Joe Biden shuffled forth from seclusion this afternoon for a rare solo press conference. You may have seen it. It's about as common as Punxsutawney Phil emerging. In fact, according to statisticians who keep track of this sort of thing, it was only his second since taking office a full year ago. And by the end, you were wishing that Joe Biden spoke in public less often.
The whole thing was awful, was totally weird and embarrassing, not just to him, but to the country. At one point, Biden treated us to a stream of consciousness thoughts about his son's former employer; that would be a small, corrupt nation called Ukraine. Apparently, Ukraine's eastern border with Russia -- unlike, say, our southern border with Mexico -- is a sacred boundary created by God that must be protected at all costs, up to and including, American lives. Why is that? Joe Biden didn't say.
The whole thing was confusing enough that we're going to spend some time unpacking it at much greater length on tomorrow's show. But in the meantime, here's what you should know. You are currently funding a proxy battle in Ukraine against the nuclear-armed Russian military, and that could very well erupt into a hot war that includes you, the United States. If nothing else, Biden made that very clear. So sleep well tonight.
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Then Biden bragged about himself, as he tends to do whenever he's awake. "Can you think of any other president who's done so much in a year?" he asked at one point. How do you respond to a question like that? Biden didn't wait for the answer. Instead, he got mad at a reporter who dared asked him about COVID.
REPORTER: Did you overpromise to the American public what you could achieve in your first year in office? And how do you plan to course-correct going forward?
BIDEN: Why are you such an optimist? Look, I didn't overpromise, but I have probably outperformed what anybody thought would happen.
Outperformed. Well, it’s true, actually. Outperform - meaning more Americans have died from coronavirus on my watch than under evil anti-science Cheeto man; which isn't easy you dog-faced, pony soldier. Stick that in your hat and smoke it. It got weirder from there.
Biden talked about his so-called voting rights legislation, which only Nazis oppose. Without that legislation, the next election will almost certainly be fraudulent, rigged, illegitimate, stolen. See how that works? If you complain about an election after the fact, you're an insurrectionist. The Justice Department may indict you for sedition. But if you complain about an election ahead of time preemptively, then you're a civil rights leader. There's a difference, Mr. Man. Learn it. Love it, live it.
Biden went on to boast under his steady, wise leadership, peasants in this country have gotten "raises." Now, he didn't mention that inflation has already eaten those raises in a single bite, and next year's raises too. But no one in the press corps bothered to ask anyway. Biden did allow that there are some Americans who are "frustrated and fatigued," but that is not his fault. It's COVID’s fault, a disease created by unvaccinated Trump voters and not - we want to be clear about this - not created by his family's longtime patrons in the government of China. They had nothing to do with it. You did it. In any case, the solution, Biden explained, is more testing and more shots. That's why he plans to send a COVID test to every American household and force every last holdout to get the vaccine.
BIDEN: When people and the hospitalizations are overrunning hospitals, and you have docs and nurses out because of COVID, they have COVID. We put thousands of people back in those hospitals. Look at all the, all the military personnel we have there. First responders. Nobody is ever organized. Nobody is ever organized. A strategic operation to get as many shots in arms by opening clinics and keeping and being able to get so many people vaccinated. What I'm doing now is not just getting significant amounts of vaccines to the rest of the world, but they now need the mechanical way is how they get shots in arms. So we're providing them to know how to do that.
How many prepositions were slaughtered in those paragraphs you just heard? We lost count. But here's the headline, and you've never heard a president brag about this: We put soldiers in the hospitals. Biden said that's a win. So next time you get a prostate exam, rest easy. Men with guns are there, there's no reason to be afraid. But Biden is not stopping with that accomplishment. There's more to do. Joe Biden's next goal is to vaccinate all 8 billion people in the world by force, if necessary. And of course, we may need soldiers for that too.
BIDEN: I would hope that what happens is the rest of the world does what I'm doing and provides significant amounts of the vaccine to the rest of the world because it's not sufficient that we just have this country, not have the virus or be able to control the virus, but that we can't build a wall high enough to keep a new variant out. So it requires one of the things that I want to do, and we're contemplating figuring out how to do that. We are contemplating how to get done. And that is how do we move in a direction where the world itself is vaccinated?
The whole world. Those damn Africans better start taking the shots because walls don't work. You build a bigger wall. They just build a bigger virus. That's what the president said. If you take three steps back, it's kind of amusing in a sad way. Here you have daffy old Joe Biden still yammering on about vaccines -- Get your third shot or no hot dogs for you. That's an order.
But actually, as he's been in seclusion in Delaware, the rest of the world has moved beyond borders. No one is listening to Joe Biden anymore. He is weak. He commands no respect. The world no longer cares what he says. As if to prove it, just hours before Biden spoke today, Starbucks -- the left-wing coffee chain and under usual circumstances, worships Joe Biden and his party -- Starbucks, announced its 200,000 employees no longer have to get the vaccine. It was mandatory in Starbucks. It's not anymore. They're dropping that requirement.
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Well, that's kind of a big change. This is in direct contradiction to Joe Biden's personal orders. Just a few weeks ago, Biden warned of a "winter of severe illness and death." What an upbeat guy he is. But only for the unvaccinated. And yet at Starbucks, the unvaccinated baristas are still standing, still pouring those lattes, and now they're getting back to work. What does this mean? Well, it means they decided the senile mannequin in the White House knows less about COVID than they do. And they may be on to something.
Meanwhile, in Israel, which is probably the most vaccinated country in the world, scientists just contradicted everything the administration's been telling us for a full year about vaccine passports and natural immunity. So a study in Israel, which no one has yet to denounce as misinformation, found that four vaccine shots do not work as well against Omicron as natural immunity does. And one of Israel's top vaccine experts admitted that natural immunity in general is highly effective. Watch this.
REPORTER: Are you now of the view that vaccine passports should be got rid of, phased out because they're no longer relevant in the omicron era?
COHEN: Yeah, I tend to think so. // Even, even if, the Omicron actually is causing a lot of, you know, breakthrough not great for infection, but reinfections, you know, people that are vaccinated and, you know, secondary infections, it's at their onset. We have to take into account that still the virus is better at immunizing than the vaccine.
Better pull that man off Twitter, what does he know? That's Professor Cyrille Cohen. He's the head of immunology at Bar Ilan University. He's a member of the advisory committee for vaccines for the Israeli government. And obviously a thought criminal. What did he do? Well, he looked at the data and concluded that scientists have made a major mistake. "The virus is better at immunizing than the vaccine."
Oh, where have you heard that? Well, we've known that for more than a year. Our own CDC found that natural immunity provided more protection against delta variant of COVID than vaccination did. Professor Cohen went on to apologize for the biggest mistake of the pandemic: shutting down schools and forcing children to stay home, which destroyed a generation. It turns out there was no scientific basis for doing that at all. It was all teachers’ unions wanting more time off. Omicron, the professor said, will turn this pandemic into the endemic phase. It'll be like the flu, a widespread but mild illness. Everybody gets it, and very few are badly hurt by it. And we should proceed accordingly.
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This has been pretty obvious. You'd never know it from listening to Joe Biden. He had no clue whatsoever. But Great Britain, which has been almost hysterical in the face of COVID, has come to the same conclusion. So today, as Joe Biden pushed everyone to take a third COVID shot, calling it the optimum protection you can have -- except for natural immunity, which tends to be much more effective. As he was saying that and being ignored. Boris Johnson, the prime minister of Great Britain, announced an end to all mandates and all lockdowns in Great Britain, including in schools. Here's part of it.
JOHNSON: Our scientists believe it is likely that the Omicron wave has now peaked nationally. // From now on. The government is no longer asking people to work from home. People should not speak to their employers about arrangements for returning to the office and having looked at the data carefully, the cabinet concluded that once regulations lapse, the government will no longer mandate the wearing of face masks anywhere.
So the United States used to lead the world, particularly in the field of science. Modern science was essentially invented here. It was certainly perfected here. Now, the United States follows the world. Much smaller countries. Our two closest allies, in fact. Countries which have COVID at least as seriously as we did, have decided that what we've done for the last two years doesn't work. And they're changing their policies. They're freeing their population from the yoke of this insanity.
All of that was happening at the very moment Biden was preparing for his big solo press conference. But apparently nobody told them what was happening. Our two strongest allies are doing this, and he didn't know. At the same moment that Boris Johnson announced that masks don't work, Joe Biden declared that he's going to send 400 million masks to American citizens so that every person in America can be safe for a day.
It is lunacy. It's depressing to watch and has massive implications. Again, this is not global leadership, it's the opposite. This is what it looks like when you're a global laughingstock. Even Biden's aides know it. Watch Biden's own COVID adviser admit masks don't stop transmission.
OSTERHOLM: We know today that many of the face cloth coverings that people wear are not very effective in reducing any of the virus movement in or out. Either you're breathing out or you're breathing in. And in fact, if you're in the Upper Midwest right now, anybody who's wearing their face cloth covering, you can tell you they can smell all the smoke that we're still getting.
Okay, so that was in August, almost half a year ago. A few months later, in December last month, CNN's resident doctor admitted that it's true. Masks are useless. They've always been useless.
DR. WEN: Cloth masks are not appropriate for this pandemic. It was. It's not appropriate for omicron and it was not appropriate for delta, alpha or any of the previous variants either.
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And yet Joe Biden is bragging that he's sending every American a mask so every American can be safe for one day. This is pathetic. Why are they doing this? It's a question worth asking, especially since Joe Biden knows the masks don't work. It's why he takes his mask off when it irritates him. Here he was just a few days ago.
BIDEN: What we've been able to do… (taking mask off) generate significant federal help.
So Joe Biden knows masks don't work. CNN knows that masks don't work. Joe Biden's COVID advisers know that masks don't work. The country of Great Britain has admitted that in public. So with that in mind, here's what the Biden administration has been saying about masks for the last two months. Read the lies.
BIDEN: Masking, masking, masking is an important tool to control the spread of COVID-19, and when you're indoors in public places, you should wear the mask.
WALENSKY: CDC continues to recommend that any mask is better than no mask. And we do encourage all Americans to wear a well-fitting mask to protect themselves.
FAUCI: We want to make sure people keep their masks on. I think the idea of taking masks off in my mind is really not something we should even be considering.
They act like there's no cost to covering your face. But the truth is, human beings need to see one another's faces. It's not optional. We pretend that it is. Any society that ignores natural imperatives, things as basic as seeing other people's faces, will destroy itself and the people who live within it. Everyone knows that. What you just saw is not science, it's mental illness. Joe Biden apparently doesn't know that, and that's why even Starbucks no longer listens to him.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the January 19, 2022, edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."