Editor's Note: Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.
"A lot of times if you see me on this podcast talking about shit, I probably just read the headline." — Joe Rogan, Sept. 20, 2023
Podcaster and comedian Joe Rogan is a menace to public health.
In winter 2021, as the Omicron wave was set to flood our hospitals, Austin's adopted meathead broadcast the ravings of two disreputable vaccine-skeptics, encouraging his massive audience to ignore the consensus medical advice of public health professionals. By April 2022, the School of Public Health at Brown University estimated that the deaths of well over 300,000 Americans could have been prevented if they'd opted to receive the safe and effective vaccines we had at hand.
On September 20, Rogan did it again. His guest this time was former business reporter turned spy novelist Alex Berenson, famous for suing his way back onto the social media platform formerly known as Twitter after getting banned for spreading reckless falsehoods about the coronavirus pandemic to his half-a-million followers.
"Don't get your kids vaccinated with the COVID vaccines, it's not good for them," Berenson — a non-doctor — declared on The Joe Rogan Experience. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines for everyone over 6 months of age, and FDA approval for Novavax, a protein-based vaccine, was handed down this week.
Keep in mind that for a newborn with no previous exposure to SARS-CoV-2, it's practically 2020 again.
"More than half of the COVID deaths in children occur in those without any preexisting risk factors," epidemiologist Michael Osterholm reported on his pandemic podcast Osterholm Update. "Let me again sound like a broken record and say that these vaccines are the best defense we have right now, particularly against serious illness, hospitalizations and deaths. So please, please, please get this vaccine if you're eligible."
Non-doctor Joe Rogan gave a different prognosis.
"Take care of yourself and [COVID's] a cold. Nobody wants to say that. It's like this verboten thing. C'mon, kids, let's be real about it," he opined on one of his episodes.
However much we may wish that were true, it simply ain't so.
While most of us can recover at home without needing a trip to the emergency room, plenty of people require hospital care. Others, even after mild bouts of COVID, many develop a long-haul syndrome that can last for months or even years.
"It's very clear in our data that reinfection contributes additional risk of Long COVID," Ziyad Al-Aly, chief of research at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Healthcare System, told science and medicine news site STAT News. "If you've had COVID previously and dodged a bullet and did not get Long COVID the first time around and you're getting another infection now, you're pretty much trying your luck again."
More than 8 million Americans are currently experiencing COVID symptoms lasting three months or longer, according to a recent survey conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics. Meanwhile, multiple studies have found vaccination reduces the odds and severity of Long COVID.
But note Rogan's proviso above: the third leading cause of death behind cancer and heart disease is equivalent to the common cold if you "take care of yourself." Except, millions of Americans deal with maladies like asthma, diabetes or chronic kidney disease through no fault of their own — all are comorbidities for COVID.
Pregnancy also puts you at higher risk of severe illness. And many prescription medications result in weight gain. By the time you count up all the exceptions to Rogan's blanket statement, you're forced to admit that the exceptions are the rule, and those who can afford to forget COVID are a privileged minority.
Neuroscientist Sam Harris recently took his friend Joe to task on exactly this point.
"You would think losing a quarter of a million people in the under-age-65 cohort would be a pretty big deal, but oh, of course, many of them were fat," Harris said with a hefty helping of sarcasm.
He continued: "Everyone in the anti-vaxx and vaccine-hesitant world seems to point to obesity as though it were somehow morally relevant. Realize that about half of American society is obese, and a person can't suddenly lose 70 pounds at the first sign of a pandemic. The cult of self-sufficiency that surrounds the obsession with fitness, the notion that each individual can be fully absolved of having any stake in the health of society-at-large, the idea that we can all just go it alone with our ice baths and our Zone 2 Cardio, this is a delusion. Eating only grass-fed beef isn't a strategy for dealing with pandemics in general and all of the anti-vaxx bullshit could well get a lot of people killed next time."
Succumbing to pressure from the Texas GOP's right flank, Gov. Greg Abbott has done his best to prohibit municipal health officials from issuing mask ordinances and other mitigation measures in the event of future disease outbreaks.
"What's crazy is we have examples of Florida and Texas where they just opened up, and they didn't have it worse," Rogan opined on his podcast.
Only, we did.
"Texas and Florida have about twice as many vaccine-preventable deaths compared to California," to again cite the analysis from Brown University's School of Public Health.
By the time Texas Health and Human Services stopped publishing COVID fatality counts on its website in May, around 100,000 Texans had perished from infections. Do those invested in rewriting the history of this preventable tragedy truly believe that was the best pandemic response our state is capable of mustering?
As of April, 40% of the money the federal government gave Texas to improve ventilation in schools had remained unspent. Yet "for classrooms equipped with mechanical ventilation systems, the relative risk of infection of students decreased by at least 74%", according to an Italian study published last year in Frontier Public Health. Cleaner air would help asthma and allergy sufferers breathe easier too, but a state with a $33 billion budget surplus failed to make this an urgent bipartisan priority.
As ugly as COVID deniers' indifference to those with preexisting conditions is, it's compounded by their smear campaigns against experts who have dedicated their careers to studying and defeating infectious diseases — doctors whom Rogan calls "Branch Covidians."
"Just today, this epidemiologist wrote, 'We have different rules about the new COVID boosters than other countries because we're sicker than other countries, so we have to give people more mRNA,'" Berenson said. "And it's like, wait, your argument is, our public health establishment and medical care is so bad... that you want us to take our advice? Maybe we should listen to the other countries where things are going better, for a change. Maybe we should just tell people, go for a walk. Maybe the solution is not to have morbidly obese people sit on their asses."
The epidemiologist he's referring to is Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, who publishes an informative Substack called Your Local Epidemiologist. Her readers learn what Rogan's listeners don't. For example, that the rare risk of heart inflammation (myocarditis) in young men that was previously associated with the initial rollout of mRNA vaccines has now all but disappeared.
"After last Fall's updated COVID-19 vaccine, two myocarditis cases were verified out of around 650,000 doses," Jetelina wrote, concluding, "The benefits of a vaccine for severe disease among adolescents outweigh the risks." Adding to that, the known dangers of all types of cardiovascular ailments after a severe COVID infection remain a cause for concern. They're also worth taking sensible precautions to avoid, including high-quality masking, when cases are on the rise.
Returning to Berenson, let's put aside the fact that merely going for a walk isn't a recognized treatment for COVID and acknowledge that we ought to provide all our citizens with universal healthcare coverage like most other rich democracies. Absent waving a magic wand to accomplish that — along with paid sick leave and greater hospital capacity — the more immediate task before us is not letting another 50,000 to 100,000 people die from this virus by next April.
So, don't roll the dice with a potentially debilitating disease that's already killed a million Americans. Just like going to the dentist, asking a stranger to stick a needle in your arm can be scary. I received my fifth dose of witch poison on Sept. 22 at a CVS Pharmacy inside a Target, and I experienced the usual sore arm and attendant body aches.
But the war against sickness and death is just about the most noble fight there is, and whatever their shortcomings and mistakes, the doctors I've trusted in covering COVID for the Current — Michael Osterholm, Peter Hotez, Katelyn Jetelina, Richard Hatchett, Amesh Adalja among them — are soldiers in that struggle.
Joe Rogan, on the contrary, is an unaccountable and unreliable pantywaist who has proven himself incapable of shame. Being a contrarian for its own sake — and during a national emergency no less — is its own pathetic and perverse kind of conformity.
"It's been a long three years, but what's so depressing is, they don't seem to have learned anything," Berenson ended the podcast by saying. "Still it's important to point out that they're full of it."
I agree completely.
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