Best of the Program | Guests: Sen. Mike Lee & Matt Ridley | 1/14/22

Attention, all small biz owners.

At the UPS store, you can count on us to handle your packages with care.

With our certified packing experts, your packages are properly packed and protected.

And with our pack and ship guarantee, when we pack it and ship it, we guarantee it because your items arrive safe or you'll be reimbursed.

Visit the UPS store.com/slash guarantee for full details.

Most locations are independently owned.

Product services, pricing, and hours of operation may vary.

See Center for Details.

The UPS store.

Be unstoppable.

Come into your local store today.

If you want to know why the world is dramatically changing all around you, you want to know why things don't make sense, why corporations are going woke, why vaccine mandates that are not based on science are being imposed on people, why the government is now spending Republicans and Democrats alike trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars more than they take in, then you need to buy this book, The Great Reset.

You need to learn what's going on with The Great Reset.

We've spent more than a year investigating this, a year and a half.

We have done an incredible amount of research on this topic, and we are just now figuring out how all of these pieces fit together.

And we're going to talk about it today on the show.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

It's at Glensnewbook.com if you want to pick it up.

Also, subscribe to the podcast, rate, and review.

Don't forget Studo's America as well.

I'm going to be talking with Justin as well and going deeper into the great reset on tonight's program.

Don't miss that.

It's on Blaze TV as well.

Blazetv.com/slash Glenn.

Promo code is Glenn.

Here's the podcast.

You're listening to the best of the women that program.

Mr.

Bill O'Reilly, welcome to the program, the biggest story of the week, sir.

Worst week for Joe Biden in his

entire first year presidency.

Is this, I mean, because you remember the days of

really Jefferson.

is this the worst a president has done in his first year that you can recall?

Well, before I answer that, Beck, I know you're a little bit delirious about the COVID thing.

And are you feeling all right?

Are you okay?

Well, I am.

I'm in an iron lung right now, and

it's been very bad.

I know the left is rooting that

I pass on, but

it's not happening yet.

I bought an old iron lung.

You said, okay, and because this is the safe time you've had, COVID, I'm going to give you a pass on the Jefferson.

But I have to tell you, you know, that Stu is actively undermining you.

And

okay, good.

I'm trying.

I know.

I'm very well aware of that.

So tell me about these poll numbers and what it means, because it doesn't seem like they are any less likely to stop doubling down on things.

Okay, so the the Quinnipiac poll has Joe Biden's job approval rating at 33%.

That is not a reliable poll.

It has never been.

So, you know, we want to be fair here in our analysis of the president.

I don't believe that he's down to 33%.

Here's how I see it.

There's no question that Joe Biden is failing.

Okay, on Monday on the Notespend News on BillOrely.com, I'm going to have my lead segment exactly what you said.

Is he the worst president in his first year in the history of our republic?

So I'm bringing on a liberal

historian, presidential historian, because I want to see that point of view.

For me, he is.

And I'm pretty good at this history business.

I think you may know that.

Yeah.

I went over every president.

Now, you could make an argument that Herbert Hoover, because he walks in and then the whole economy collapses,

but that was set into motion before he got into office.

And it also, his policies, while he didn't do anything

that probably would have been a little bit better than some of the things, but

the Hoover projects started under him.

There were some things that lasted.

He had no leadership skills.

He had no vision.

He was befuddled like Biden is.

And James Buchanan, of course, was a president before Lincoln.

And under him, the South was emboldened to separate.

I have a letter in my historical collection by Harry Truman saying that if Buchanan had been the same temperament as Andrew Jackson, that there wouldn't have been a Civil War.

Interesting letter.

But anyway, Biden, there isn't anything you can point to, not one thing.

And if there is, I want your listeners to to contact me, bill at billorilly.com, okay, that he's done to improve the nation.

That's the test.

You just step back, take emotion out of it, politics out of it, and say, give me one thing that Joe Biden has done to improve the country.

Just one.

And you can't do it.

And so this week, getting back to your what's the biggest story of the week, he got pummeled on

time he turns around, record inflation, record COVID cases, no

his insane legislation about Voting Rights Act, which is unconstitutional, by the way, is not going to happen.

Build back better, not going to happen.

Can't get anything done.

So we're looking at a guy who basically is sitting there and he's got three more years.

And it's over.

It's over.

It's like the Kansas City Royals.

They're not going to win the pennant this year.

Okay?

But he is legislating.

I was just talking to Mike Lee, and

Congress is almost irrelevant, but he's just going through with executive orders.

And they are being overturned, but they do.

Go ahead.

Even those orders are foolish.

They don't get the country anywhere.

They don't move the country.

I mean, I'll remind everybody that it was his executive order a year ago that opened the borders.

Right.

He did it.

He can't blame Congress.

He can't blame Trump.

He can't blame Obama.

He can't blame anybody.

He did it.

And to this day,

we have tens of thousands of people a week crossing that border illegally.

None of them tested for COVID.

Tell me about killing of the...

Does that help the country?

Tell me what your thoughts are on the filibuster being killed.

I mean, I don't think that ever had a chance.

That never was going to happen because if you do that,

then when the Republicans win the Senate next November, which they will,

they just turn it on you.

They turn it on you.

They revoke everything that you've done.

Yeah, you can veto and all this, but you just tie it into an incredible knot.

You've got to have the ability on controversial legislation to have an overwhelming majority in the Senate, or you you don't have a country anymore.

You have a partisan mess.

You have some backstands.

I talked a couple of weeks ago about Hillary Clinton running as the candidate, and it was kind of roundly mocked.

Now, some people are picking this up.

I'd love to hear your analysis on Hillary Clinton.

Is she

do you think she will run?

Do you think the party would back her?

Okay, I broke the story

about

five weeks ago when she came out and cried about something.

Yeah.

She was crying.

Okay, and I said, oh,

there's Hillary crying.

Why would she do that?

Look, the Clintons, whether you despise them, and I'm sure most of your listeners do, are very, very savvy people.

And even though they don't really, they're not a close couple anymore, they do confer.

And they know that Biden's a disaster.

And they know he's not going to run again.

There's absolutely no way on this planet that Joe Biden runs for re-election as it stands now.

Okay?

Now, maybe through the gift of God, he'll go out and part the Potomac.

I don't know.

I guess it could happen.

But he's befuddled.

He's incompetent.

He's way too old.

And I'm not saying that age-wise, it's his mental capacity.

And I'm not saying he's senile, and I'm not going to do that.

That's not fair.

I'm not a doctor, but he cannot govern this country, so he's not going to run again.

So Hillary says, hmm, Kamala's out of the box.

She can't do anything.

She's not going to get the nomination.

All right.

So who else is there but me?

The Democrats still like Hillary.

I think that's a fair statement.

So why not me?

But then Hillary gets a

boomerang thrown at her by one Michelle Obama last Sunday, who takes out a completely unnecessary ad in the New York Times costing the Obama Foundation, Michelle's foundation, about $75,000 to say, hey.

I'm getting back in the political game because I want to register everybody to vote.

And of course, she doesn't.

She just wants to register Democrats to vote.

Okay, so here I am, Michelle Obama.

Hmm, isn't that interesting?

Okay, so Hillary wants to run.

She wants to be president.

So why wouldn't she?

That's how you have to approach all these questions.

Why wouldn't Hillary Clinton try again?

She thinks she won the first time around.

Where have we heard that before?

So anyway, you were astute because I'm sure you didn't see my initial report on Hillary Clinton because you don't watch the no spin news every night.

No, I don't listen to you even now.

I'm barely listening to you now.

Bill, so do you think that, I mean, you want to talk about a queen.

Do you think that Michelle Obama would actually run?

I don't know, but if she does, she walks in.

Nobody will even primary her.

So she can have that nomination if she wants it.

No one will primary Michelle Obama.

No one.

Oh my gosh.

So she's.

That's a doomsday device there.

I mean, I think that is something that should be concerning to everyone because

that's concerning.

I mean, look, it depends on what political spectrum you're on, obviously.

Liberals, progressives, and Democrats would love to have her run.

However, once she does run, She's going to open herself up to, you know, the hate fest that America is now.

It's a hate hate fest.

All right.

This is not like,

okay, the best man or woman wins.

No.

It's, we'll destroy you and your family.

It's like organized crime.

It's like killing the mob.

That's what politics is now.

All right.

But we, but we,

but we've already played that game with the Obamas, and they are experts at deflection, especially with the media.

They would not let the Obamas be destroyed like that.

Like the Clintons,

all right, the Obamas are very, very shrewd.

Now, the corporate media

is going to deify, word of the day for Stu, look it up real fast, Stu, deify Michelle Obama.

So she'll have the media with her.

But with the media declining drastically in influence and readership and viewership, the internet then rises

and she is going to be the subject of an unbelievable personal attack if she runs.

And she knows that.

They know it.

So when Barack Obama first ran, he didn't get attacked very much.

You'll remember that.

Oh, I know.

It was like, here's this newbie.

He didn't do much in the Senate, but he's an African-American.

And as Joe Biden said, he's a clean guy or something.

Remember that?

What a great

question.

No, we're now debating whether calling somebody articulate is racist when Joe Biden said he was clean,

articulate, and a fairy tale.

Unbelievable.

Right, right.

I mean, but it doesn't matter because Joe Biden's a Democrat.

Now, if Joe Biden had been a Republican, he would have been canceled immediately.

Okay, so with the Michelle Obama scenario, it's fascinating because it could be Trump versus Michelle.

And I mean,

I don't even know how

people would get through that.

Oh, no, my gosh.

Our heads would pop.

Our heads would pop.

It would be.

It's great for you and me because, you know,

everybody will be glued because every day there'll be another mud fest.

You know, the Obamas aren't like Donald Trump.

They're not direct hitters.

They hire their hitters.

Yes.

Okay.

And they'll have them all over the place.

Oh, yeah.

And so we're going to be sitting here going, is this America?

You're listening to the best of the Glenn Vec program.

Mike Lee

is here to talk to us a little bit about SCOTUS and some of the other things that are going on in Washington this week.

Hi, Mike.

How are you?

Good to be with you as always, Glenn.

Great

speedy recovery.

Well, I'm in an iron lung now, Mike.

I don't know if you know that, but I've been trying to hide it.

But now I think, you know, now that I've taken the soundproofing out, you can hear the echo of the iron lung that I'm in today.

It's ridiculous how, I mean, I did the show the entire time I have COVID.

I have a cough.

It is into my lungs, but it's not a bad problem.

And I've been trending for two days with people wishing me, you know, death.

It's crazy.

But Mike, let's go to SCOTUS.

I feel like, and this is why I wanted you on, I feel like we have another John Roberts half measure.

I feel like we won with

the battle in our businesses, but we lost with the Department of Health.

Yeah, that's true.

What the Supreme Court did was to say that the OSHA mandate, that dealing with every employer, the part of the mandate that said 84 million Americans, including, by the way, 500,000 Utah's, are at risk of losing their jobs if they don't bow to presidential medical orthodoxy.

Fortunately, for all of us, the Supreme Court had the courage to stand up and say, no, no, they can't do that.

This is not a dictatorship.

And this is

given them.

They didn't really, they only said OSHA can't do that because it's out of bounds.

They didn't say the federal government, did they?

Right, right.

So this is the part dealing with the 84 million Americans covered by the OSHA mandate.

That dealing with the part that says we will fine any employer with more than 99 workers if they don't fire every worker who refuses to get vaccinated.

With respect to the so-called CMS mandate, that dealing with Medicare and Medicaid programs and healthcare systems that interact with them, that receive money from them.

The Supreme Court punted.

The Supreme Court said, we're going to let this litigation play out.

We're not going to to weigh in right now.

We're not going to stop this abruptly.

And so this was, look, as between the two, if we were going to have to win one and have the court punt on the other, I'd a whole lot rather win the one that we did win yesterday.

I wish we had won both.

Now, Mike,

what's concerning to me is

the White House just doesn't care.

It's not even going through Congress anymore.

It's almost as the Supreme Court is a legislative body at this point.

Because immediately they started revamping.

They're working now on,

because of cinema and others,

not going to work on this filibuster thing.

They're now doing executive orders.

I mean, there's just no stopping these guys.

And the Supreme Court is not the place for legislation.

No, no, it's not.

And look, this is part of a syndrome of self-importance that pervades Washington, D.C., especially within the executive branch, one in which people are willing to say, you know, we can't really trust the peasantry.

We can't really trust those who are elected by the people at the most regular intervals to pass legislation.

We're going to have to have the experts do it.

This is the Woodrow Wilson dream for America:

you'd have only Tony Fauci's in charge of everything.

Little Tony Fauci's in charge of every area of the American economy.

Seasoned, wise experts, infallible in their approach.

And only rarely, of course, willing to call elected lawmakers morons.

So, Mike, I had a sit-down with Donald Trump, and I don't know if you saw it.

It was a couple of weeks ago.

It was all about the future, not about the past.

And I said to him, you know, things are so out of control that

a serious pruning, and I would be for the shutdown of all these federal agencies, you know, to a skeletal staff.

And

I said, it's just completely out of control right now.

It's almost like we need a system

reboot and set it back to factory settings.

That's going to be impossible to get this thing back under control unless we have a strong GOP that understands what we're fighting and what we're up against.

And it's not Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.

It's much bigger than that.

Are you seeing troops starting to rally in the GOP?

Are we playing the same game with the McConnells and stuff?

No, without question, I'm seeing this troop starting to rally, and I'm seeing fantastic, exciting new candidates like Josh Mandel in Ohio coming up through the ranks.

People who are willing, as you say, to come back and reimpose the factory settings.

What are the factory settings in our system?

Well, in our system, that's the Constitution.

And it's a document that still works today.

It's as relevant as it was back when it was written in 1787.

But we have to start following it.

And one of the things that it says, the very first operative provision of it, is that Congress makes the laws.

All legislative powers herein granted shall shall be vested in the Congress of the United States.

We've drifted far from even that very first and critically important definition.

There's a reason for that because we entrust the lawmaking power, which is inherently the most dangerous power in government, only to people who are elected by the people at the most regular intervals.

And if we ever cease to do that, as we have been lately, because we've been delegating it all to Tony Fauci,

we deviate from the factory settings.

Let's restore the factory settings.

So Christian Sinema gave a great speech yesterday on the filibuster.

I don't think they even have 49 or 48 votes for this thing,

but she came out quite eloquently.

I'm impressed by

some of her

stances on

reason.

Yes, look, Kirsten Sinema is fantastic.

She is a dear friend.

She and I are both graduates of Brigham Young University, and while we don't agree on everything and we have different party affiliations, I have tremendous respect for Kirsten.

In fact, I was just talking to her last night, telling her, you know, she's a hero.

She's willing to stand up for things, even when it's difficult.

In fact, she seems to have

her very best days, especially when it's difficult.

And I admire that tremendously.

Are you sensing a change in the Democratic Party?

I mean, the poll numbers are - I've never seen anything like this.

And

are they still able to bully their people into line as much as they were?

That appears to be their MO.

And as far as I can tell, Glenn, they're doubling down on that.

Like they're saying, okay, this hasn't been working, so we got to give it even more cowbell.

And I think that's going to end badly for them.

So I was

thinking about COVID a lot.

I have it.

My family has it.

Everybody I know has it.

I mean, the scientists that are down in the Antarctic, they have it as well.

I mean it everyone's going to get this variety and it's good.

I mean the it's got it's causing us a lot of pain and it is causing death but the death rate is down 91%.

This becomes an endemic which is really good.

But speaking of doubling down I'm seeing the president saying he wants to push businesses to choose to do this anyway.

They are getting more and more draconian.

There's calls today for getting Joe Rogan off the air and Spotify to fire him and censor him because of the COVID laws or the COVID lies, as they say, that he is spreading.

They're talking now about much more draconian kind of rules and laws.

Do you see this

ending well here, Mike?

I mean,

we're at the tail end of COVID, and they seem to be going even crazier.

Yeah.

You know, Glenn, there's a reason why we have a First Amendment.

There's a reason why we've decided that government ought not be able to punish people for contradicting government orthodoxy.

And the reason is there's really disproportionate bargaining power.

The one thing that makes government government is its ability to use force with official sanction, with the seal, with the badge.

And so it really is dangerous.

We should take these things very seriously.

Whenever they come out and true government offices try to threaten, intimidate, belittle people, true government office, to the point that they can't express a differing opinion on a matter of public policy, that's really dangerous.

Well, you have Joe Biden coming out all the way up.

I think yesterday Joe Biden came out, it was yesterday, the day before, and said to social media, you have got to shut these shows down.

I mean, he is pressuring big businesses to become even more draconian on the First Amendment.

This is, I mean, this is really dangerous.

It really is.

And when you get to the point where a government is as big and is as powerful as the federal government is, as the executive branch in particular is, you have to stop and wonder whether we've just allowed it to get too big.

Because if there's that much subtlety and sophistry within that system, we've got to tear it down and get it back to the basics of what the federal government is supposed to be doing.

National defense, trademarks, copyrights, and patents, immigration, naturalization, regulating trade or commerce between the states with foreign nations and with the Indian tribes.

There are a few other powers, but that's it in a nutshell.

We're into everything right now, and because we're into everything, they can do anything they want.

Mike,

the Ray Epps situation and January 6th, I mean, I don't even understand it.

Can you give me an update on

what's happening with the January 6th investigation?

Yep.

So Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and I, along with the rest of our colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee, questioned at length these officials from the FBI and the Department of Justice the other day.

We asked the most basic questions about who was arrested, why, when, what was being investigated, what the situation was with Ray Epps.

Time after time after time, they told us, I'm sorry, I don't have that information.

After a while,

can you put that into perspective, Mike?

How often does something like that happen?

How out of the norm was this line of questioning and their answers?

Well, it's not at all uncommon to have an executive branch employee or high-ranking official in front of a committee and to have us ask them a question and have them say, I don't know the answer.

But what's different here is we were asking them questions about the very topic that they had agreed to come and testify about in front of the Senate Judici Committee.

That's what's so spooky about this.

They came before us to talk about those very issues, and they appeared not to know a thing about them.

So they're either lying or they are being willfully ignorant of what happened.

And I'm not sure which one is worse, but they're both awfully bad.

So, Ray Epps,

do we have any real indication that he may be an FBI, or is this just speculation because we don't know what's going on?

When these officials were asked that question at this hearing earlier this week, they just refused to answer.

They just said, can't talk about that.

And so we're going to keep hounding them until we get answers.

It appears to me, based on the way they answered, now, look, if in fact

he was unknown to the FBI prior to January 6th, if in fact he had no association with them.

I can't imagine that these officials from FBI and DOJ wouldn't have said as much at the time.

That they wouldn't have at least said, we're not sure who he is or he's not connected with us.

They did not say that.

They instead just punted and said they couldn't answer it.

And so that's a real problem and we've got to get to the bottom of it.

Because if that is true, if we had this person, if Rayvs were in fact someone acting for and on behalf of the federal government and agitating as he obviously was in these video clips and encouraging people to engage in unlawful activity, one has to wonder how many other people like him were there.

Correct.

And at whose direction were they operating?

Mike,

last question.

I know you have to run, but this week I released the book on the Great Reset.

I have to send you a copy.

We cannot keep it in stock.

Literally, we cannot keep it in stock.

It's the best, fastest-selling book

I've ever written.

And we're just trying to get the ⁇ we're trying to get the printers to keep up with the demand.

So I'll send you a copy or you can get it on Kindle.

But one of my researchers asked today, where do we stand on the $100,000 or the $10,000 snoop on bank accounts?

Did that finally pass through?

Is that still being debated?

No, that has not passed through.

And that's going to to pass through over my dead body.

That cannot happen.

We're not going to let that happen.

And if your listeners want to learn more about it, they can always go to leafersenate.com or they can learn about these and other topics we've discussed.

Mike Lee,

the only man in America that I would gladly endorse if it wasn't a death knell to everybody's political

political career every time I've done it in the past.

But you are fantastic and I wish you the best.

Thank you very much, Mike.

Thanks so much, Glenn.

You bet.

Mike Lee for Senate.

The best of the Glenn Beck program.

We have Matt Ridley on the phone with us.

He's the co-author of Viral, The Search for the Origin of COVID-19.

There is a big story that came out this week.

Exposed emails from Fauci and the gang seem to be just a blip in the news cycle this week, but it is important that we don't move on.

We have to search for the origin of COVID-19.

And

I wanted to get Matt Ridley on to talk about what was discovered in these emails.

What does it tell us and why are they important?

Hi, Matt.

Ben, good afternoon.

Nice to talk to you.

Good morning, I should say.

Thank you.

Yeah, well, you're in the UK.

So good evening.

Good afternoon.

So Matt,

tell me what new came out this week.

I don't know if you saw the Fauci hearings,

but

I mean,

we had this information a few months ago, but now it is being confirmed

and doesn't look good for Fauci.

Am I reading that right?

Well, we knew for we've known for a long time that there was a meeting in early February, which Fauci attended, so did Francis Collins, so did Sir Jeremy Farrer of the Wellcome Trust, who was actually the person who asked for the meeting, and a bunch of other senior virologists on the phone on Saturday, the 1st of February,

in which they discussed the widespread concerns among

virologists at the time that it looked like this new virus was the product of manipulation in a laboratory or at least it had mutated in a laboratory that they couldn't explain how it came about in nature.

We've known just the outlines of that but when we sought the emails about that meeting that followed that meeting we got totally redacted documents you know with everything blacked out and that was a little

intriguing

to say the least.

Now some of the Republicans on the House Oversight Committee have been allowed a sight of the unredacted emails and have transcribed some of the key paragraphs.

And

they are even more startling than we expected, because what they show is that

doctor Fauci, doctor Collins and other senior advisors to the government in both the UK and the US, were briefed very clearly by virologists that at the time they thought there was a very good chance this had come out out of a laboratory.

They couldn't explain one feature in particular of its genome by any other way,

and that they thought that theory should be taken very seriously.

And yet the outcome of that meeting was to commission an article for Nature Medicine magazine, and another couple of articles came out shortly after that too, one of which had Farrar on as a co-author,

which basically rubbished that idea and said, no, it couldn't have come from a lab.

and there was no evidence for that and it was a conspiracy theory and everybody should shut up about it.

So what changed in the couple of days after that meeting to to take these people from thinking it was a very strong possibility to thinking it was a nutty conspiracy theory that could could be ruled out?

And

what we should show is that what changed is politics.

It wasn't it wasn't scientific evidence that changed their minds.

It was the impact this might have on the reputation of science in general and science in China in particular.

That's a question.

What do you have on that that shows that directly?

Well, there's an email from Ron Faucier, who is a Dutch scientist who is involved in this external,

who says we can't agree to this because it would have an impact on

we must rule out this possibility because it would have a significant impact on science in general and Chinese science in particular.

We have a remark from Francis Collins in one of the emails saying this might damage international harmony if we indulge in this speculation.

It's a strange choice of words.

It's the sort of words that the Chinese regime uses actually a lot.

So

it's pretty clear, and

then finally there's an email in April in which Francis Collins basically says to

Dr.

Fauci,

yes, this article did come out, but it didn't shut down the debate as much as I'd hoped.

There are still people speculating about a lab leak.

That's a pity because it's not helpful to the reputation of science.

The background of this, of course, you remember, is that Donald Trump has said this virus comes from China around the same time.

And a lot of these scientists

are very strongly opposed to him and are horrified by the thought that some of this information might

give him some vindication.

So I think

the problem here is scientists saying one thing in public, thinking a completely different thing in private, and their reason for doing so being political, not scientific.

Matt, have you ever read The Gods of the Copybook Headings by

Rudyard Kipling?

I have, but a very long time ago.

Yeah.

Well,

I think of that poem almost every day because it talks about when society goes this far off the rails and the last line is, you know, the gods of the copybook headings

with terror and slaughter return.

You will eventually,

depending on how far you go, you will have to come back to truth.

And the more you fight it, the worse it becomes and the worse the fight back to the truth is.

Science and medicine has got to start their fight back right now, or

they are completely discrediting themselves right now by not being 100% transparent.

We can't survive with a medical industry and hierarchy that is involved in lies, blackmail,

you know, payoffs, and politics.

It's bad for all of humanity.

Well, yeah, I probably wouldn't go as far as to use some of those words, but I agree with the point you're making, and I do so as somebody who's very pro-science.

I've defended and championed science all my career.

I've written about the wonderful achievements of scientists.

I think it's humankind's greatest achievement, Barnes.

Discovery of

how the world works.

But

it is getting very difficult to defend the way science is behaving as an institution on some of these matters.

And if science is to retain its reputation, it's got to own up and say, look, in the name of science, some people have been doing dangerous experiments.

That's a mistake, whether it led to this pandemic or not.

Certainly didn't help predict it as it was supposed to.

And if science were to look at itself and say, sorry, guys, we got a few things wrong here.

We got a lot right.

We developed vaccines and so on.

But actually, we may have started this pandemic.

We're really, really sorry.

Let's make sure it never happens again.

They would get a lot of credit.

Instead of doing that, they're saying, no, no, no, we don't want you to talk about this.

We don't want you to think this.

We can rule it out.

It's a conspiracy theory.

It's nutty.

And I'm afraid that means that when this does come out to be the case, which it may well do,

can't be sure about that, but we may well find out that this did start in a lab, that it may drag a lot more of science down with it than it should.

Yep.

So, Matt, I don't know if you're qualified to tell me this, but

I take the latest news of this pandemic becoming an endemic as good news.

This is what really kind of happened in the 1918 flu.

Bad the first year, worse the second year.

year then it starts to uh peter out and we just end up with a flu Omicron seems to have a death rate lowered by 91 percent that's you know and we're still in the throes of everyone getting it so it's still bad but I take this as the possible beginning of the end of this

nightmare

Would you agree or not?

I completely agree with you.

I've been saying this for a number of weeks.

And when I started saying, hang on, I think this is the milder version of the virus.

I had

some of the sort of medical establishment saying there's no such thing as a mild version of the virus.

It only depends on how much

our immune system reacts to it.

And respiratory viruses don't evolve towards mildness.

I'm sorry, then how do you explain the fact there are 200 kinds of common cold and none of them kill us?

You know, etc.

So I think this is exactly what we've been waiting for.

A mild version displacing a nastier version, the virus becoming endemic, becoming a seasonal, not completely harmless and still capable of killing people

infection.

And I think that's what happened, for example, with the other four coronaviruses that we catch all the time.

They cause the common cold or versions of it.

They're not the commonest cause of the common cold, but they're one of the causes, and they do not kill us.

And they started as nasty pandemics that probably did kill us.

Is there any case to be made for,

you know, Fauci has even come out and said everybody's going to get this.

So why the big push now again on quarantine and everything else?

Isn't this kind of what we were hoping to happen?

I mean, I don't want anyone to die.

So do everything you can so that they don't die.

But this is the end of that isolation thing.

The people in Antarctica, in the labs there, have Omicron.

So everyone's going to get it.

Exactly.

Well, the UK, which hasn't always got it right in this area and has been far too draconian and

authoritarian in the way it's handled this health crisis, in my view,

nonetheless did take a decision back in July that it would open up society again.

And we were predicted to have hundreds of thousands of deaths as a result by the modelers.

That didn't happen.

That has meant that we've had an earlier and bigger Omicron wave than other countries.

That has largely displaced our Delta wave.

That has meant that we've now got, yes, we're still getting 100,000 new cases a day, but our death rate is

knocking along in the low hundreds

and has not got anything like as bad as it did last winter.

It looks like we in the UK are going to be out of this

pandemic quicker and earlier than other European countries

compared to the US.

And so that tells us that the right decision was to open up society and stop these lockdowns back in the summer.

Scotland wouldn't follow suit, and it's having a slightly worse time now.

Matt Ridley, God bless you.

Thank you, sir, for all of your hard work.

Thank you for defending science and just speaking the truth as you understand it.

God bless you.