 So, with me today is Pete Garretano, and we're going to talk a little bit first about what he sees and what I see is happening here to our institutions, our economy, our constitution as the coronavirus still is mounting in our state. So, hi, Pete. What's going on? Well, like you said, the cases are rising and the deaths in Vermont, unfortunately, and we've made national news lately not a really great thing to make the news for because we have the highest case rate in the country one week, and actually that same week, Florida had the lowest case rate in the country, so I think, yeah, what we're here to talk about is, and I've gone to a bunch of the meetings, town meetings about the masking and a lot of people are voicing the same concerns that if it's not working, somebody admitted, let's try something different because we've killed businesses, there's so much collateral damages going on, suicides are up, drug overdoses are up, child abuse is up, wife abuse is up, and this has all been written about in many, many publications. This is not a secret, the damage from the lockdowns and the masking is much worse than what's happening from the COVID, and pretty much everybody admits this now and that's just ongoing, and you notice it in the courts, but we also, we can look around and see that there's states that aren't, are done with this and have said, okay, let's go back to what we were doing before, and they're actually doing just fine, and they're not only doing fine, but their economy's booming in places like Texas and Florida. Colorado too, yesterday. Colorado, and people that watch TV have been watching football games for the last three months, where there's been 100,000 people in the stands that are unmasked, who knows if they're vaccinated, because they're certainly not checking people's vaccine cards in Alabama at a football game, and they haven't had any big outbreaks, contrary to what our experts, Dr. Fauci, keeps insisting they're going to happen. It's not happening, in fact, cases down south since the beginning of football season, I looked up Alabama, Florida, Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana have all been plummeting, and so we have people going to tailgate parties, going to restaurants, going to football games, all unmasked, and here, we're having a town meeting to decide if five people can go into a store without a mask on, it makes no sense. I wanted to talk to you a little bit more about that, actually, but you mentioned something else, which I've seen over and over, and it scares me, frankly, and that is what's happening in some of our real primary institutions of our society. For instance, in the courts, it is so difficult since the courts closed to get cases, especially for poor people, adjudicated. For instance, criminal jury trials, they would have been stopped in places, which means people linger in jail for months on end before they're convicted of any crime. That's all pre-trial. They can't have visits. It was an outbreak, by the way, recently in one of our prisons, and it's a thoroughly vaccinated environment. Everybody in the prisons, staff and so forth, have to be vaccinated, and yet there's all these break-through cases, which means further kind of punishment on the prisoners there, and those people are in general, a lot of them, pre-trial. They have not been convicted of any crime, and that's a general breakdown, I believe, in the rule of law, including in the national level. For instance, when President Biden issued a vaccine mandate for employers over 100, remember that? The courts stopped him from doing that and said he doesn't have the power. This, to me, is a real constitutional crisis, and yet he has said over and over, do it anyway. Do it anyway, and that occurred even in New York City, where people who are unvaxxed can't really even go in a restaurant anymore without a certificate, right? Right, and at some point, yeah, I mean, he's overstepping his bounds, but there's been so much press about the danger and the transmissibility and everything else that people are hooked into this belief that everything that they've been told is true, but currently pretty much all the things that people were saying a year ago have been proven by data to not be true, and I don't mean scientific experiments, I mean actual data of what's happening out there in the world. Okay, wait a minute. Now, you basically study this every morning, don't you? Pretty much, yes. And then you are a lay person, correct, but you're a smart person, an intelligent person, and you do this because it concerns you, correct? It concerns me and it's very interesting. I started doing it last March actually. When it started happening, right? I started looking into all the stuff and mainly reading medical journals and the CDC's journal, you know, publications and WHO and now the state of Vermont. And at this point, now some of these things have just become outright lies. I mean, I'm not going to call names, but when you have this, I'm going to call out the city of Burlington, who in their proclamation for mandates made the statement that breakthrough cases were rare. This is absolutely not true. They're common. Rare in medical terms is something that's one in a thousand to one in 10,000. Breakthrough cases right now in Vermont are as common as regular cases. So that's not, I mean, I've thought that this just statistics say that breakthrough cases are about a third or not. They're 34% in Vermont in the last three months. Okay. But still, that doesn't constitute rare by any stretch of it. No, I know. I know. It's to be accurate. They're common. And, you know, there's a slight difference, but it's not a big enough difference to make, you know, what they have right now is it's kind of science denial in my book. And I think it's also in Montpelier because they know we've had 10, 9,000 breakthrough cases and they know that these people are just as transmissible and they can give it to others. But meanwhile, we have people, there's 20 businesses in Burling that you want a vaccine pass to get in. So I don't, this is, this is, like I said, this is science denial. This is like vaccine misinformation or whatever you want to call it because what I asked somebody the other day is, so you're okay if a vaccinated person comes into your restaurant and gives somebody the disease, but you just don't want an unvaccinated person to come and give it to them because you're just as likely to encounter somebody on the street that's vaccinated that has COVID as unvaccinated. There was last month in Massachusetts, there were one week in Massachusetts, December 1st and December 7th, there were 11,000 breakthrough cases in one week. There's been 65,000 in Massachusetts. There's been 80,000 in New York. So there's hundreds of thousands of these in our general area. There's people crossing over the border. Then we might only have these signs that say vaccinated only. It makes no sense. There's no medical or epidemiological reason to have any segregation between vaccinated and unvaccinated. In fact, I mean, so that everybody's getting it? Everybody's getting it. Yeah. I mean, the state is showing that's what the state of Vermont data, the state of Massachusetts, this is right off their website, the state of New York. And the other issue here is what I ask is when did these vaccinated people become unvaccinated? And apparently, the answer to that is about three months, because New York also did a study which is posted on the CDC's website, where they took their 10,000 breakthrough cases and they asked them how when did you get vaccinated? Well, the average time that they got infected after vaccination was less than three months, which means the vaccine for the average person didn't even last three months. Okay, so we're talking about a six month booster, but that's apparently not soon enough. So in other words, what you're seeing from what you're reading from the CDC website and is that essentially, I guess that immunity fails after a certain point of time if you're vaccinated, that it fails. South Korea has just recommended boosters every three months because they notice every three months. They're having a huge outbreak and they are like Vermont. They are one of the most vaccinated countries in the world and they are also the most mass country in the world. So they have 95% masking and pretty close to the same amount of vaccination and they're having their biggest outbreak of the whole pandemic, kind of like Vermont is. So they've looked at the data and said, well, gosh, it looks like it's only lasting three months. Okay. All right. So tell, okay. So but you also said, as I said to that, that there are a series of town meetings, correct? And that you went to a Shelburne one and the question, let's go back a little bit. Governor Scott has refused to refused essentially to declare a statewide mask mandate. Thank you, Governor Scott. Yeah. And he turned those decisions over to the local towns and villages. And there were numbers of town meetings in which the people voted or their representatives voted to do a mask mandate or not. And you kind of kept track of all that. Well, I've been watching and trying to stop reporting on it. But at last count, you went to the Shelburne one. The Shelburne ensure a lot. At last count, there's way more that said no to the mask mandate and they didn't see yes, which doesn't really surprise me. I assume the only ones that would say yes would be Burlington, Montpelier and a few other did they? Burlington did in Montpelier did. But the big retail areas so far from what I can tell South Oregon, Williston have not. And actually the last time I went shopping yesterday in South Burlington, signs were all off the big stores, meaning the big grocery stores and the hardware stores. There wasn't even a sign asking you to wear a mask. If you weren't vaccinated, there were no signs whatsoever about. Did you visit a lot of these stores? I went to I went to Lowe's and I went to Hanifords. Deliberately South Burlington. Yeah, I was shopping. I know, but then I noticed I took a double take because it's been what a year since you didn't see something about the mask or COVID on the stores and there was nothing on either store. So there was though a vote in South Burlington, correct? Right. And the vote said that public buildings had to be masks, but everybody else decided for themselves. So apparently these large stores decided for themselves were done with masks. Why do you suppose they didn't want to have to enforce it probably right? I was interesting because I ran into a worker at one of the stores which were requiring masks. And he said the difficulty his store didn't want to do it. And the difficulty was it puts the store in the very uncomfortable position of enforcement. Right. Right. And that was a lot of the testimony at the town meetings were business owners that didn't want to have to have to ask their teenage employees to confront adults about wearing a mask. We had a hard enough time getting help. And they didn't want to do that. So yeah, I mean, that that's part of the thing. By the way, did you see yesterday they had lines in the free press which said that this mask mandates on buses were causing fights, physical fights. Doesn't surprise me and people. I mean, people aren't happy about it. I'm not happy about it. It makes I testified. It makes me sick when I wear a mask. And my doctor told me, well, that's because you're trapping germs in the mask. And that's one of the big fallacies of the whole mass thing is that these masks are not meant to be worn for two or four hours in hospitals and in doctors. They they they throw them away. They don't even clean them. Okay. And what they recommend is people read, throw them away or boil them in water. Nobody's doing that. So you're trapping germs in it and you're touching it. And most of the data shows the places that are highly masked had had worse outbreaks in places that weren't. I mean, all the most masked countries are Italy, Spain, the United States, and they're way up there in cases. And and all of Africa has nothing going on. And they want to get to that. Yeah, they have 5% masking and have about 5% vaccines. And they and they are doing better than anybody else in the world. Even though they're very poor country to know they're very poor country. And I'm guessing their hospitals aren't as good as ours. But I could be wrong. Maybe there's just something I don't know. Maybe they just have spectacular health care facilities. And that's why their their case, their death rates are a tenth of Vermont's and Vermont's are one of the lowest. But anyway, so let's get back to these town meetings because that's direct. I would guess that town meetings are an example of direct democracy, right, where people really have a chance to talk. And so when you were in Shelburne, what was the atmosphere? What was the attitude? I went to the Burlington one, by the way, to late. But the Burlington one about mask mandates was totally tumultuous. Just people yelling at each other. But anyway, what happened? The majority of people there opposing it. Because the majority of Charlottes and Shelburne, the majority of the people opposed the mask mandate. Okay. And so what happened? Well, it was they were very calm. Was it civil? Oh, yeah. I mean, there was only 15, 20 people at each one. And one doctor test, two doctors testified at one testified, you know, spoke at one and in a couple business owners and then just people that said a lot of the same things. Look, it's time to do something different because this isn't working. You know, we've been doing this for a year and it's so well more than a year and it's shown no improvement. And I mean, since we're talking about masks, I mean, you know, Vermont has made the news and and the graph of the United States is pretty much the same. This here shows Vermont's cases the last year, mask mandate, and then a big surge when we were 85 percent mask. We removed the mask here. It went down again. Vaccines hit. It went up again. So you can draw whatever conclusion you want from that. But that's the that's the way the data looks in pretty much every everywhere in the United States is that especially in the north. We're all masked. And I was talking about South Korea. 95 percent mask, a surge went away. Vaccine, a surge. And and there's there's two or three websites. You can you can look up every country in the world and look at these statistics here. I mean, I'm not going to keep showing you these, but here's other countries that show where the mask was put in place and then the surge afterwards. And so we keep insisting that mask works and people are showing you all these studies that have been done in scientific stuff. You can throw it all out the window and this is real world stuff. This is what has been happening around the world. And I actually couldn't find a single country anywhere where the when the mask went into place, COVID went away. It just didn't happen. And one of the funnier ones, somebody printed out from the CDC's website, November 19th of 2020, all the cases in the United States. So this is when the first surge occurred and pretty much the whole United States was about 85 percent masking. Some of the interior is left, but the coastlines are more. Well, here's a year later, and it looks exactly the same. So after a year of masking and vaccines, our case surge looks exactly the same. So people are saying it's working. I have a hard time agreeing with that when you look at stuff like this. What do you mean by working? I think people think it's working in that they hope in a way that this will bring cases down and that they can go back to normal life. So in your research that does not appear to be the case, right? Well, I would like people to think about it, have a big critical thinker and look at this too. Look, you know, go on to world meter, go on to John Hopkins, go on the CDC website. CDC is the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. There's another one called COVID-19 health data, which is by, I want to say Carnegie Mellon will actually show you the masks. We'll show you more stuff and you can line it up and you can compare states, which is what I did with the southern states and New England right now, because New England's having an outbreak. The southern states are all doing really great and the southern states have less vaccines, less masking. In fact, they're not masking at all and the northern states still have it. So you look at those things, then you go, hmm, you know, be a critical thinker. What you're asking those for people to use their own. Use your head and don't keep listening to these experts who have been wrong over and over and over again. I mean over and over and over. I mean Dr. Fauci, somebody called him in the press the other day, the wrongest person that's ever been wrong. And yeah, you can look back at statements they've made. The vaccine will be 100% effective. It will keep anybody from getting it. It'll keep anybody from spreading it. What they really say, though, that hospitalizations will be down and right? Well, in the beginning, they said none of this was going to happen and now they keep changing their story, but it's not even remotely true anymore, you know, about cases, about hospitalization, about deaths, because the deaths are going up and up and up. What I'm also shocked about is that as this system, in a way, continues, our society is being so affected by it, the consequences of the shutdowns, the lockdowns, the consequences are really severe if you look at places like where the opioid crisis is huge too. Oh yeah. And suicides are way up. And crime. And crime. Right. Which I don't, I mean there's no direct cause and effect, but the society itself, our society, is having huge problems that we have not seen before. Not that I remember, and I'm old. A lot of it is mental illness too. I mean, like a form of it. I mean, all the therapists I know said their business has just gone crazy. Up. I hate to say crazy. Their business is really, right, doubled or tripled. They can't even handle the people. And this is, I wish I had my mask. This is because of this. It's not because of COVID. People need to see faces. They need to see people laugh and smile. And they need to see people talking. Especially children. To me, it's a crime that we're masking children when children have virtually no chance of dying from this disease. But it's been pushed in their everybody's head that this is a dangerous thing. Five year olds. Five year olds. Even though the CDC and even though the Pfizer drug test showed there was no difference whatsoever between a vaccinated child and an unvaccinated child. I just wanted to mention something also because the unvaxed are really being put in a category, which can only mean that people are going to, as they say and won't culture other them, make them into this disease vector of other people that deserve no real respect in our society. And I've seen that over and over that we are dividing society into those people who are vaccine and those who are not with great deal of punishment toward the people and blame toward people who are not back. And there's no basis for science right now. There's absolutely none because once once again you can get you can get COVID from a vaccinated person. I've had four people in my car in the last two weeks that all your taxi cab driver. I had that all had COVID and all had breakthrough cases and it was all in a short amount of time. So this if I had four people in my car in two weeks then it's all over the place and we have nine to 10,000 in Vermont and that's probably way underreported. All this stuff is underreported. I mean there was a nurse we know that got on from UVM and was complaining that the doctors didn't want to report vaccine injuries. And so I mean that's another thing is we're being told the vaccine is effective and it's obviously not effective. I mean yes. Not effective certainly against variants. Well it's not it's not it's effective against transmission. It's I mean our cases are through the roof and we're and we're at 95 percent. So how anybody can look at that and say it's doing well. Let's put it this way. This vaccine would have never been approved if what we were seeing now is presented as the data back in December of last year. We're seeing about a 50 percent effectiveness. We're seeing transmission. We're seeing people get hospitalized and people dying and it only lasts three months. So if Pfizer had come out and said okay we've got we've got something for you but it's probably only going to last three months and you probably can still get it. You can probably still transmit it. You can probably still die from it. It would have never been approved. But they told us I mean their data said the exact opposite thing. So right now we know this is not not true. In fact injuries are you know according to VAERS which which I look at all the time. You should say what VAERS is the is vaccine adverse event recording system. And that's where the government our government is through the government and the CDC has been around 25 years and the that the injuries from this vaccine that have been reported are 100 times worse than any vaccine ever that's been produced and marketed and and we keep hearing of that safe and effective. Well first of all the the pharmaceutical industry testified to get immunity from prosecution by saying vaccines are inherently unsafe. Okay so the vaccine isn't safe. This particular one is the most unsafe that's ever been produced. It's not even approved. Well it's not really even approved. Pfizer is. Pfizer is. The latest this is right off the government's website. So we have 20,000 deaths. We have 12,000 in the world or in the United States. Okay. 20 12,000 reports of myocarditis which is very very common money on people to neurological problems 20,000 and 950,000 adverse events reported so far. And and you know there's a disclaimer at the bottom of this saying that doesn't mean that the vaccine caused the death. That's true. But I but all you have to do is go on the VAERS website which you can do start reading some of the reports which I printed out a couple of the people that have died like the moment they took the vaccine and and you won't believe that the vaccine didn't cause it and of course their their relatives don't believe you know believe it either. In fact there's even comments underneath of some of these reports you know that that from doctors and from the from the people saying the vaccine probably killed them. You know so you can go on and find out the age of the person you can just punch in a state find out the age and it'll it'll say like I printed a bunch that they died pretty much the moment after they got the vaccine and the reports all would happen they had a heart attack and and and died and so you know if I'm a healthy person that's 30 years old and I take a some kind of medication and I have a heart attack within five minutes after that I'm sorry. Right right right you're going to assume that right. I personally think that that that's the way it was but okay so before we go I did want to comment on some of the legal issues that are going on also with that with the travel ban and with the Biden administration is there something else that you wanted to well yeah I want to just read a little bit about this the surgeon general our surgeon general no the surgeon general Florida who seems to have common sense okay so Florida is a case study in a way that the cases are coming down right right right okay and they've they've had very few restrictions in Florida correct correct I've been there three times and this is a statement that you that you right so they they recently appointed a Harvard educated African man as their new surgeon general and this is he made a statement to the press two weeks ago and this is very interesting because he said I wish I had written his name down I'm quite sorry as we know these vaccines are not preventing transmission sure they reduced the likelihood of transmission even that is sort of questionable depending on how far out you go but they're not preventing it I've heard some leaders say things like we'll create safe workplaces by mandating these vaccines well they're really decoupled because the infective can still happen whether people are vaccinated or not I mean it's very obvious you remember these people are also telling you that all these breakthrough infections are rare well they're obviously not rare in fact they're common so this idea that the vaccine mandates are needed to create safe workplace is a complete lie it's continued to be you said that yeah it's continued to be repeated and you should know that it's not at all backed up by science in fact the science says something that's completely the opposite and this is the surgeon general of florida part of the reason that some people are not comfortable with these vaccines is because of the climate of scientific dishonesty about the vaccine whether it's natural immunity denial of that in the face of data or in the case of the vaccines open honest discussions about both effectiveness and safety there's been dishonesty around that the reality of how safe these vaccines are is absolutely not public healthy people have had adverse reactions after reaction there's been a concerted effort to prevent these types of stories these experiences from receiving the attention that they obviously should receive it's completely ridiculous but that's the surgeon general of florida which of course in our blue state florida is not particularly the bad guys right part of the bad guys florida is of course a red state but business is booming down there they're inviting firefighters and police I was surprised to see so many businesses are moving from california to places like texas texas and florida and i think our governor frankly has been very aware of that and therefore i believe that he's been incredibly cautious in his approach to restrictions requirements and so forth and he turned over those decisions to the towns and it seems like in a more or less democratic fashion that's the first democratic input we've had during this whole whole it does seem like the towns have rejected some of these major restrictions about masks before we leave we only have a couple more minutes left I did want to mention about south africa southern africa as well south africa is a nation within africa but southern africa the president recently said because of an omicron variant which seems to be breaking out that there should be travel bans across all of southern africa and that those people cannot come here and i'm so surprised because there's so little COVID there according to any statistics there's no COVID in places like Mozambique or Namibia and yet those people can't come here it's very worrisome because that of course is a country with many many poor people with mostly black people and the president is somehow getting away with saying that they can't come here it's and it's shocked it's kind of shocking to me because right well it goes it's just as I is it being challenged in the court I don't even know do you who would challenge it well they challenge the muslim man yeah I guess that but that's because Donald Trump did in that body I don't know well I don't know I mean why the contradiction I don't get it you know and because and I feel very sympathetic to southern Africa because they're basically poor people and they're basically brown people and black people who who probably feel very punished by all this with no particular reason they have not had huge outbreaks of COVID correct right and this kind of goes back to what I was saying before that the total ridiculous policy that's not based on science that we'll let people from let's say who's having a big surge right now England the people from England can come here as long as they've been vaccinated which means nothing because there's because England is a surge is England is surging right right tens of thousands of people in England have had vaccines and COVID also so we'll let those people in but in Africa where they've had virtually no COVID but they've had four cases of Omicron more than four though okay well it doesn't matter if there's a hundred I know there's ten thousand there's been millions of infected people in Europe and they're all allowed to come here anyway I'm just wanting people to really think about the differences between that policy and the differences as you say of Europeans Europeans can come here and that's where Omicron is really burgeoning it seems to me well they would have used the R word of Trump yeah I know but we're not gonna do that I don't I'm not gonna label it I'm just suggesting that this whatever this policy is has adverse effects on black people even in this country even in this country once again the policy is not working you know there's a thing well the travel ban is working to keep Africans out that's for sure which I don't want I mean you know I don't know what the I don't know why they're doing it I don't know why back to mask briefly too I mean all these countries that are highly mastered and poorly I could not I could not find one country that was under 50% masking that was in the top 75 worst COVID that's per thousand yeah all the ones that were the lowest masking rate also were down the bottom so so what you're saying in close is that look at stuff think about it oh yeah look at stuff think about it but also realize that doing the same thing over and over again it's not it doesn't work be working and now we should think this through a little bit and that's what the governor Colorado did yesterday right I know I saw that that was great he's a democrat now we'll you know he maybe he's fed up with it you know he's fed up with it so I think I'm gonna wear a mask wear a mask if you want to get a vaccine get a vaccine that's my look no but you also say clearly we're going back to normal yeah well that's we're just we're through with it we're going back to normal there's too much collateral damage yeah I know too many people that have lost their businesses almost lost their businesses I know I ran into one yesterday especially but small businesses small businesses small businesses all right so maybe next month we'll be here and we hope to see you again at that time thanks for listening