Joe Rogan is not a doctor. Still, millions of people (including UFC president Dana White and Green Bay Packers QB Aaron Rodgers) are listening to him for Covid advice. In 2021, Rogan came down with Covid and decided to take Ivermectin to treat it, and then he got mad about CNN reporting that he took “horse dewormer,” mostly because “I can afford people medicine, motherf*cker.” His declarations, very clearly, are not based upon science but various ramblings.
To quote Marc Maron’s characterization of Rogan’s rhetorical style, there’s a lot of “‘I don’t know, man” flying on any given subject, all for a reported $100 million deal with Spotify. Well, doctors are fed up with Rogan saying whatever he wants about Covid, no matter how dangerous, and YouTube recently deleted an episode that featured a Rogan guest comparing vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany. Well, hundreds of physicians (270 of them) have come together for a signed opened letter to Spotify, and here’s (via Rolling Stone) what the doctors have to say on the topic:
We are a coalition of scientists, medical professionals, professors, and science communicators spanning a wide range of fields such as microbiology, immunology, epidemiology, and neuroscience and we are calling on Spotify to take action against the mass-misinformation events which continue to occur on its platform. With an estimated 11 million listeners per episode, JRE is the world’s largest podcast and has tremendous influence. Though Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform, the company presently has no misinformation policy.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Joe Rogan has repeatedly spread misleading and false claims on his podcast, provoking distrust in science and medicine.
The full letter is well worth a read since it really dives into the science of it all, along with much of the misinformation that Rogan’s been dropping, essentially as entertainment. They’re asking Spotify to stop “enabling” this dangerous rhetoric, and meanwhile, the very unvaxxed Rogan remains ticked off that he can’t perform at a crowded arena in Canada as the pandemic continues.
(Via Rolling Stone)