RUSH: Margie. Margie’s in Harrison, Ohio. It’s great to have you, great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Well, hi, Rush.
RUSH: Hey.
CALLER: Dittos since ’89.
RUSH: Well, that makes you almost a lifer.
CALLER: And 15 for the 24/7, too.
RUSH: I appreciate that. I really, really do.
CALLER: Yeah, I love it. I’m calling about my complete, total disgust and anger and any other word you can think of concerning the campaign that the press has been running on Trump about the drug, the hydroxychloroquine and… however you pronounce it.
RUSH: Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, the Z-Pak, yeah.
CALLER: Thank you. In just the last few days — one was Monday night and a couple last week that I saw on a thing — there’s so many doctors that are away from the Democrat-run states and, you know, so on, so forth, that have large amounts of people, 900 they’ve been treating and so on, so forth. No deaths, all have gotten well. One was just Monday night, and he did his whole nursing home somewhere in Texas, I think. And he gave all of them drugs, and he followed it up with heart things, you know, the EKGs on all of us patients. And nobody’s dying. And I am just so mad that these politicians can tell a doctor what to do.
RUSH: Well, get in line behind the insurance companies. Now, you need to ask yourself a question here, Margie. Let’s put on our thinking caps. Let’s lay the cards out as you have in your call. We have a drug, hydroxychloroquine. I’m gonna set the table here. You have the drug hydroxychloroquine. It’s used in conjunction with azithromycin, Z-Pak. Your assertion is that it has been working well, and your assertion comes from having talked to doctors about it. That it is being given to patients with the coronavirus, and it is, for the most part, helping them. Right?
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Now you’re encountering the media and a bunch of other politicians running the drug down, making fun of it, telling people not to do it and others are telling doctors they can’t prescribe it. And you’re befuddled as to why this might be the case. Am I right?
CALLER: Well, I’m befuddled and I’m disgusted and I think it’s obnoxious.
RUSH: So why do you think this is the case? We have a drug that’s been out there 50 years to fight malaria. It’s passed all the human trials you could put a drug through.
CALLER: Oh, yeah.
RUSH: Yet they’re still clamping down on the use of it. Can you imagine one reason why this might be?
CALLER: Well, I saw a little saying, and it said: “The press is for the virus and not for humanity.”
RUSH: Well, I was once thinking, I had coined a term that the media and the Democrats — I was gonna call ’em Team Virus. But then people said, “You better not do that, Rush, you better not. People will not understand it. You’ll get ripped to shreds if you call ’em advocates for the virus.” So I never did. I never called ’em Team Virus. I’m just giving this as an example to you. But no, Margie, that’s not why.
CALLER: Well, how can the Democrat Party, like the different states, the upper echelon, the governors or whoever, how can they tell the doctors what to do?
RUSH: Very simple. The federal government has regulatory power over what doctors can prescribe. How can they do it? How can they do it? Where have you been?
CALLER: Oh, I know better. I know better.
RUSH: No. The question for you is why are they doing it?
CALLER: Ummm…
RUSH: Come on. Think.
CALLER: To get Trump.
RUSH: No.
CALLER: No?
RUSH: No. I mean, if it gets rid of Trump, fine, to humiliate Trump, but no. Try again. I’ll give you two more guesses.
CALLER: Oh, my goodness. Why else would they be doing it? To show their point of view?
RUSH: Have you ever heard of the Firesign Theatre? It was an improv comedy group back in the sixties.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: They had one of the greatest bits I’ve ever heard. They were mocking, making fun of game shows. They had a game show called Beat the Reaper. And if you were a contestant, they shot you up with a deadly disease and they gave you X-amount of time to identify the disease or they wouldn’t give you the antidote. And so they shoot people up with the plague, they’d shoot ’em up with — it was just funny. It’s kind of what we’re doing here. I’m giving you a couple of chances to identify why in the world would they be dumping all over hydroxychloroquine.
CALLER: I just don’t get it. Because they want something else that they created.
RUSH: Ah. Ah. You are so close, you’re burning up, you’re getting close to the sun here.
CALLER: So that they can take credit for it and they can put Trump down because of —
RUSH: No.
CALLER: No?
RUSH: Now you’re turning back toward the moon. Why would they want credit for whatever works?
CALLER: So that they win.
RUSH: You are so pure. You know what? You have to be one of the most virtuous, pure people. You’re not thinking of the number one reason anybody does anything.
CALLER: Greed.
RUSH: Money.
CALLER: Money, greed.
RUSH: Money.
CALLER: Money.
RUSH: There’s no money to be made if hydroxychloroquine is shown to be the cure. There’s no money to be made if hydroxychloroquine is said to be an effective treatment. It’s 50 years old. It’s cheap. You can’t go back and reprice it to a thousand dollars a dose based on deferring the cost it took during your trial to come up with a vaccine.
That’s just my theory. I could be dead wrong, ladies and gentlemen. I could be way off the beaten path on this. I’m just throwing it out there as an idea. I’m Sergeant Schultz in Hogan’s Heroes. “I know nothing. Nothing. I’ve seen nothing!” I don’t know. I’m just out there wild guessing like everybody else. Margie, thanks the call. Appreciate it.
Kay in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Welcome. You’re next on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Mega dittos, Rush, I’ve been listening since the eighties and I’m thrilled to talk to you.
RUSH: Well, I appreciate that. Thank you very much.
CALLER: Well, we all know that every year there’s between 15 and 60,000 deaths from seasonal flu. It’s silly that number is basically absent from all the news (unintelligible) and usually when you die from the seasonal flu it’s from pneumonia.
RUSH: Nobody’s dying from pneumonia or the seasonal flu this year. Haven’t you heard? Everybody’s dying from COVID-19. No flu and no pneumonia. Go talk to the funeral directors. James O’Keefe, Project Veritas, went to talk to funeral directors in New York. “Why are all these people that you’re preparing for burial, what’d they die from?” COVID-19, every one of ’em, COVID-19, COVID-19, COVID-19. No. It’s been one of the best years for flu that America’s ever had.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: A couple little news items. Pfizer has begun… Since we’re talking about hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin… (interruption) No, it is stra… They’re not just saying that hydroxychloroquine is ineffective. They have literally been running it down. I mean, they’ve been trashing it. They’ve been going overboard on it.
So it does raise questions, curiosity. Anyway, “Pfizer and the German pharmaceutical company BioNTech announced that their potential coronavirus vaccine began human trials in the United States” two days ago. So here they’re testing already a potential vaccine, and over here is hydroxychloroquine.
It doesn’t have a chance, hydroxychloroquine. “If the tests are successful, the vaccine could be ready for emergency use here as early as September.” Now, you know what happens? With a story like this, I’ll guarantee you what happens. In fact, I think it already has happened this week.
So, a story about a potential vaccine. A company will say they’re working hard, they’re getting close, “We’ve started testing!” The next day, maybe even later the same day, there is a story from some heralded health expert or researcher who will say, “We may never get a vaccine.”
Every morsel, every item of good news is met with fatalistic, apocalyptic news immediately thereafter — and it’s gonna happen here. You wait. So we got this story: “Pfizer and the German pharmaceutical company BioNTech” started testing their “vaccine [with] human trials in the United States on Monday.”
You wait. How long’s it gonna be before we get another story, “We may never, ever get a vaccine.” And, by the way, that may be true. We don’t have vaccines for the vast majority of viruses that are out there. You know, I’m blue in the face pointing this out. We still don’t have an AIDS vaccine, an HIV vaccine.
We have other forms of therapeutic treatments. We don’t have a vaccine for it. There isn’t someplace you can go and take a pill or a swab or whatever and be inoculated against coming down with HIV. Ditto, the flu. Ditto, the common cold, which itself is a virus. It’s a rhinovirus — and there’s not a vaccine for that.
So there may not be a vaccine for the coronavirus. My point is that with every morsel of good news, it isn’t long before somebody comes along and throws ice and cold water on it. Austria. Austria is reopening shops, and they say that their reopening had been underway for a while. It has not led to additional coronavirus infections.
“Austria’s first loosening of its coronavirus lockdown three weeks ago, in which thousands of shops reopened, has not led to a new spike in infections, though further vigilance is necessary,” it says here, “its health minister said on Tuesday.
“The Alpine republic acted early to tackle the viral pandemic, closing bars, restaurants, schools, theatres, non-essential shops… That helped cut the daily increase in infections to less than 1% and keep deaths relatively low — with just 606 reported so far” in Austria.
But they opened up three weeks ago, and they’re not experiencing any kind of a blowback. Now, there’s a new study from researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and they say that the coronavirus has mutated. It’s always bad when that happens, right? Yeah, that word “mutant,” what do you think?
When you hear the word “mutant,” you think a gigantic fly, right? Gigantic fly, gigantic insect mutating all over the place to come along and swallow you whole. So the Los Alamos National Laboratory says “the coronavirus has mutated. The new strain is even worse.” Oh, no! Oh, no! It’s even more contagious.
They say that if the virus doesn’t subside in the summer like the flu does, it could mutate further. It could limit the effectiveness of the vaccines being developed! Here you go. Good news, bad news. Good news, worse news. Good news, rotten news.
There aren’t any vaccines yet, but we already have a story about how if this doesn’t happen and that don’t happen, why, it could be really bad. Lousy news for you; great news for the Democrat Party and the American left, who are doing everything in their power to scare us into not reopening the country.
Even though these studies also tell us there may never be a vaccine, they still have to destroy the possibility that a vaccine might be developed. “But it won’t work. So don’t get your hopes up, you plebes, ’cause there’s no benefit. There’s no benefit in reopening. There’s no benefit in wanting to reopen. Because no matter what you do, this virus is gonna get you,” say officials at this lab or that department or this think tank.