Bill Maher Calls for ‘Precision’ on Covid: We Can’t Go On Forever in ‘Permanent Hair-on-Fire… Freaked the F*** Out Mode’

On Friday’s Real Time on HBO, host Bill Maher asked why it is that the United States can be so precise with bombs and yet so imprecise in responding to a virus. Maher said America cannot continue to treat covid as if everyone has the same risk.

Maher has been somewhat of an outlier among liberals when it comes to pandemic restrictions, as he is in so many areas. During the “New Rules” segment of the latest episode, he elaborated at great length on the subject that has recently had many Republicans cheering him and Democrats attacking.

“Someone needs to explain to me, why is bombing the only thing America can do with precision?” said Maher. “We can send a laser-guided missile down an ice tunnel from a drone at twenty-five thousand feet, we can put one through a window without even rustling the curtains. When it comes to killing machines, we’re an atomic clock. For everything else: We’re a sundial in the fog.”

Maher spent about a minute on the subject of imprecision in other responses, using examples such as post-9/11 airport security and the creation of Homeland Security.

“They say if you see something, say something,” he said. “I see us afraid to identify threats by likelihood and bleeding ourselves dry just like Bin Laden wanted us to.”

He went on to describe how the medical establishment mishandled the AIDS virus, and related that to the mishandling of covid in New York under then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, of CNN fame.

By 1987, CDC officials pretty much knew how HIV was spreading and who was in danger. Now, of course, there’s no moral dimension to this, despite what Pat Robertson used to say. Gay sex is just as loving, natural, and salutary as the other kind. But science can be arbitrary. And instead of being precise and focusing on who should be protected, we launched a fear campaign about how AIDS was going to explode into the heterosexual community.”

Oprah Winfrey summed up what people were hearing when she said research studies now project one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS by 1990. But that didn’t happen, and the upshot of bad information was that in the late 1980s, low-risk Americans were swamping testing facilities and diverting our attention and energy away from the truly at risk.

New York in 2020 learned the hard way, how much better precision would have been in prioritizing protecting the nursing homes. Contrary to popular law, COVID is not Russian roulette. Of course, any virus, anything can kill anyone at any time, but we know who COVID kills.

Seventy-five percent of COVID deaths are people 65 and older. Ninety-eight to ninety-nine percent are unvaccinated. Seventy-eight percent who’ve died or been hospitalized were overweight.

“If you’re obese and unvaccinated or eighty-five and still crowd surfing at music festivals, yes, this will likely go badly for you,” said Maher. “But at some point. But at some point that has to stop being my responsibility.”

“Doesn’t it make more sense to focus on helping the vulnerable stay safe and let the rest of us go back to living normal lives?” he continued.

“There’s always going to be another variant,” said Maher. “We can’t go on forever in permanent hair on fire, cancel Christmas, handjobs through a hazmat suit, freaked the fuck out mode!”

Maher pointed out that public sentiment has turned against President Joe Biden on covid and that most Americans want restrictions to end and American life to resume as normal. He brought up the fact that what children are being subjected to is “unnecessary and horrible,” and said that society is stealing their “education, their sanity, and their social skills.”

He also attacked early lockdowns directly.

“A study this week from a professor at Johns Hopkins concluded that the lockdowns we all suffered through had little impact in reducing COVID deaths,” he said. “OK, that’s kind of a big one to get wrong.”

Maher touched on how, in media and tech, the theory that covid could have originated in a lab was a forbidden subject. He said making athletes mask on the sidelines after “mixing it up on the court” is just “theater.”

At the end of his remarks, he brought up the issue that has been dominating media for weeks: free speech and misinformation.

“The medical-industrial complex has not earned the right to claim monopoly status on information about this virus or medicine in general,” said Maher.

“Yes, free speech has allowed people to hear misinformation sometimes,” he said, “and a lot of it was yours.”

Watch the clip above, via HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.