others – it’s all an illusion. No flip-flops.
In the past year, Tony Fauci has gone from telling us not to masks, they’re totally useless, and plus doctors need them, to wear masks, or you will die, to wear three masks, or you will die, to don't wear any masks at all, to now, you’d better wear masks. Now he’s telling us he’d never flip-flopped on masks.
YouTube had better get to work tonight deleting those previous videos, or else we’re going to have a lot of trouble believing Tony Fauci. The bottom line, whether you believe Fauci or not, is that this is getting very confusing. This is an administration that has told us they’re in charge of our health, and in charge of fighting this global pandemic. They’re not doing a good job explaining what the science is.
In fact, they’re doing such a bad job that even Kamala Harris doesn’t know what to think. Here she is just yesterday, contradicting her own administration’s guidance by explaining that once you get vaccinated, you don't have to wear a mask.
KAMALA: People need to get vaccinated. That’s the only way we’re going to cut this thing off. Nobody likes wearing a mask. Get vaccinated.
You don’t have to wear a mask if you’re vaccinated, says the vaccinated lady who’s wearing a mask. Does your head hurt yet trying to follow this? It might be easier to stop thinking entirely and just obey. Maybe that’s the real message. On the other hand, it's possible the administration's guidance is so all over the map, so lacking in scientific substance, and so confusing that Kamala Harris can’t understand it, despite her medical background.
Rochelle Walensky is an actual doctor. She's the director of the CDC. She went to Harvard. She’s never been elected to anything, but in a pandemic like this, her word is law. It’s more powerful than anything Congress produces. She’s her own federal agency. In fact, on a continuum, she sits somewhere between king and God. So read carefully as Rochelle Walensky tells you that COVID is killing twice as many children as influenza.
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WALENSKY: I think it’s really important for people to understand that this is not a benign disease compared to other diseases our kids see. If you look at the mortality rate of COVID, just this past year for children, it's more than twice the mortality rate that we see in influenza in a given year.
So, you’re not supposed to question that, and we didn’t really dare to check those numbers, because who are we to check the numbers from an unelected federal bureaucrat when she’s commanding us to obey. So we didn’t, we just took it at face value.
But a columnist called Phil Kerpen, who’s a columnist and had some free time, decided to check the CDC numbers on what the CDC director claimed on CNN.
What did he find? He found that the CDC director has no idea what she’s talking about.
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From 2019 to 2020, according to the CDC, a total of 124 children died of COVID. From 2020 to 2021, 213 children died of COVID. By comparison, influenza killed more than 400 children just last year. In fact, that was not an abberation. Influenza has killed far more children than COVID has in each of the past five years. It's not even close.
And that's assuming the CDC's numbers on child deaths from COVID are accurate, and it looks like they’re not. In a recent report, the CDC itself acknowledges it could be vastly over-reporting the number of children who are dying from COVID. The CDC report states that, when considering everyone who died of COVID, roughly 2.5% of those who died had a co-existing medical condition unrelated to their deaths. But for children under the age of 18, that number is dramatic – over 35% of children who died from COVID had what the CDC calls an "unrelated medical condition."
In other words, more than a third of children who are listed on the official records as dying from COVID had comorbidity that the CDC assures us cannot possibly be connected to COVID. But it appears, upon closer examination, the comorbidities might in fact be related to the deaths of those children.
Now, we’re going to pause here, and say, why are we getting so precise about these numbers? Because these numbers are being used to justify putting a mask on your third grader for an entire year at school. What’s the effect on a child of doing that, of sitting in a classroom full of people whose faces he can’t see, of breathing cotton fiber for 10 hours a day, every day. They’re profound. These numbers matter.
For every other age group, these sorts of co-morbidities are much rarer. That makes sense when you consider that COVID is much less dangerous for children.
Joseph Allen, a scientist who works on The Lancet's COVID committee, found that "Three major studies over the past year all found the risk of death to be in the range of 1 in 100,000 to 1 in 1 million. Hospitalization rates for school-aged kids younger than 12 (the group that can’t get vaccinated yet) hovered around 3 or 4 per million throughout the pandemic."
If you need perspective those are extremely low numbers – much lower than the CDC director just proclaimed.
Dr. Marty Makary, at Johns Hopkins, found a "mortality rate of zero among children without a pre-existing medical condition such as leukemia."
So, in the face of those numbers, which they are lying about, they’re saying that kids should wear masks and be forced to get the COVID vaccine.
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But Rochelle Walensky doesn't care. She is instead leading the charge for more mandates, for both children and adults. According to Wolensky, we need vaccine passports to make sure that people who aren’t vaccinated can't go outside or make a living.
JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: I know they are doing it in Europe, you are not CDC director of Europe, which I’m sure you’re happy about. They are issuing health passes where you can go to a disco, or a discotech they like to call it, if you have a health pass. Is that something that the CDC would ever lean into? Or perhaps advise here?
DR. ROCHELLE WALENSKY, CDC DIRECTOR: You know, I think some communities are doing that. And that may very well be a path forward.
That may very well be a path forward. Where are the people who are going to protect us against this? This is insane. Who is going to get up and say so? No one so far. Instead, the floor is left to Rochelle Walensky and people like her: manipulators of data and liars.
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"We need vaccines immediately, everybody should be forced to get one." If there's one message that's been consistent from this administration, it's that. The Biden administration's lackeys in the media are pushing the same message.
Max Boot of the Washington Post, the dumbest columnist ever to work at that newspaper, just explained the "progressive" case for forced vaccinations on Twitter.
"Words I never thought I'd write: Saudi Arabia is being more progressive than America," Boot wrote. "Saudis will need to show proof of vax to enter schools, shops, malls, restaurants, concerts, public transport."
Oh, that’s progressive. Forcing people to take medicine they don’t want to take. By the way, the vaccination rate in Saudi Arabia is far lower than the vaccination rate in the United States. But they’re more progressive, somehow.
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But the bigger question is: If the vaccine works, why are so many vaccinated people getting COVID? It's not just happening to Democrats who flee Texas.
It’s happening to a lot of people, probably people you know. Most of them are fine, but not all of them, and they’re still getting COVID. Piers Morgan tested positive for COVID-19 after taking both doses of the Astra-Zeneca shot in the U.K.
Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Christian Yelich also tested positive after getting vaccinated.
A medical assistant from Minneapolis called Jummai Nache had to have her legs amputated after receiving the second dose of Pfizer's vaccine.
And in New Orleans, a 33-year-old fully vaccinated business owner named Angelle Mosley just died of coronavirus.
Why did this happen? We don’t know. We’re not Rochelle Walensky. We’re not going to make up stuff if we can’t actually answer it. But it’s becoming really clear the science is slightly more complicated. It doesn’t mean the vaccine doesn’t work or it’s not worth taking. But don’t lie to us. It doesn’t always work. You know people who’ve gotten COVID after getting a double vax. Again, it doesn't mean it’s not worth taking, but stop lying to us.
If you want us to have confidence in your medicine, then tell us the full truth. But they won’t. They've been telling us for six months the vaccine is perfect. But clearly, in some cases, it doesn’t work. Don't take it from us. That's not our theory. Take it from the man who created COVID himself.
FAUCI: Now, that we have a delta variant, that has changed the entire landscape. Because when you look at the level of virus in the nasal pharynx of a vaccinated person who gets a breakthrough infection with delta, it is exactly the same as the level of virus in an unvaccinated person who`s infected. That`s the problem. So, those data are very compelling. And that triggered the change in the CDC guideline.
The level of virus is "exactly the same as the level of virus in an unvaccinated person." What? What does that even mean? We’re not going to speculate. But if this administration is trying to reassure the country and justify forcing people to take medicine they don’t want, maybe they should wake up and figure out what they’re trying to say, and then explain it to people.
The truth is, we don’t know. And we don’t know what we don’t know. And here’s how we know that we don’t know what we don’t know about this vaccine.
The other day, Pfizer's purchase agreement with the Albanian government leaked on the internet. One of many fascinating excerpts from that document, lots of legalese. But between it all, lots of quotes like this:
"Purchaser acknowledges the long-term effects and efficacy of the Vaccine are not currently known and that there may be adverse effects of the Vaccine that are not currently known."
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Reassuring? What are those effects? And why don’t we know? And why can’t we ask? No one is pausing to ask questions at this moment, though. That’s not allowed.
Nancy Pelosi definitely won’t allow it. She’s threatening to punish any member of Congress who doesn't wear a face-covering on the House floor. And most obeyed.
PELOSI: Members are reminded that under House Resolution 38, the sergeant-at-arms is authorized and directed to impose a fine against any member acting in violation of this policy.
So, Nancy Pelosi will fine you if you don’t pretend it’s science when it’s clearly just a form of social control. Most Republicans went along with this, but not all of them. Chip Roy, congressman from Texas, just delivered remarks speaking against this. Here's part of it.
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CHIP ROY, R-Texas: We have a crisis at our border and we are playing footsie with mask mandates in the people’s House. I mean it is absolutely absurd what this body is doing – the people’s House. It is an embarrassment. It is a mockery and the American people are fed up! They want to go back to life, they want to go back to business, they want to go back to school without their children being forced to wear masks!! To be put in a corner, to have mental health issues. … And the speaker comes down at 10 o’clock in the morning saying we have to wear masks in the people’s House! While we have got thousands of people pouring across our border and Democrats don’t do a darn thing about it… We are absolutely sick and tired of it and so are the American people. This sham of an institution is doing nothing for the American people. Nothing for the betterment of the people that send their representatives here.
Why don’t they all say that? Hard to know.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the July 28, 2021, edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."