RUSH: The CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, urging everybody to do nothing, go nowhere, stay home during Thanksgiving. By all means, don’t do anything. Stay where you are. Stay hunkered down. That’s what Americans are known for. They hunker down in the corner. Find the cubbyhole where you live where the Navy SEALs have to be thrown in there to get you out if they can’t find you. Make sure you protect yourself by hiding from everything.
During its coronavirus task force briefing yesterday, the Health and Human Services secretary, Alex Azar, announced that Pfizer will ask for emergency FDA approval for their coronavirus vaccine today and that the Trump administration is gonna ship millions of doses of vaccine within 24 hours of approval. Vice President Pence said that, quote, “Literally we could well be a matter of just a few weeks away from a vaccine being available across this country for the most vulnerable among us.”
Folks, as I said yesterday, I think we Americans, and understandably so, so I don’t want to sound like I’m preaching — we take greatness, many of us, for granted. Because we have come to expect it because we live in America where greatness is part of the daily existence for a lot of people.
And even though there has been a lot of effort made over the years by the Democrat Party to demonize major American corporations like Big Pharma and like Big Tobacco, Big Box Retail, Big Food, big whatever, the American people, even those that end up falling prey for this and end up hating these corporations, nevertheless expect that the products they produce are going to work.
They also resent how much they cost, and they think they’re being gouged but expect them to work. To have a vaccine for something like this in less than a year is unheard of. It’s unprecedented, and to be this effective, 95%. This is something you need to actively take a step back and seriously appreciate. Because it is a major, stunning achievement that could have only happened in this country.
And there’s another big, primary reason why it was able to happen in less than a year. And that’s President Donald Trump, who single-handedly did away with restrictive, penalizing, obstacle-oriented regulations. Had the regulations that were in place when Trump was inaugurated remained in place during this past year, we wouldn’t be talking about nearing the release of a vaccine for anything. We wouldn’t even be talking about being very far down the road in research and development.
We wouldn’t be talking at all about having begun any kind of testing. Had it not been for Trump, who understands the punitive, obstacle-oriented nature of regulations, had he not swept them away, we wouldn’t be anywhere near where we are with this vaccine. This is something for which a lot of people need to have a lot of appreciation.
And I want to say one more thing about regulation in general. The regulators, we can sit here and we can beat ’em up, and we do. They’re unelected. We don’t know who they are. There are literally tens of thousands of them, if not more, in the federal government. They are in every cabinet-level agency and department. They literally make up the vast majority of employees in every department, regulators. It’s very crucial to know that they’re not elected. That’s akin to saying they’re not accountable. And they’re not accountable ’cause nobody knows who they are.
They have immense power. They have the ability to write law — call it regulation — dictating how you and I can and cannot behave, how companies can and cannot behave, what companies can and cannot do, what they can make, what they can’t make. It’s entirely anti the democratic process. Yet they exist. Why do they exist? Well, it’s not entirely their fault. I mean, if you are appointed to be a regulator at Department of Homeland Security or regulator at the FDA, you’ll gladly take the gig.
But who is it that makes all this possible? I mean, if you wanted to all of a sudden make these people accountable, who would do that? Well, the people that allow them to exist in the first place. And the people who allow them to exist in the first place is the Congress. And the Congress is made up of the House and the Senate. And the House and the Senate, for much of my life, has been very comfortable in punting, kicking down the road controversial issues of any kind so that they don’t have to make the decision, so that there is not a decision that people can run against them on at the next election.
Classic example is when it came time in the late eighties, early nineties to close some military bases. We’d had a successful run in war. We had gone to Kuwait. We kicked Saddam Hussein out of there. And then we had eventually kicked Saddam Hussein out of Iraq. So we’d had mucho success there. And after that success, it came time to close the military bases. A lot of people said, “Why? Why are you gonna close the bases now?” “‘Cause they’re redundant.”
Like in Sacramento you got so many bases they’re on top of each other. We don’t need that many. Gotta close some down. Oh, okay. Well, who’s gonna make the decision to close some down?
“Well, we’re gonna assemble a blue-ribbon communitee.”
Really? Who’s gonna be on the committee?
“Well, we don’t know, but none of them are gonna be elected.”
Oh. So the Congress appointed people who had worked, maybe had been in Congress before, members of the House or the Senate or people that had worked at the Pentagon. And they formed the blue-ribbon panel that made the decision which bases were closed, not your elected representatives. They wanted nothing to do with it. When the decision was made on which bases to close, they couldn’t be blamed. They didn’t do it.
So when a base near Sacramento got closed, the people in Sacramento affected by it got hold of their local Congress, “What the hell are you doing to us?”
“Ah, ah, ah, ah, we didn’t have anything to do with it. The blue-ribbon panel over there did it. You need to go talk to them.”
“Well, what good are they gonna do? They’re not elected to anything. They’re out of business. They shut down.” That’s how regulators came to exist. So, yeah, we bemoan what they do, but they exist because other people don’t want to do the work they do. They don’t want to have their names attached to controversial decisions. Therefore, they don’t want opponents to be able to run against them when it’s reelection time on the basis that they did something that really made a lot of people mad.
So that’s how we end up with all these regulators. Well, these regulators have been allowed to propagate like one of those animals that just, whatever it is, propagating all over the place out there. Like the Clintons. Anyway, and they have just been multiplying out there at a rate you can’t keep up with. And they regulate. They write regulations on who can build a house where, how close it can be to the water, whether you can have your lights on at night because there are turtles lurking around on the beach or whatever.
Do you know, ladies and gentlemen, that in the 1930s — that’s the Great Depression. The Great Depression, massive unemployment. I mean, it was horrible. In the 1930s, we built in four years, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge that connects Oakland to San Francisco, the Hoover Dam, and the Empire State Building, in 10 years in the 1930s. There were no regulations. Very few. People were hired to do very dangerous work, and they did it, because it was the Depression. We couldn’t build something like the Golden Gate Bridge today in four years if our lives depended on it.
So we used to be, this nation, tremendous builders. Long story. My point is, Donald Trump came in and swept away not the regulators, but he got rid of mountains — he illustrated it in a photo-op. Stacks and stacks of paper representing regulations. There were like 12 stacks 12 feet tall versus the number of regulations in the 1960s, three stacks that were 12 inches tall. He got rid of all of those inside of two to three years, and it’s what permitted Pfizer and the rest of these Big Pharma companies to be ready to go with a vaccine in less than a year. Unheard of.
It’s evidence right in front of our face what needs to be happening. Shrink government, get rid of regulations, get rid of regulators. I mean, do you realize how little legislation is actually passed into law every year? Do you realize how little Congress and the Senate actually agree on outside of the budget? There’s very little. It’s exactly as the Founding Fathers intended it. Then how do we have all these new laws every year? From the regulators. And Congress is happy as they can be with it. ‘Cause their names are not on it, nothing they can be punished for, no way they can be held accountable.
But getting rid of the regulations paves the way for a vaccine for the coronavirus that would otherwise never happen, not be possible. Speaking of which, Dr. Fauci says that the vaccines are safe. So there. The vaccines are safe, and they have not been hurried. Dr. Anthony Fauci assured the public on Thursday that a coronavirus vaccine would be safe and effective, and he called for an end to suggestions that the development was rushed for political purposes.
He said the process of the speed did not compromise at all safety, nor did it compromise scientific integrity. It was a reflection of the extraordinary scientific advances in these types of vaccines which allowed us to do it in months where it actually took years before, said Dr. Fauci. He’s missing — look. The people working on this are obviously brilliant. But it still couldn’t have happened with all the brilliance in the world, with all the scientific research in the world, with all the Dr. Fauci approval in the world, it couldn’t have happened if President Trump had not shrunk regulations to the point of them being invisible.