Joe Rogan’s Show May Be Dumb. But Is It Actually Deadly?
Look, I think it’s fine that Joe Rogan said, with COVID-case rates coming down in April, he wouldn’t tell a healthy 21-year-old to get vaccinated. That’s a value judgment, not a lie. And we may as well ignore the fact that he treated himself with ivermectin in September, after he got sick himself. He was also taking monoclonal antibodies and steroids (and some studies did appear to show, at first, that ivermectin was effective). But a lot of bullshit spewed on The Joe Rogan Experience, his podcast, is gravely irresponsible; there’s just no arguing this point.
He or his guests have said, for instance, that useful COVID treatments were suppressed by greedy hospital executives, that COVID deaths have been grossly overcounted, that masking simply cannot work to stop disease transmission, that public-health messaging has hypnotized the masses, that recovering from COVID confers permanent immunity, that mRNA vaccines represent “a major threat to reproductive health,” and many other things that aren’t true. The spread of these ideas wastes our time, at the very least. I suspect that it makes us dumber, too, by sucking any serious critiques of vaccine policy into a vapid swirl of blabbing and debunking.
