RUSH: I got a flash message from one of the staff. “Well, you’re really making us New Yorkers and New Jersians — you’re really hurting our feelings.” I’m not trying to hurt anybody’s feelings. Look. I lived in New York for eight years. I enjoyed it. I loved it. But I paid my dues. I had to get out. I have no animus against New York at all. I mean, but the numbers are the numbers. And the point in reciting them is not to shame anybody. It’s so inform people.

That’s all that this is about each and every day is informing people with the belief that the people listening to this program have the ability to think and decipher and critically think, analyze, make up their own minds about things. As long as it agrees with what I’m telling them, everything is cool. He-he-he. But no. The fact that 52% — if you take New York and New Jersey and Massachusetts out of the equation, we’ve got a non-event. But you can’t take ’em out. I know you can’t because they happened, they are happening.

But, in terms of policy, sometimes I feel like — even though I know I’m not — I feel like a lone wolf in my concern for the country and the economy. I know I was one of the first to publicly and openly start fretting about what we were doing. It’s never made any sense to me. Beyond the first month, it has never — and even then, could I tell you why I think we shut down? This makes me even angrier.

We shut down over a number, 2.2 million. The bogus number of deaths that that fraudulent modeler told us about, Neil Ferguson, now shamed in the U.K. Remember that first projection, 2.2 million people will die in the United States, 500,000 people will die in the U.K. Okay. So, you take that number and you get the crew from the CDC and the National Institutes of Health and you get in your official CDC and National Institutes of Health vehicles with all the proper decals on the doors and you drive up to the White House and you go very solemnly into a meeting with the president, “Mr. President, if you don’t do something today, 2.2 million people, your fellow citizens, many of them your voters, will die by the end of the month.”

“Oh. Really? Oh, my God. Who says?”

“Well, we have this expert modeler that we’ve relied on for decades. He’s currently having an affair with a climate change activist, but we can look past that. His name is Neil Ferguson, and he’s predicting 500,000 people will die in the U.K., and among them might be Boris Johnson.”

“No kidding?”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s bad, Mr. President, 2.2 million.”

“What do we gotta do?”

“Mr. President, you gotta shut it down. You gotta shut it down.” So we shut it down. Then we find out that that 2.2 million figure has never been valid because it did not accommodate or account for any action that we might take to avoid that number of people being killed.

And when this clown plugged in one variable, social distancing, staying six feet apart from people, the 2.2 million number became 60,000 in America and 20,000 in the U.K. But it doesn’t matter, because by that time the 2.2 million number’s out there. And to this day it’s cited by advocates. “If we hadn’t done anything, 2.2 million, maybe more. I couldn’t afford that. I couldn’t take the chance. Not on this watch, 2.2 million.”

Meanwhile, the people in the NIH and the CDC get back in their official vehicles with the decals on their doors, go back to their office, mission accomplished. So 2.2 million dead is why we shut down. It was a bogus, invalid number from the get-go. But it worked. It was a big enough number to scare the hell out of everybody.

Now, a couple of other stories about the CDC here. Here’s the first one. Right here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers. Here’s the headline: “The Centers for Disease Control,” which, by the way, I don’t think they’ve got a lot to hang their hat on in this episode, if you ask me. Where were they discovering the existence of this thing? Where were they taking steps to see to it that it never got to the United States? What the hell is their job?

Why are these people still held up on pedestals as experts on whom we can rely? Is the federal government not filled with people who’ve been Peter principled way above their abilities? (interruption) The ChiComs did it, of course. And who doesn’t know that the ChiComs lie? We’re dealing with communists. You know what else the ChiComs are doing? How did this not get noticed?

Xi Jinping, president for life, communist head honcho, he ordered Chinese embassies around the world to go out wherever they were in the world and buy up every PPE device, equipment, mask, ventilator, whatever they could find and send them back to the motherland so that Chinese citizens who got the virus could be treated and dealt with. They went on a worldwide buying spree to buy up everything so that they, the Chinese, could hoard it. How did that not get noticed?

“Boy, Rush, you’re really being hard on –” Look, folks. Is it so mean to want some accountability here? It’s not. Why do we keep regarding people that don’t do their job? I tell you what. There are business requirements for this show and shows like it that have to be met. And if they’re not, it’s sayonara, El Rushbo. Performance based, easily measurable. People in government somehow seem to be able to escape this kind of accountability. Not just federal government. Every level of government, they seem to escape it.

So the Centers for Disease Control is supposed to know these things are happening, ferret them out, do what they can to prevent them from coming into the country. They’re supposed to have a lab where every known virus in the world is kept and studied. But, yeah, it’s easy to say the ChiComs lied, the ChiComs withheld everything. They are communists. And, by the way, we are now discovering that there were cases of coronavirus diagnosed in this country in December, in various states.

Anyway, here’s the headline: “CDC recommends mail-in voting due to coronavirus despite Trump’s concerns about voter fraud.” What the hell does the CDC — The CDC is now urging mail-in voting? I wonder why not just say the CDC is recommending voter fraud as a way to deal with coronavirus? Why not just tell us, Mr. Redfield, what you’re recommending? This is on the CDC website.

If grocery stores are open, if subways are open, then we can damn well go vote. It’s ridiculous that you can’t open a retail establishment that might have 12 customers a day, but you can open a grocery store. “Well, it’s essential, Mr. Limbaugh, because people need food.” I agree. I totally understand. But common sense, there’s a disconnect here. I’m just telling you, if we can get on Andrew Cuomo’s not disinfected subways and if we can send seasoned citizens in New York to nursing homes, and if we can go to grocery stores, then we can damn well go vote in person. We do not need to have mail-in voting.

Here’s the second CDC story, and this just happened. It happened during the top-of-the-hour break. That’s when the story was published. It’s an exclusive from the Associated Press. “U.S. Shelves a Detailed CDC Guide to Reopening Country.” By this I mean they shelved it. There was a guide, there was a pamphlet, there was a list of recommendations for how to reopen the country. Who do you think put it together? The Centers for Disease Control. The Trump administration has decided to toss them.

“A document created by the nation’s top disease investigators with step-by-step advice to local authorities on how and when to reopen restaurants and other public places during the still-raging outbreak has been shelved by the Trump administration. The 17-page report by a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team, titled ‘Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework,’ was researched and written to help faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials as they begin to reopen.”

Because, of course, ladies and gentlemen, none of you know how to do it. You have no idea how to reopen your store. You have no idea how to reopen your business. You have no idea how to maintain a separation of six feet. You have no idea how to do diddly-squat until some bureaucrats you didn’t elect come along and give you the guidelines.

“It was supposed to be published last Friday, this 17-page report by the CDC. “but agency scientists were told the guidance ‘would never see the light of day.'” This is the Trump administration telling these people to go pound sand, essentially. This little pamphlet of yours is never gonna see the light of day. You’re not in charge of reopening, Trump said. The states are. The governors are in charge of when they want to open their states, not you.

“The official [at the CDC] was not authorized to talk to reporters and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity. The AP obtained a copy from a second federal official who was not authorized to release it. The guidance was described in AP stories last week, prior to the White House decision to shelve it.”

Let me tell you what these guidelines would have done. I mean, I’m gonna guess. These guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control would have forced you to live under a permanent state of paranoia. These guidelines would be written in a way that life would never be normal again. How many people have you heard now say, “Oh, we can’t go back to the way it was, Mr. Limbaugh. No. No. Things are not gonna be normal in the sense that we’ve known ’em as normal.”

Why not? “Well, because we got the virus out there, Mr. Limbaugh. You never know. It’s never gonna be the same.” I understand that, but, for crying out loud, what do you mean we can’t go back to being? “Well, the federal government is gonna have to be more and more involved in making sure that people follow the guidelines.” Oh, so you’re gonna have a bigger police state, is what you mean. That’s what you mean when you say we can’t go back to normal.

We gotta take as much fun out of life we can and turn it into guilt. We gotta turn kids into paranoid tattletales. Anyway, Donald Trump can sniff this stuff out. I am so glad he she would have this. I’m so glad he shelved this because where’d that 2.2 million number come from? Well, from the fraudulent modeler in the U.K. But who were its domestic sponsors? The CDC has no business telling you or setting voting policy, and they certainly should not be granted such a wide berth as to be the final authority on who, what, when, how, and why the American economy reopens.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Somebody just sent me a tweet. It’s somebody asking, “What happened to all those spring breakers in Florida that violated the stay-at-home order to go ahead have spring break on the beaches? How many of ’em died?” Has anybody seen any news on that? (interruption) Really? (interruption) I wonder why.

Why are there no stories on how many people died in Florida on spring break and elsewhere? ‘Cause, you know, these kids, they went down there and they violated the stay-at-home order. They went down there and they had spring break anyway, and they were doing their usual spring break debauchery on the beaches.

Everybody said, “You can’t do that! You gotta get out of there.” The governor Florida said, “Yeah, you bet. We better shut it down after a while.” Now, I would assume that a whole lot of those kids have died, right? (interruption) Well, that’s… They told us that. They told us that that was gonna happen. It’s why… (interruption)

Well, but… (interruption) No, no, no. Yes, but we didn’t know that it was rare then. We’re going back to March now, Mr. Snerdley. You remember the pictures. It’s a great question, because the answer is, they haven’t died, ’cause if they had the media would be all over it and Donald Trump’s picture would be on every story with every death.

But they haven’t died, and these were people… You want to talk about getting closer together than six feet? How about on top of each other (for hours on end) and then you throw in the adult beverages and who knows whatever the hell else? And you know, you know the Drive-By Media had to be following along waiting for the carnage.

But they haven’t reported on any carnage, which must mean that there wasn’t any. Yeah. Now we can say we know that, well, young people are the least likely among us to acquire it. Oh!