Alex Berneson Feels COVID Measures Have Been an Overreaction

Let's establish your position Alex on COVID. What is your position on this? Sure. So people accuse me of being a COVID denialist or I don't think it's real. I don't think anyone dies from it. That's all nonsense, Joe. COVID is real. It emerged from, we can talk about where it might have emerged from earlier this year, maybe in late 2019. It's killed a lot of people. It's contagious and it's been a problem this year. It's been a significant problem. It is not worthy of the response that we have had to it. I believe lockdowns have been a mistake and we can go into all of it, but we have overreacted in an extremely dangerous way this year. I believe we've overreacted as well. I think that in particular, one of the things that disturbs me the most is that there has been no accounting for the damage that has been done by forcing people to shut down their businesses. The only thought has been making sure that the ICU beds are open and that somehow or another people are able to get treatment for this. I've openly criticized the fact that there has been no discussion whatsoever about getting healthy. No one is encouraging you because they are worried about being called a fat shamer or some other nonsensical term. I think it's much worse than that because if you remember back in March, we were told 15 days to slow the spread. Let's not have the hospitals be overrun. At some point, maybe it was in April, maybe it was in May, somehow this became no one can ever get sick and die from COVID. It is wrong that this disease exists and we have to do everything to stop it no matter what the consequences. You mentioned businesses. Businesses are important, but to me, what's even more important is what we're doing to our kids. What we've done with school closures, what we've done with normalizing the idea that being outside with your friends is dangerous. We are screwing over our kids in the worst possible way. I think we had an idea of what COVID was going to be. I know I certainly did for the first two weeks. I was like, this is going to kill everybody. I thought I was going to kill 10 percent of the population. I was really worried about it. I remember being in the supermarket stocking up and thinking, Jesus Christ, like this is this feels so crazy. But I also remember thinking it was going to last two weeks. And now here we are still reacting this way. We're now deep into January or deep into December, almost into January. A lot of my friends were caught, including young Jamie over here. Jamie beat it in a day. Tony Hinchcliffe has it now. He was sick yesterday and today feels good. And this is the case with so many people, whereas if they got the flu, I knew I know a lot of the same people that have got the flu. They were knocked down into the dirt for three or four days, maybe a week, maybe two weeks. It's different than we thought it was going to be, but we're still reacting like it was the same thing. And then there's this this fear porn that everybody likes to peddle. It's this weird thing where everybody wants to think that, you know, if you catch it, you have 10 percent chance of dying or the sky is falling. And it's just it's weird how people want to pretend that it's still what it used to be. And they want to say, you know, you should think about this because 300000 Americans have died. You want to go stop. No, 300000 Americans have died from covid that also had a lot of other stuff. How many people have died just from covid? And it's a relatively small number in comparison. It's like a bad flu year. Right. So it's complicated. Here's here's the thing. And and and I don't know if you if you know, this is as I said, I got all this stuff for you. But the the booklets, I especially the first one, which is about a death counting, how we go, how we count a covid death. Go. I go into this in detail. OK, well, let's talk about that right away. So, OK. There's here's the most fundamental fact about covid that the media doesn't report accurately. How stratified the risk is by age. So you mentioned you mentioned, you know, people who are who might be overweight or have diabetes. All that stuff does add to your risk. What really adds to your risk is age and people and people don't really. I think this is true of almost everybody. People don't really have a good idea of what what risk is. Right. So if I say, you know, like it's riskier to be old and have covid than to be young, you might think, OK, it's like two to one or three to one or five to one. It's kind of like normal risks, like what are the odds that the Jets are going to beat the Rams like one in 10? You know, last week and that happened. The Jets beat the Rams. This risk is not like that. It's like somewhere between 100 and 10,000 times the risk of an age. So maybe 75 versus 25, 80 versus 25. If you look at who dies from this, it is overwhelmingly people over 65, 75, 85. OK, the median age of death in European countries or, you know, which are a little bit healthier than the US is in the low 80s. But that doesn't really tell you the real risk, because what you need to understand is that only two or three percent of the population is over 82 or 83. Now, what about people like there was that guy who was a Broadway actor, who was a young, healthy looking guy, who got second one of dying from it. So that's going to happen. So there's two issues. First of all, that happens to people with the flu. I can point you to stories from 2018, what, you know, young, healthy teacher dies of the flu. It just was never reported nationally this way. That's A. B is if you look at those cases, oftentimes there's weird idiosyncratic stuff happening, of which the number one thing is a lot of those people are put on ventilators very early. They're put on ventilators and they never came off. We're not having that as much anymore. And if you look, the average age of death is actually creeping up now, it looks like. And OK, so that's one. Is that the risk? So we talk about that. Yes. The ventilators. Yes. So what happened? So what happened was in March, especially back when everybody was terrified, there's there's there's something called a nebulizing procedure. So there are procedures that that we're you're we're inserting tubes into people and it releases a lot of, you know, aerosols from them. And the fear was this is going to get aerosolized and the nurses and the doctors are all going to get sick and die and we're going to have no medical staff. Ventilator avoids that problem. OK, so the the feeling was let's ventilate very early. This is a really serious disease. Let's get everybody we can on ventilators. That's when remember when we needed 100000 ventilators, 200000 ventilators. That was the idea. OK, we're going to ventilate really early. Turns out that was a terrible idea. It turns out that as Elon Musk likes to say, you know, your lungs, if you if you ventilate too early, it's just like a meat bellows and you can blow out people's lungs if you overventilate. And it looks like that happened. I will tell you not that we're not that we don't use ventilators for covid, but right now in the United States, I believe there are about 8000 people on ventilators. Can I can I stop you for a second? We're like meat bellows, like bellows, like fireplace bellows. Yes. So you're just pushing this air in and you're and like if you push it in at pressure that's too high, you can just blow out people's lungs. So you literally destroy their lungs. Yes. Yes. We did that with people. And and it became clear. It became pretty clear pretty early on. And and they and they tried to stop doing it and they have stopped doing it. You know, that's why they were saying that 80 percent of the people they put on ventilators want up dying. It's not just that they were so sick by the time they got to ventilators, they were dying. That's right. And they couldn't save them. It was that that the ventilators themselves did. That's wow. That and I don't think that actually too many people would argue that even in hospitals. I can point you to stories that have been written about this and I can point you to serve in hospital discussion of this. Again, there is a role for ventilators for people who really cannot breathe on their own. But this early ventilation that we that we used back in March and April killed people. And some of the people killed are people who were younger who probably would have survived. My friend Michael Yeo was young when he got it. And he was really beaten down. He did a lot of traveling. He flew to New York. He did morning radio, the whole deal, flew back, drove to Vegas, visited his family and drove home that night and then did a bunch of auditions in L.A. and then got sick, real sick. His doctor didn't put him on a ventilator because he said, if I put you on a ventilator, your lungs going to stop working and you're going to die. And he's OK today because of that. Yeah. But he's a young, healthy, robust guy. And he got it and almost died. I mean, he was really, really sick for about two weeks. So but he recovered. Yes, he did. So again, we're not saying this disease isn't real and we're not saying that some people, unfortunately, aren't going to have these bad reactions to it. But but, you know, back in March, maybe he gets put on a ventilator and maybe he dies. Well, he got it very, very early. So that was so he so he was fortunate. He had a doctor who was smart. Yeah. Catch new episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience for free only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips, easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience on Spotify. 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