RUSH: Every time I’ve stopped to think about what we’re doing to ourselves, I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it. Folks, I don’t want to sound corny here. I’m really not trying to sound corny, but if you knew how much — and I’ve mentioned it over the course of the years. If you knew how much I appreciated you…

You have meant everything to my happiness and my success, your being there, your being part of this audience. I owe a thank-you or gratitude. I’ll never be able to repay everybody who’s been in this audience. I just… I have such a profound appreciation for all of you. I have the sense of a familial relationship with all of you, a familial connection with all of you — and I know it is a…

I know these experts, and they may be experts and they may be brilliant, and they may know doctors and nurses and health backwards and forwards, but they don’t have a connection with any of you. Not like I do. And I’m scared to death for you. I’m scared to death for everybody, even people that don’t like me. I’m scared to death for everybody, because there has to be an end to this.

Look at the hospital industry right now. Look at the doctors and nurses who are being paid half. They’re frontline soldiers going to work every day. The president talked about it yesterday. They’re frontline soldiers, based on how deadly we’re told this is. Even though 98% of the people who get it recover from it — 98% of the people who get it recover from it — according to Bill Bennett in his piece yesterday.

I don’t see any kind of concern for this among people who are speaking every day to the people of this country. I see concern about not getting the virus; I see concern about all the great work being done. It’s kind of like I told you I once went to the dedication of a federal building with the name of somebody I knew on it — and the ceremony was the GSA praising itself for getting the building built.

It blew my mind. And every day we get government praising itself for what it’s doing here — ventilators and all this other stuff dealing with the virus. That’s what they’re supposed to do. But I don’t see… This may be mean; I don’t know. I just… I don’t sense anywhere near a concern that I have for the people of this country. It is the people of this country who make it work.

Now, I know they would argue with me and they would say, “No, we’ve got all kinds of concern. We’re trying to keep them alive, Mr. Limbaugh. What are you talking about?” I totally get that. But what’s missing is a sense of perspective here. When the subject of opening up comes up, you know it’s lip service. You can just hear it’s lip service from them, ’cause when they throw in something, “It will never be normal until we get a vaccine.”

We don’t have an HIV vaccine. “It’ll never be normal ’til we get a vaccine.” They’re telling us it’s never gonna be normal again — “normal” meaning a roaring, robust economy with gads and gads of opportunity for people who want to access it. There has to be a way to do both of these things at the same time. There has to be a way to get this economy going — and there’s no end in sight to this, do you know?

That’s the thing. They try to tell us when there’s gonna be an end in sight to the medical cases. They gave us the charts and graphs and the apex and the uphill and the downhill and mitigation. “We’re gonna be on the downhill side of it.” Then they tell us, “It’s gonna come roaring back again seasonally,” so everything we’re doing now is irrelevant essentially ’cause it’s gonna come roaring back.

There has to be a way to combine two objectives here. Somebody said, “This is where the billionaires of America must step up, the Gateses and the Buffets and all the richest people in America who have been spending their lives trying to be at the top of the Forbes list. Let them donate some money to the hospitals. They are billionaires. They have more money than God.”

It seems like it, but, folks, we can’t support this country on donations. We can’t support it on gifts. We can’t support it by confiscating the wealth of other people. We’ve never been able to do that. This economy has to sustain itself. This economy has to be roaring and producing its own GDP. Do you know the size of this economy before this happened? $22 trillion. The sum total of all economic activity: $22 trillion.

The richest man in America has $78 billion, not even close to $1 trillion! So, yeah, it might make people feel good to have, you know, Bill Gates send five or 10 billion to the New York Hospital system, but once you do that, they’re gonna come to expect it. You know how hospitals stay alive? People get sick and go to them. Doctors and nurses get paid treating them. Getting sick and dying is part of life.

Getting sick and going to the hospital — trying to stay alive, doctors and nurses treating you — is part of the economy. Empty hospital beds do not bode well for a hospital. We don’t want ’em full. We… It’s such a mixture of things that happen. Every industry has to have activity in it, and there must be a pursuit of profit in most of it or it’s not gonna sustain. It’s not gonna… It can’t exist.

It cannot exist by confiscation.

It cannot exist by printing money and give it away.

You can’t print enough. We’re not gonna print $22 trillion. (Snort!) I say, “We’re not gonna print $22 trillion.” We did. We printed $20 trillion. That’s the national debt, and look: A $20 trillion national debt, and we still are in this problem. So I just have this ongoing fear, and I know I’m running a risk by sounding critical of people in power at the elite level of government and so forth, but I just…

Look, I’m not an idiot, and I know who in this task force hates Donald Trump. I know who in this task force loved Hillary Clinton, and I know who in the media hates Trump (everybody, pretty much), and I know that there are political agendas attached to everything. And I know that there are people in this country who wouldn’t mind this economy tanking so they can rebuild it with their China-like centralized government, a Soviet-like centralized government.

We’re in a lot of challenges here, and the engine of this country has been sidelined. The people who make this country what it is — with very few exceptions — have been sidelined. They are the key to this nation rebounding. They are the key to this nation recovering. Not a federal bureaucracy. Not a federal cabinet-level department.

The people of this country are key to it, and they’re not being unleashed. They’re being sequestered. Some have already been wiped out, and it is a painful thing — a painful thing to see and to experience. (interruption) Well, no. To put it in perspective, $1 trillion is equal to a $1,000 billion. The richest man in America has $80 billion — Bill Gates, whatever.

One trillion is a thousand billion. It’s a million millionaires, is one trillion dollars, and we just printed $6 trillion or four, whatever we just printed, and we’re already talking about it not being enough. We printed, what, $2 trillion and that’s enough to give everybody $1,200? We can’t do that. (interruption) No, no, no, don’t misunderstand. We have to do it, if we’re gonna shut down the government, if we’re gonna shut down the economy, there have to be alternatives.

Here’s a tweet. This is Scott Adams. He’s the noted cartoonist. This was yesterday morning about 7 a.m. He said, “In about a week, if the government hasn’t given us a credible #coronavirus back-to-work plan, we need to make our own schedule with our own criteria. My patience for obeying a government that refuses to inform us of the basics (healthcare supply and demand) is nearing an end.”

That’s one man, Scott Adams, he got a lot of acolytes. He has a lot of followers, but I totally understand the take. Here’s the polling data from some outfit called Just the News with Scott Rasmussen. This is not the Rasmussen poll. Scott Rasmussen left Rasmussen. This is his own poll. Americans are worried about loss of income than their own health during the pandemic, according to this poll.

Would it be safe to say, Mr. Snerdley, the government’s shut down, too? (interruption) All right. During government shutdowns, what does the media do? The media treats us to stories of the vast suffering of government employees, do they not? During government shutdowns they tell us, “Oh, my God. The Department of the Treasury people are not gonna get their annual Thanksgiving turkey because they’re not employed, and the Christmas turkey. And the ski ride operators and the sleigh ride operators, oh, my God. The government employees are not gonna be able to have Christmas because of the government shutdown.” They tell us this every time there’s a government shutdown or when they’re thinking about shutting down the government.

During today’s shutdown of the U.S. economy, the media treats us to their attacks on Trump. They feature what some people are calling inflated death tolls. They tell us China is good. They tell us Trump is evil. Where are the media stories about out-of-work Americans at home miserable, depressed, suffering? There isn’t one of those. The stories about how Americans are loving it, Americans are discovering their children again, Americans are discovering their families again, Americans are discovering the fun of being home without going to work.

Government employees I guess are getting their checks. Many of millions of employees and businesses are not. Where are the stories of Americans desperate to return to work? Where is the media doing — you know there are people chomping at the bit over this. But it’s not the politically correct narrative. And so we’re not seeing those stories.

Angelo Codevilla in the American Greatness website, “Doctors, Doctored Numbers, and Democracy — Many of our so-called health experts are acting less like good doctors and more like bad politicians. The New York Times on Tuesday reported: ‘The numbers the health officials showed President Trump were overwhelming. With the peak of the coronavirus pandemic still weeks away, he was told, hundreds of thousands of Americans could face death if the country reopened too soon.’

“These numbers, many millions of infections, hundreds of thousands of deaths, were ones that ‘health officials’ had been spreading through a sensation-hungry media for some time. Together with a poll question that framed the choice just so, they had already helped produce another set of numbers: ‘Voters overwhelmingly preferred to keep containment measures in place over sending people back to work prematurely.'”

Let me give you some other pull quotes from the piece from Dr. Angelo Codevilla. Dr. Fauci has opened the door to what typical bureaucracy looks like, talks like, and thinks like. He is overeducated, he is overcredentialed, he’s overawarded, he is entrusted with too much power, he’s living in the comfortable D.C. bubble, he is asked to all the right parties, protected from accountability, and dangerously incompetent. Wait. That may not be a pull quote. That’s not a pull quote. That is the characterization of a little helper. That is not a pull quote from Dr. Codevilla.

Here is one. “To make intelligent decisions about countermeasures, we would need have hard data about all these matters. Yet, for two months, doctors such as Anthony Fauci have messed up millions of lives and commandeered trillions of dollars while scaring the hell out of people and watching curves based on projections based on meaningless numbers. Watching the several curves resulting from the testing that is now ongoing and that is projected to continue as the country suffers will provide only more guesses, that will feed more models and more disputes. The most important fact about COVID-19, its true mortality rate, is the number who die of the virus divided by the number infected by it. No algorithms. Simple arithmetic.”
And 98% of the people that get it recover from it. “In short, Fauci, et al., are showing themselves to be typical of our bureaucracy: over-credentialed, entrusted with too much power, and dangerously incompetent.” That’s Angelo Codevilla on Dr. Fauci.

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RUSH: Let me give you one more pull quote from the Dr. Codevilla piece. “President Trump, as well as the governors of some states, have been stampeded out of their common sense into shutting down the country until further notice. The bureaucratic-media complex has done this on the supposed basis of medical authority. But the doctors have not been speaking as doctors on the basis of knowledge of the human body while offering cures or even palliatives. No. Their judgments are based on speculation about the meaning of [freaking] models. They are not acting like good doctors but rather like bad politicians.”

It’s like living under climate change models and turning life over to them. “Backed by the media, Fauci and company have contended that actions by anybody, ordinary citizens, elected officials, or physicians that do not follow proper bureaucratic procedures are illegitimate. Who the hell do they think they are? We belong to ourselves. Not to them.”

They are not in charge of our legitimacy. They are not in charge of our lives. They are not in charge of whether or not what gives us meaning.

“Decisions affecting each and all of us rightly belong to ourselves directly and indirectly through elected representatives. Congress and the legislatures should be making decisions on the basis of open debate and recorded roll call votes.” Dr. Codevilla, not happy.

“To make intelligent decisions about countermeasures, we would need have hard data about all these matters. Yet, for two months, doctors such as Anthony Fauci have messed up millions of lives and commandeered trillions of dollars while scaring the hell out of people and watching curves based on projections based on meaningless numbers,” which have now magically been revised down.

“Watching the several curves resulting from the testing that is now ongoing and that is projected to continue as the country suffers will provide only more guesses.” Guesses are not a way of making national policy. They just aren’t.

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RUSH: No, no, no, no, no, no. I was quoting Dr. Codevilla. I don’t think Fauci is incompetent or evil. I just think he’s a bureaucrat, folks. I just… I don’t think these people have any kind of a connection with the actual people who make this country work. They think they make it work. They think they’re the ones who are the best and the brightest and all that, and there’s just no empathy.

If there were any empathy, this wouldn’t be going on the way it is right now. The idea that government can provide for everybody during a shutdown? It’s not possible.

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RUSH: Greg in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Great to have you, sir. Glad you waited. Hi.

CALLER: Yeah, hi, Rush. Thank you. Mega dittos from the beautiful shores of Lake Michigan. We’re praying for you.

RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.

CALLER: I have a double-question question. Who will give the official okey-dokey, and how will the America deal with it?

RUSH: Well, rights now it’s Fauci.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: You smirk out there, but right now it’s Fauci. Everybody’s deferring to Fauci and Birx as to when we go back to work. If you doubt me, watch a briefing.

CALLER: Yeah. But if the president comes along and says it again or puts his foot down and says it’s official, the media is gonna have a… They’ll believe Fauci and ignore the president? I mean, they gotta go along with it.

RUSH: No, I’ll tell you what’s gonna happen. I’ll tell you what’s gonna happen. Someday hopefully, they’re gonna let us go back to work — and somebody is gonna die, and the media’s gonna focus on that person and demand the country be re-shut down and blame Trump for the death. You know damn well it’s gonna happen. People die. Do you know how many people die in New York? Damn it. I’m having trouble remembering the number.

I think 7,000 people a day die in New York, 50,000 a year die — or 7,000… (sigh) I don’t have the number in front of me. The point is that there are people who die. The death rate in this country is high from all kinds of things before you add coronavirus to it. And we don’t shut down the country every time somebody dies. We don’t shut down the country for flu, for any of these things.

Now, I can understand why as compared to the coronavirus so forth, but we’re gonna have to end it. At some point, this has to end, ar else the United States is gonna wave the white flag and give up. We either go back to work or we give up. We go back to work or we concede defeat. We go back to work or we surrender. And when we go back to work, people are gonna die, because people die every day in America from a wide variety of things.

But the first COVID-19 death after we go back to work, every reporter in America will be there and will be blaming Donald Trump for it, for goofing up the go-back-to-work order. You know you can predict this is gonna happen, and you don’t need much of a brain to be able to understand it or predict it. You know it’s gonna happen. So since we know it’s gonna happen, we can’t be concerned with it. We can’t stop it from happening.

Salinas, California, Don. Great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hi. I wanted to say, God bless you, Mr. Limbaugh. You’re as iconic to me as Paul Harvey, and I selfishly want you to beat this cancer because, damn it, I need you. (chuckling)

RUSH: Thank you, sir. I deeply, deeply appreciate that. Thank you.

CALLER: And now what I wanted to say is the shelter-in-place order has outlived its usefulness. We now know who the virus is least deadly to, and at least those people need to climb out of their holes, get back to their lives — and if they happen to catch the virus, more the better they come out the other side immune, which starts us down the road of herd immunity, which is our only weapon against this virus right now.

RUSH: Well, I hate to tell you, but Dr. Fauci came out against herd immunity yesterday at the briefing.

CALLER: Well, can I say this about Dr. Fauci?

RUSH: Well, let me ask you —

CALLER: I hope the president’s listening. Clinical scientists make lousy generals, okay? They pick a clinical model; they follow it to its bitter end — not allowing unproven variables like the malaria drug to muck it up — and what we could very well end up with is our own version of Gallipoli. That’s what I see about Dr. Fauci.

RUSH: Yeah. I know there’s a lot of impassioned emotions out there about this. Don, thank you very much. I heard what you say, and I deeply appreciate it.

Okay, here are the numbers. This is what I was looking for. And this is 2018: 7,452 people die in America every day, 7,000 die every day. It’s called population control. It’s called life expectancy, call ’em any number of things: 7,452 people die every day in the United States. That’s one every 12 seconds.

But I’m here to tell you the first COVID-19 death after the go-back-to-work order is issued, can you imagine what the media is gonna do with it? Yes, you can. And precisely because we can imagine it, we ought to just ignore it.

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RUSH: By the way, the 2019 number, over 8,000 Americans die every day. Let me get the exact number. It is 8,782 Americans in 2019 died every day. Does that surprise you? Bet it does. People don’t think about it. Life goes on, this and that and the other thing, but it’s a big number. The number of people that die around the world every day — and then they’re replaced. It’s called the birthrate replacement level. People are born every day too.