Let's not forget, someone decided in 2018 that a pandemic preparedness program was a waste of money and scrapped it 😀👍

Only extroverts “suffered” mentally from the shut-ins. Introverts were having a BLAST.

The cardboard audiance was insane I forgot about that.

"Where's boeing when you need a door to fall off?"😂

“If you don’t know what a glory hole is, don’t look into it”!😂😂😂

The one store that didn't close during covid was the liquor store!

Closing the Beaches was the most stoopid. California cops even arrested single people who violated the closure and were on the beach with no other people around. Walmart 24 hour stores reduced their hours, forcing people to shop in crowded stores during the day instead of offering the option to shop at 3 AM with only three dozen other customers in the entire store. Even worse Walmart got rid of the overnight stocking crews and forced them to work during the day when the stores were crammed with people, subjecting employees to contact with thousands of people every hour. Both ideas the exact OPPOSITE of good sense. Of course, the big-box retailers were allowed to stay open with very few restrictions while all the small businesses who only got 30 customers per hour were forced to close. That only sent thousands more people to the big-box stores every hour.

The fact that the crowd waited to clap after he said it was a mistake to close down schools during COVID tells you exactly where their stance is.

As an ICU nurse for over 30 years, I have never witnessed so many patients dying in a day, 4 in the morning shift and 4 in the night shift. And from an unknown disease that we have never seen before. Hospitals have to have new treatment protocols almost everyday. Looking back, I don’t know how we all kept our sanity while trying to save our patients from a monster and protect our family and ourselves from falling ill. I’ve always felt that a COVID Commission should be formed because of the lives lost and the PTSD that the healthcare workers are going through right now. We can all look back and say we all overreacted but then again hindsight is always 20/20. I would rather not have had all the accolades that “Nurses are Heroes” than have had to face the tragedy of the COVID pandemic in my lifetime.

And Mark Esper, Secretary of Defense in 2019 and 2020, sitting over there on the sidelines having to laugh away as he knows he was a part of all of this, too. How great!!!

Thanks Bill. I paid no attention to the man behind the curtain, I was outside all the time cycling, playing golf and just breathing deeply because it is good for me.

Let’s not forget how some networks ran death counters, which suddenly ceased on January 20, 2021.

can't deal with an applause break after every single joke.

I remember the extra refrigeration NYC had to order to keep all the bodies.

You know Bill, you talk about people being a bit over exaggerated on some issues, but we weren’t asked to wash our hands every five minutes. Some of the steps might have been extreme, yes, but many of them were just common sense when it comes to disease control, or cleanliness. You forgot how your celebrity has put you into a realm separate from the everyday common man. There is room for you to grow up a little bit more!

Evil isn't the real threat to the world. Stupid is just as destructive as Evil, maybe more so😅

I remember the cold storage units outside the hospitals when the morgues filled up. That's my memory of 2020. Bill's being a bit dismissive about how we were supposed to take or handle something like that considering it had never happened in his lifetime.

If the world was a hospital America would be in the mental ward 😂😂

Odd to me that "We ate in parking lots" is listed as one of the "stupid" things we did. Taking stuff outdoors and letting life continue was about the only smart thing we did! Santa Barbara was a model city for that, closing down State street to cars so all the restaurants could serve people outdoors - festive and safe. Astoundingly hospitals in sunny California did not utilize their parking lots as waiting rooms and had everybody crowded together indoors - covid folks and broken legs alike. Talk about stupid. The idiocy was in the extremes - crowd everybody together indoors at hospitals, but close down beaches. So damn dumb.

Not all of us gave into all of this nonsense. And any push back caused life altering harm to the people questioning this insanity.

As an Australian I can't comprehend how the United States could even entertain the idea of reelection, for a man who responded to the trauma of nurses seeing containers of dead bodies, by handing out free pens.

Since when Bill Maher cares about kids at school? 🤣🤣🤣

Do they give a prize to the audience member who cackles loudest and quickest after every line? If sycophancy ever becomes an Olympic sport, there'll be medals abound in that crowd 😂

I’d love for Bill to be the moderator at the Trump/Biden debate!

Alternate Facts from Maher, for laughs. Tuning out now.

Ah yes COVID-19, something Bill appears to have forgotten he rode out safe and largely unaffected, making his show from the courtyard garden of his mansion.

Wait...what ? Bill spent 9 minutes trashing the entire covid ordeal as an overblown event, then at the end Bill 'craps' on Trump for disregarding it ? It seems like they both have the same opinion in common. LOL

And UKposts STILL blocks half the sane comments on the subject

As usual Bill; the survivors get to write the history.

Bill has become the old guy saying “Get off my lawn.”

2020 was probably the worst of my life so far. The fact that all of that political nonsense was going on and there was no way to go out and escape it was maddening! I had the worst experience with the Unemployment agency I have ever had, and everytime things seemed to be getting better, it got worse, all thanks to COVID!

Bill, you and your viewers were the ones who fueled the panic.

Ok to be fair Colorado did it right with the cardboard cut outs in sports events , they had South Park characters which was hilarious!

Okay the gloryhole "I wouldn't look into it" line is comedy gold!

I just watched a video clip where a guest who was asked to be on his show was told …”no….I won’t refrain from my weed smoking ..that’s a deal breaker “. Wow…really Bill? A guy was just trying to stay drug free and sober ? And you say ..”no..I have to smoke weed the entire time I interview you “

Admit it. Y'all went nuts over COVID and you demonized those of us who didn't. You're re-writing history, here, mate.

1.8 million people died from COVID-19. I was working in NYC. The epicenter of Covid. This was BAD! Rather have a government overreact to save lives than the contrary. This rant from Bill has become old and tired.

Ah yes, four years ago...the good ol' days when we were literally having fistfights over masks made in sweatshops and people were going to the grocery store looking like the government agents in E.T.

Officials didn't think it was a big deal until the general public went bananas.

Government wasn't the solution, it was the problem.

Closing the schools was bad for the children but not as bad as grandma and grandpa on life support ventilators

Didn’t bill tell everyone to shut up and be happy ? He should have taken his own advice in 2020.

I'm feed up with the "didn't need to close the schools" arguments. Children didn't live in a vacuum. They interacted with older people at home, their grand-parents for example. having 30 kids packed in an unventilated classroom and then sending them home is not wise as most of them were asymptomatic and big vectors of the disease. From NIH: "Although younger children had lower viral loads than teens and adults, they were most likely to transmit COVID-19 in their household."

All the crazy crap we did was due to the fact that we were absent a leader… Which is the same reason we know Faucci’s name.

Korea wore masks every single day outside inside, I was there. People would run with masks on. They didnt nearly have the cases, deaths and problems. There over reaction meant that schools stayed open. Americas meant arguing.

Half good points, half idiotic

Ironically, Iran's attack on Israel was the first direct flight between the two countries since 1979

Honestly, I don't even WANT to remember 2020, or 2021

I don't get mocking handwashing. You don't have to do it every 5 minutes but if you're out in public, don't touch your face, and wash your hands as soon as you get home. You'll cut way down on your colds and chest infections. If you combine that with wearing a mask in indoor public spaces you won't get colds ever. I know because this is what I do. Maybe Bill just doesn't mind having a lot of colds.

I lost friends and extended family members from covid. Not elderly with health issues either.

I remember taking my puppy outside , I was absolutely alone in a small park and suddenly a very old man came very close to me - like literally in my face and started yelling - why I am not wearing a mask ! He saw me out of window without a mask , put on his mask went outside , came to me and asked where is my mask . Stupidity has no borders!

Glad he called out torturing animals.

Easy to mock after the fact. I bet you took your precautions - and smoked more than usual.

So yes. Definitely better than 4 years ago. Hello ! Good thing they didn't leave it up to some armchair talk show host.

Glad to see Bill is sticking with the elites.

Rare time I agree 100% with Bill here.

Here in Australia: April 2020 - NSW Health allowed passengers from the Ruby Princess to disembark in Sydney despite knowing that test results, which would prove whether or not coronavirus was present among sick passengers, would be available within hours. Passenger just got into taxis and took off. Later we had the "Ruby Princess" infection clusters and 28 people dead as a direct result.

I'm not sure if I can agree with Bill here. As a person living in a third-world country, I can still remember how much our people suffered in the pandemic. Patients were literally falling off their beds dead and the 'natural immunity' you mentioned about, that simply became a joke at one point. And our healthcare system, despite it's flaws, managed to handle the crisis in the first few months of the pandemic atleast. Many people were praying so hard to get a shot of vaccine, and when it came out, our people were partying like it was Independence Day, despite the fact that a jab did not guarantee complete immunity and precautions had to be taken You know, you can cry and complain about the precautions that we had to take for the first few months, but I say from experience, had I not followed them, I'd have been in an overloaded freezer, and my family or friends would not have even got the chance to see my burial. That being said, I still agree with Bill on many things, but this? NO.

Wonder how any people laughing are the ones who pushed CLOTH masks. 😂

No WE didn't. Some of us weren't that stupid. 🙄

FYI...COVID took my sister, my ex-wife's 2 sisters, my step daughter, my neighbor, and almost killed me, despite all of us living in separate houses and not seeing each other during the pandemic. In my experience, not enough precautions were taken during the pandemic.

there was no covid test to begin with duh

"And there are no miracles" --- LOL. I love it!

I would vote for you Bill. we desperately need common sense in this country and humor.

Hindsight is 2020 😉 I started as an RN when COVID started it was scary AF

To be fair, Mr. Maher, hindsight is always 20/20, and I think you often forget that when it comes to COVID-19 (because he missed having his audiences during the pandemic) 🙄

I would like to see John Stewart Debate Bill Maher.

Given everything we've seen and should've learned about Covid I think we would've come out better ignoring it than overreacting like we did.

Who thinks we over reacted to Covid? Applause….. Yeah, I hear that a lot from survivors.

In the early stages of the pandemic, when death counts were rising and little was known about the disease, closing schools made sense. They simply stayed closed for too long. Calls to open back up came too soon, and turned the whole thing into a partisan argument, like everything else.

I remember. I remember some, being labeled racist for trying to restrict the spread. I remember being told facts, that were anything but facts. I remember all the hate. I remember the attacks, and intimidation. I remember the lies. I remember all the people fleeing their beautiful cities. I remember people coming together and helping one another. I remember everyone doing what was needed to protect our elderly. I remember a lot of bad decisions with regards to that. I remember .

According to Bill we should have basically done nothing. But because we can never ever know what would have happened had we done nothing he can never lose the argument. And also, according to Bill, there is only one country on the entire planet. No, wait, there is only person and his couple of rich buddies.

Yeah, this is one New Rule I can’t agree with completely. Sweden tried keeping no restrictions in the hopes that natural immunity would prevail and they admitted defeat. Imagine how it would have gone for us with a larger population and a poorer healthcare system. Natural immunity also showed that you would still catch the virus and suffer its effects so it wouldn’t help as much. And was the potential of natural immunity worth losing a life? That was the problem with Covid: no one knew just how bad it would affect you. Some people were asymptomatic, some had mild symptoms, and so on. No trend or demographic. I am definitely better off now than 4 years ago. At least I can go out and enjoy doing stuff unlike 2020.

Never ceases to amaze me how people who won’t be held responsible for decisions that are made all have 20/20 hindsight

A man who doesn't pick sides right on

Glad to see Bill coming back to reality

NY recommending Glory Holes is the funniest part of the clip!😂😂😂 Don't remember that at the time.

Bill, easy to laugh now, you survived and so did I. We closed the schools and I (a high school teacher in a poor community with many, many multigenerational households where grandparents or great aunts take care of the kids because parents both work two or more jobs) still had 4 students lose 7 family members - and those are just who I happened to learn about - for all I know there were 10 times as many, because people didn't talk about it. We don't know how bad the pandemic would have been if we didn't close the schools, wear masks, etc., but the countries that took serious actions did far better than did we. Consider Vietnam, with a death rate about 1/7th that of the U.S. The people who died AREN'T HERE TO COMPLAIN ABOUT IT. So no big deal, right? No. In 2022 the World Health Organization estimated 14.9 million people had died of Covid worldwide. That is roughly 1 out of every 500 people in the world. In the US we've had over a million deaths from Covid - roughly 1 out of every 340 residents. By comparison, auto accidents kill 40,000 US residents per year, or 1 out of 8500 residents. So Covid killed as many people in about 2 years as car accidents kill in 25 years.

The effects of Covid 19 could be eradicated by super spicy chicken wings, and a gigantic wolf mascot head counted as proper ppe.

We were all locked in our homes getting bombarded with opposing information. We didn't know what to do other than try to protect ourselves and our loved ones (most of us anyway). Whining that we made mistakes in the past is low hanging fruit.

If we haven't learned a thing from COVID, are we not still better off today than we were in March 2020? Mistakes were & are always made, but I'd rather be on the side that was safer than sorry, even though- as stated, mistakes were made, because nobody is perfect.

I worked all through the pandemic. fun on the ghost freeways. Was so fast getting everywhere

The COVID material is funny. You are hitting a stride Bill. It feels like George Carlin right now. You should release a new 1 hour special and hammer this stuff home.

Poor Bill. During COVID -- he got bored up in his big secluded mansion. His personal assistants, chauffeurs, private chef / cuisine delivery staff all ended up inconveniencing him at some point during that time. What a damn shame! Bill suffered so much.

A lot of this type of rant just begs the question "and what was your solution?" Just ignore it and let it run rampant with the 'hope' it wouldn't be as bad as predicted? Take the school closure situation - sure the kids were more or less going to be ok from COVID so doing school from home wasn't great for them but what of the teachers? Little known fact, almost no teachers are kid-aged, and many are middle to old-aged, so even if the disease spreads quickly through the kiddie population without much incident, what is going to happen once it reaches the teachers/admin staff, likely over and over again? Should they just be forced to teach in person and say 'screw you, your life isn't that important anyway'? What was the 'easy' and immediate solution then? It's this type of binary thinking from Bill that gets me - what is your alternative? Because I can guarantee whatever your plan of action would have been would also have a LOT of problems too. Face it, there were few 'great' choices. All we can do is hope this can inform us about future crises.

Spot on Bill!!! Cheers🇨🇦

Gotta give Trump credit for saying how it just did go away, He was right about that.

Let us never forget how many families had to visit nursing homes, retirement communities, assisted living facilities and hospital by standing outside and looking through window but not be able to embrace their loved ones as they deteriorated and prohibited from giving rhem the hugs that they so desparately needed. We also need to be reminded how many people died as a direct result of the negligence of the former president who could have adopted a more proactive stance in dealing with this situation.

So glad about the raucous laughter - it informs me that Maher has just told a joke. The bewildered gaze and the dropped jaw are useful prompts too.

He’s so right! As a nurse who worked during Covid, I first got Covid when my immune system was compromised by everything I had to wear on my face. Got bronchitis which lead to Covid. It was insane.

Sometimes he is a rational person

Come on, Bill.

Bill - the strategy was better safe than sorry. You worked from home and survived. Remdmber that !

HELL, NO! We're all broke now!

"It has become a pandemic of the unvaxed". One of many covid shamings.

Covid to Maher is like Hillary's emails to conservatives: he'll never let that go.

Bill, don’t you remember in March 2020 we didn’t know anything about COVID-19. I remember that month because it just so happens to be when I was born and two days before my birthday on March 15. My company laid everyone off for the next three months. It didn’t just happen at my job. It happened all across the United States and globally. Major industrialized nation said this is going to be terrible. If you don’t have an essential job you are now being told to stay home. We joke about COVID-19. Some people even say it wasn’t that serious by the end of 2020 1.8 million people died from COVID-19. Back then we didn’t know what to do. We didn’t even have a testing for COVID-19 in March 20 20 the CDC honestly didn’t know how to approach the disease we didn’t even know what it was. We had just started trying to use brand new RNA technology to synthesize a vaccine. a vaccine that would’ve normally taken us a decade or more to develop. We did it in less than 10 months just so happened brand new technology had just fallen into our lap. Sidenote, RNA vaccination technology that’s probably how we will cure cancer. No that is likely we will cure cancer. People often forget we didn’t know what we were dealing with even today we still don’t understand the severity of the situation. People forget we experienced heavy supply side inflation because of COVID-19. In a global economy, we had people all across the globe not working some of them sick many of them quarantining, and that stuff we wanted stuff we needed. We could not get. We wanted chips we couldn’t get them. I remember working in the auto industry and our assembly client not being able to get computer chips to build parts. We about it now some of us don’t even understand how close we came to going over the edge. If that virus had been just a little bit more deadly just a smidge could’ve been worse worse. We are very lucky to come away as unscathed as we did, even though we lost millions of people, even though we still haven’t recovered economically speaking. Even though some people still don’t understand the government had to spend money remember people were laid off. What were you going to do? Tell them to eat dirt. You had to give them money to spend. Remember those words when you’re laughing, I don’t think this is a situation to necessarily joke about especially since so few people actually understand the dynamics of it.

Do you ever feel like you’re talking to the American wall

Day drinking is still a moral imperative with all the idiocy that still goes on.

Well, Bill, it's not "over." Many wealthy people have no idea how bad the situation was, and still can be, in "fly-over" country. Since I have Sjögren's Syndrome I was very careful to mask up in crowds even after the lockdown was over. My husband did not and brought Covid-19 home in 2022!!! I was in bed for a month, weak and barely able to breath. The constant coughing was extremely painful because I have arthritis, and every bone in my body ached. I was practically chugging cough syrup. Now I have long-covid which entails chronic fatigue, brain fog and food allergies. It's never "over."