RUSH: Now, I wanted to go audio sound bite number 1, audio sound bite number 2. Let me make sure I have the appropriate story. (I’ve got so many Stacks of Stuff here.) Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Here we go. Okay. Audio sound bite number 1. This is March 31st — so, about ten days ago — me here on the EIB Network.

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RUSH ARCHIVE: I’m not a doctor, and I’m gonna make sure that I am just speaking as a layman here, but it could well be that so many Californians have been exposed to this virus — you know, 5,000 to 7,000 Chinese arrive at California airports every day. You go back and count that up, add it up from December, January, February, what if the people of California have somehow been made immune to it because they’ve been exposed to the virus and don’t have it or found a way to fight it off. It’s a gigantic question. California ought to be the epicenter.

It ought to be ground zero of infection, and it isn’t. Now, the governor clearly says it’s coming. Governor Newsom and the mayor of Los Angeles both say it’s coming, so it may be premature to be commenting on this. But the disparity here in the number of cases and the number of deaths and the number of hospitalizations in California versus, say, New York and some states on the East Coast is striking.

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RUSH: Exactly — and herd immunity is the virus arrives, and nobody knows it. Nobody knows it exists. We’re talking about perhaps even last October, November, December. It arrives from China via travelers, and people get sick, and there’s no word about coronavirus. There’s nothing out there to scare people. They just get sick. It’s a respiratory virus.

They think it’s the flu, they think it’s the cold, depending on how bad it is. Some people go to the hospital with it; get checked out. Maybe some people perish. We don’t know because there were no stats. If they perished, I’m sure it was chalked up to the flu. In the meantime, all these people, a lot of people get it with no symptoms. This we know.

We know that 98% of the people who get coronavirus recover. So this creates massive immunity to it. The more people who get it and survive it, creating antibodies, passing it along, then you have… this is what’s called herd immunity. Dr. Fauci has spoken out specifically against herd immunity as a solution. But it was posited by me and also the brilliant Victor Davis Hanson, who lives in California.

It was posited that herd immunity is a much more logical explanation for why the numbers in California are so low as opposed to (chuckles) a two-day head start on social distancing over New York. Come on! Here is me, last Thursday on this program, discussing why I thought California’s rate of coronavirus infections was so much lower than New York’s…

RUSH ARCHIVE: Let me just tell you what I think it is. I’m a layman. I’m just telling you what I think. I’m not a medical guy. I’m not telling you with ontological certitude. I think it is herd immunity that took place in California in December. A lot of people had something; they didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t flu. They lived through it. They got past it. That’s what I think happened in California.

RUSH: Dadelut, dadelut, dadelut, dadelut, dadelut, dadelut from the San Francisco Chronicle: “Study Investigates if COVID-19 Came to California in the Fall of 2019 — If so, the state may have built up some herd immunity. Researchers at Stanford Medicine…” That’s an august facility. It is highly accepted and revered. It’s not a quack operation, in other words.

“Researchers at Stanford Medicine are working on a hypothesis that the coronavirus first started spreading in California in the fall, which could explain the state’s low case numbers.” The article also mentions that California “instituted social distancing before New York did, but just two days prior.” It cannot be the explanation.

The researchers from Stanford are doing antibody tests in the Bay Area, but they won’t get the results for weeks. They seem to believe that the lower case numbers are due to herd immunity. Now, if that’s the case, it would mean that a lot of you in California have had the coronavirus and didn’t know it. You either were asymptomatic… There are a lot of people who get infected that have no symptoms.

Your immune system handles it somehow. There are people who get it and think it’s the flu. It has similar characteristics because it’s a respiratory disease; it affects the lungs. In some cases, it replicates pneumonia in certain patients, which is an infection of the lung. But the psychology here is: If you don’t know there’s a killer virus out there and you get it, then you don’t know that you’ve gotten a killer virus.

You just think you’ve gotten sick, and getting sick is what happens to all of us routinely. Some, every year. Some, every other year. Some of us, you never know. But you get sick and you deal with it. If it’s really bad, you go to the ER. If it’s really, really bad, they put you in the hospital. Most people deal with it at home, and they go in the grocery store or the drugstore and they buy over-the-counter medication to try to make themselves feel better.

If you don’t know that there’s a killer disease out there and you get it, you’re not going to think you’re going to die, and you’re not gonna act like you think you’re gonna. You’re not gonna act like it if you don’t know it. I think a lot of people have had coronavirus and didn’t know it. They have had it a lot sooner than we became aware of it — especially in California and, I think, also in Oregon.

Now, it takes, supposedly — these are medical stats. It takes two-thirds of a population to be infected before you reach herd immunity, and Victor Davis Hanson is quoted throughout this article in the San Francisco Chronicle. He’s actually the first to posit the theory that herd immunity is the explanation for California. Now, I’m just gonna tell you: The experts at the briefings and the governor of California are gonna fight this.

They’re gonna do everything they can to make people think that herd immunity didn’t happen, couldn’t have happened. It’s the worst thing. Social distancing! That is the order of the day. Social distancing! That is what is going to be used as any explanation for any success in lowering the death toll. This whole notion of herd immunity is gonna be fought by people whom it doesn’t help politically.