RUSH: Dr. Fauci can’t guarantee the physical vote in November will be safe. Dr. Fauci said in an interview on Sunday, that he can’t guarantee that it will be safe to physically vote at the polls in November due to coronavirus. (summarized) “I hope so, Jake. I really hope so, but I can’t really guarantee…” When did we turn to the National Institutes of Health to guarantee that the election’s gonna be safe or that November will be safe?

No, I’m… No. This is not nitpicking. It’s quite the opposite of nitpicking. The United States media is turning to the director of the National Institutes of Health for practically every question involving reopening the United States — the economy, elections, malls, summer camp, you name it. The director of the NIH. Now some of you might think, “Well, Rush, he’s gotta be the guy because he’s in charge of the health, he’s in charge of the virus, he’s in charge of the…”

No, folks. Reopening the United States economy, I don’t even think it needs a task force, but there’s gonna be one; so I hope really good people are on it. To me, the United States economy is something that happens naturally. The United States economy… You know, it is commerce. The United States economy is people getting up and living their lives.

And people are naturally inclined to want to earn a living. One of the reasons why is it’s necessary. You have to earn a living to eat. But a lot of people don’t now. The federal government is paying for you to eat while not working. That cannot go on forever. But if it goes on for six months, the socialists think that they’ll have enough evidence to make their case that people will vote for it in November.

They don’t need this to go on forever. They just need it to go on for long enough to persuade people that it works, unlike in Venezuela and unlike in Cuba. But the U.S. economy is not something that requires a PhD to understand. Now, if you want to get into macroeconomics and study the infinite details of data produced by the economy, well, that’s an entirely different thing.

But understanding how the economy works? It’s people getting up and living — and, right now, that aspect of people’s lives is being denied them. They’re not being allowed to live their lives in what, for many people, is the most productive aspect of their lives. And this just can’t go on. The United States economy is not some mystery. It’s not even a mystery to socialists who hate it.

They understand perfectly how it works, and it scares the heck out of them. They hate capitalism because it works. They hate capitalism. Capitalism delivers on its promises. Socialism doesn’t, never has, and can’t. But it can work for long enough or a short enough period of time to convince people, “Hey, this is great. Maybe we can try this,” and they’ll vote for it, and then they’re really sunk, if that were to happen.

So I appreciate that there are people with ideas on how to do it. Roll it out; certain segments go first, the healthy areas, the healthy people. If you’re sick, stay at home, continue to stay at home. We gotta get going! How do we get restaurants up and running? Do we allow restaurants to have as many tables as they used to have or do we have fewer tables, everybody separated by six feet?

Require masks in there with holes in there for your mouth so you can chew and swallow? These are things that the experts are going to discuss, and how we handle airlines, how we handle seating on airlines. I mean, these are questions that do need to be answered. But do we need airplanes flying? Yes. You don’t need a PhD to understand that.

Do we need restaurants open? Yeah. Do we need the malls open? Yeah. Do we need the streets open ’cause people walk on the sidewalk? Yeah. Do you realize in Lynn, Massachusetts, they’ve turned sidewalks into one way? If we turn this over to every Democrat governor and mayor, heaven help us. Meanwhile, there’s Dr. Fauci saying we can’t guarantee a physical vote in November.

Last night on the Fox News Channel, Steve Hilton… I forget the name of his show. It runs at 9 o’clock, and I normally… I don’t watch cable news on Sunday nights. By Sunday night (chuckles), I am newsed out. I have finished show prep, and I’m watching escapist, mindless TV twaddle or I am reading escapist, mindless book twaddle. Well, none of it’s escapist, mindless twaddle.

But last night, Kathryn said, “You ought to watch this. You ought to turn this on. There’s some guys on here that actually have some good ideas about reopening.” So I did. I turned it on. Raymond Arroyo was on, and I thought, “I’m listening to myself,” in many of things Mr. Arroyo said. And the founder the JetBlue was on, and this guy was fabulous. This guy has some wonderfully great ideas.

And they talked about — I’m sorry to do this to you. There’s another idea that Dr. Fauci has had. Which, ladies and gentlemen, again I want to stress that I’m not challenging the medical qualifications or the achievements or the accomplishments or the reputation of Dr. Fauci. Far be it for me… (interruption) Yeah, The Next Revolution is the name of the show.

Far be it from me. That’s not it. But now Dr. Fauci is out there recommending all kinds of things. One of the things that Dr. Fauci that he says are being discussed are immunity cards. Can you say George Orwell, folks? Do you know what an immunity card is? It is federal permission to leave your home. It is federal permission to leave your home and go to work and interact with others who are immune.

You may not remember this, but back during the apartheid days of South Africa they had “pass laws.” You remember? You had to have permission from the government to pass here, go there — and it was racist, and it was bigoted. The primary problem with immunity cards is everybody’s gonna want one.

If immunity cards are what turns you loose — if immunity cards, instead of the Constitution, is what becomes the source of your freedom — oh, my. Phrased that way, this is doubly scary. If immunity cards… Well, they’ve been saying that for a while. The news media have been saying for a while that if you get the disease and recover, you could get it again. Some people are contracting it again.

Oh, those stories are all over the place, that it’s on the bottom of your shoes. The coronavirus is everywhere, ladies and gentlemen. We are powerless against it. We can’t reopen until there’s a vaccine! Hey, do you know how few vaccines for viruses we actually have? That can’t be the measure. But back to these immunity cards. If immunity cards replace the Constitution as our source of freedom, everybody’s gonna want one.

You know what you’re gonna have to do to get one? You’re gonna have to get infected. You’re going to have to get infected. You’re gonna have to run the risk of getting infected, and then you’re gonna have to run the risk of surviving — which apparently is not that great a risk — and then after you have your precious immunity, then you can get your immunity card.

But aside from the dangers of people trying to get infected, the very idea that we’re gonna have in the United States of America checkpoints where you have to produce your papers? We’ve all seen… Well, most of us have seen these World War II movies where anywhere in the Soviet/Eastern German bloc you get to some checkpoint somewhere in Germany or Eastern Europe, “Papers, please. Your papers.”

And people get nervous, search around for their papers. If they don’t have their papers, it’s the last you’ve ever seen of ’em. Do we really want that in the United States of America, “Papers, please,” at checkpoints throughout American cities? Dr. Fauci said this is entirely possible. He unloaded a lot of things on CNN yesterday. “Asked whether he could imagine a time when people would carry such forms of identification, he said, ‘Well, it’s one of those things that we talk about when we want to make sure that we know who the vulnerable people are and not.'”

Ho-ho-ho. Immunity cards are not to tell you who’s vulnerable. In a way they could be. But immunity cards — and if you can get it a second time, if they say this is true — in other words, if you really don’t build up immunity. Dr. Fauci said, “This is something being discussed. I think it might actually have some merit under certain circumstances.”

So, again, Dr. Fauci is turned to as the world’s foremost authority on the politics of this. Immunity certificates, by the way, have been implemented by researchers in Germany. It stands to reason. They have experience with, “Papers, please,” in Germany. Immunity certificates are being implemented by researchers in the U.K. and in Italy. In parts China, citizens are required to display colored codes on their smartphones indicating their contagion risk.

Apple and Google are working on contacting using Bluetooth as a means of tracing, contact tracing, tracing your steps to find out if you have interacted with infected people. This is all under the guise of protecting everybody. The controversial surveillance measure in China, the colored codes on smartphones, was tried or is being tried in Wuhan, which is the source city for this.

See, so Dr. Fauci – as Steve Hilton pointed out last night — Dr. Fauci is being asked a bunch of political policy questions, and he runs the National Institute of Health. Now, do not misunderstand. I don’t think it’d be unreasonable for medical people to be consulted by the policy people. But the medical people are not the final arbiters, not to mention we didn’t elect Dr. Fauci. It’s a bad idea, these immunity certificates — antibody passes. “Yeah, I have the antibiotics. Here are my papers.”

It’s a bad idea. We don’t want to go down that road. And surveillance is gonna tick up. It’s gonna be a part of reopening. It’s gonna be a part — it already is — but it’s just gonna increase with the belief that the American people are gonna be all-in on it. The American people are gonna want to know who the lepers are. They’re gonna want to know who the infected are and the government is counting on surveillance policy being supported. And who could blame the government. Because they portrayed the virus as something that’s a killer for which there is no cure or treatment. They never talk about the recovery rates.

Why are you staring at me with wide… (interruption) You cannot believe these people are serious? What people were serious? Fauci? (interruption) Oh. You better believe it, you better believe it. The people floating the idea of immunity certificates are dead serious about it. They’re dead serious. Look. You know better than most. You’re just not thinking of it because you’re looking at this primarily as a health issue, as you should.

You gotta understand, to the very people that you have known your whole life are the political opposition, the Democrats, they’re not looking at this a health issue. This is a political opportunity like they haven’t had in who knows how long to implement so much of their agenda, the Green New Deal, get people to stay at home, stop pollution, show that shutting down capitalism saves the planet. They’re doing it. They think they’re doing it right now. Shutting down capitalism is saving the planet. They got their charts and graphs. Here it is. Hold it up. They got their charts and graphs here showing less pollution in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut by people not going to work.

They’re already on the march here. Green New Deal works. People not working can save the planet. We can keep them fed, massive government spending, i.e., socialism, we can keep ’em fed, we can keep ’em home, we can save the planet, we can bring down the price of oil. We can get rid of oil ’cause we don’t need it, people aren’t driving anymore. We can get rid of fossil fuels. They’re salivating over it. This virus is a godsend to some people.

You know that as well as I do. You just haven’t gotten to that point, Mr. Snerdley, because to you it’s a health issue, and you’re looking at it as a health issue to overcome and to conquer so that we can resume normalcy. You gotta understand, there are countless millions of Americans who don’t want to return to that normalcy, and this is a golden opportunity for them to succeed at that.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Look at this, ladies and gentlemen. Top coronavirus forecaster, which means he has never been right, this is Chris Murray of the state of Washington model, University of Washington IHME, the guy has never been right — you understand this? — not a single modeler has been right. They’re trying very hard. They’re doing their best. They haven’t been right. And the top coronavirus forecaster, meaning the chosen model of the media, is warning of a rebound if the country reopens May 1st. So the guy running the model doesn’t want to reopen. Oh, no, we can’t reopen. Why, there might be a rebound. A guy who hasn’t been right yet on his projection of the number of deaths. What amazing times.