 Joe Rogan is the world's most successful podcaster, which you might think should mean he'd be careful about what he says about something as important as vaccines in the middle of a pandemic. Unfortunately, he's not. And people say, do you think it's safe to get vaccinated? I've said, yeah, I think for the most part it's safe to get vaccinated. I do. I do. But if you're like 21 years old and you say to me, should I get vaccinated? I go, no. Are you healthy? Are you a healthy person? Like, look, don't do anything stupid, but you should take care of yourself. If you're a healthy person and you're exercising all the time and you're young and you're eating well, I don't think you need to worry about this. This is a really, really bad argument. And it's a really bad argument for a simple reason, which is that getting vaccinated isn't just about you. Getting vaccinated doesn't just protect the person who gets vaccinated. It also protects everyone around you because, as we know, getting vaccinated reduces transmission. There are some people who can't get vaccinated. Even if you personally are not a great risk from COVID-19, then it's the right thing to do to get vaccinated because that will protect people who can't get vaccinated, right? And it means that we can all go back to normal because we get herd immunity and we won't have the virus moving around anymore. And I mean, he just didn't think of that. I mean, you have so much responsibility if you're hosting one of the world's most successful podcasts. And he just didn't think of it, didn't mention it, didn't mention it to his audience. But there's a lot of jobs that will tell you you need to have this. Well, that's what's starting to happen now. People are worried about them doing it for their children. And we talked about this earlier, that you might have to have your children vaccinated. And I can tell you, as someone who's both my children got the virus, it was nothing. I mean, I hate to say that. If someone's children died from this, I'm very sorry that that happened. I'm not in any way diminishing that. But I'm saying the personal experience that my children had with COVID was nothing. One of the kids had a headache. The other one didn't feel good for a couple of days. I mean, I mean, not feel good like no big deal, no coughing, no achy, no like an agony. There was none of that. It was very mild. It was akin to them getting a cold. Again, this is a conversation that is fair enough to have in a pub. Not everyone has to be an expert on COVID-19. And everything he's saying there is reasonable. He's saying kids, yes, they are not at a big risk from COVID-19. Absolutely not. Which is why when we discuss vaccinating kids, we're not talking about their safety. We're talking about the safety of society as a whole. It's also important to mention it. I don't necessarily think we should vaccinate kids. I don't know which way we should do this. I think there will be serious discussions among scientists at this point. Maybe we'll get herd immunity anyway, so we don't really need to. If we get herd immunity at 80% of the population, then we might not have to vaccinate under 16. There's a serious discussion to be had there. But the framing of that conversation by Joe Rogan is just misleading his audience, because he is continuing with this frame, which is to say that the only reason you might get vaccinated is to protect yourself. There's no other possible logic, which is just a misrepresentation of the fact. And it's also an incredibly dangerous misrepresentation of the fact, because he has lots of young people who watch that show. And we need those young people to get vaccinated, because that helps us get herd immunity. It means we can go back to normal. It means that people who the vaccine wasn't very effective on will be safe, because we as a society don't have much COVID moving around. And even though he's got millions and millions of listeners, and this stuff doesn't have to understand the complexities of COVID. This is basic, basic stuff. If you were any kind of journalist, you have a responsibility to learn this basic, basic stuff, especially if you host the world's most successful podcast. It's stupid. And it's incredibly, incredibly irresponsible. Let's look at one final clip of this discussion. And this is where it gets, I mean, just quite frankly, ridiculous. Yeah. And you can have this thing where it's like, you were saying this virtue signaling and this kind of like theatrical display of I get the vaccine, what a good person I am, I care about everyone. But you're like, look, my daughter's a lot younger than your kids. But I'm like, yeah, I'm not injecting my daughter with something to fucking virtue signal. Like I'm not doing that. If there's something that she's of no risk, statistically has no risk from. I'm sorry, I'm not taking any experiment on her in that. And that's, that's my attitude. But it's amazing that that's controversial. Yeah. That even saying that I'm not going to inject my child with the vaccine is controversial. Yeah. It's crazy. Because again, we are not talking about even the flu that we just found out killed 22,000 people last year. We're not talking about that. Right. We're talking about something that is not statistically dangerous for children. But yeah, people still want you to get your child vaccinated, which is crazy to me. Yeah. Like you should be vaccinated if you are vulnerable. You should be vaccinated if you are vulnerable. I'm starting like a broken record now, but it's an important point getting vaccinated isn't just for you. It's for society. It's for people more vulnerable than yourselves. I mean, the thing that really struck out here was this use of the term virtue signaling. Now, I'm not someone actually who says, oh, virtue signaling is a meaningless term. I think people do virtue signal. And I think there are some big examples of virtue signaling, especially from big corporations. So for example, you might see Nike tweet, you know, hashtag black lives matter. That's virtue signaling, because there are serious, significant things that night could do to, you know, influence policy and to materially improve the condition of black and brown people in the world. For example, they could pay decent wages in all of their factories around the world. That would be something which would have a material impact, but it would cost them. Right. So instead, what they decide to do to prove they're one of the good guys is they tweet a statement which doesn't cost them anything, which has no consequence, but just signals they are virtuous. That's virtue signaling. Now vaccinating your kids. And again, it's not clear we need to do this. It will become apparent will be advised by the various health bodies, whether or not we should do it, but they are not going to advise us on the basis of, oh, we should vaccinate them because vaccinating people has now become a sort of trend. It makes you look good. It will be because they have assessed that this is a necessary thing for us to do to stop the transmission of COVID-19 to more vulnerable people. It's why we give, or one of the reasons why we give kids the flu jab. It turns out, flu is actually a bit more dangerous than COVID-19 for young people. But one of the big reasons and, you know, the NHS are explicit about this, that we give the flu jab to kids is because they tend to be super spreaders when it comes to spreading flu to older people, more vulnerable people. So again, a completely misinformed, lazy discussion about probably, you know, the most serious topic. And it's the most serious topic because our actions matter. So if you're telling that to your, you know, millions of people, audience, you can, you know, quite concretely undermine the effort to move beyond this pandemic. Are these people trying to keep me locked in my house forever? Like, I'm so mad. It's just, like, let me be released and stop, like, stop slowing it down with this idiocy, obviously entirely egregious, completely scientifically illiterate, not only because, not only the idea that, you know, the only reason you get vaccinated is for yourself, as you've noticed. But also, firstly, that whole idea of that exercising a lot can help you prevent getting impacts from COVID, like negative impacts from COVID can stop you transmitting COVID. You don't know if you're vulnerable to COVID, you know, that we have so many stories. One thing that's so scary about this illness is that there are so many instances of people who consider themselves very healthy, who might not know if they have an underlying condition in all these different ways being knocked out by this virus. And not to mention, and I feel that, you know, I need to walk around with these discussions with a megaphone just screaming long COVID, because this is always so missing from the conversation. We think, okay, coronavirus, the impact of it is either, you know, you have like some, you have mild symptoms or you even have, you know, a really bad flu, or you're in the ICU. There's a huge, like, number of people who sit in the middle of that, who have long COVID or have these unknown long-term effects from coronavirus, you know, we still are, that data is still emerging on what the possible long-term effects can be, even if you make it through the initial illness, completely fine. And I think this is partly to do with the fact that in general, our society doesn't really know how to talk about or engage with chronic illness, like we just don't see it in our understanding of what it means to be unwell and what it means to be sick. So, you know, for me, like for me, my main, as well as, you know, lowering transmission, my main reason why I want to get the vaccine is because I'm scared of getting long COVID. I'm scared of being taken out, you know, and not being able to, many of my friends have who are healthy, who have healthy diets, who are young, who exercise, who, you know, it's been six months and counting and they are still deeply affected. And, you know, I think in the case of the vaccines, you know, there are some cases where I think, you know, vaccine hesitancy is something that should be dealt with sensitively. So, you know, especially in the US, like the long history of black and brown indigenous communities who have been heavily abused and experimented upon by, you know, health, by pharmaceutical industries, by, you know, healthcare institutions, vaccine hesitancy in those communities, you know, I don't think it should be dismissed. I think it should be engaged with carefully, and that kind of understanding that a lot of trust needs to be rebuilt there is definitely, you know, so there's not all cases. This case absolutely egregious, absolutely irresponsible. And also, but it also reflects, and I think I talked about this at the very beginning of the pandemic, when we had this whole culture war emerging out of masks, the whole, you know, when they tried to make masks into a culture war. And it's this idea of, you know, it's my liberty, it's my freedom to not wear a mask if I don't want to, or if I'm not scared. And it's again, this whole idea of this conception of freedom, this conception of liberty, this conception of being in society that is so individualized, this mentality of I don't owe anything to anyone. The mobility of vulnerable people is irrelevant to me, but I'm not vulnerable. I'm not accountable for making the world a better place for people who are vulnerable for whatever reason, or that my individual behavior is only relevant insofar as it has consequences for me as an individual. This is the kind of doctrine that we hear from people like Joe Rogan, it's that like Jordan Peterson style, kind of thing that, you know, it happens at that kind of podcasting cultural level, but it has its knock on effects all the way up into government, all the way up into policymaking. We saw an incredibly, incredibly slow uptake of masks in the US under Donald Trump. And we still are seeing slow uptake of masks in a lot of states that have very right wing governors. So it has real life consequences. And it is absolutely irresponsible. It's not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of fact. And it's to spread a message like this in this moment when we are so close to such a watershed moment, and not to say that the vaccine is going to solve everything. But we're so close to things getting a lot better, especially for people who have been shielding for such a long time and who have had to deal with the impacts, the mental health, the physical impacts of that, to roll us back at that point is so deeply, deeply unacceptable. We should point out that Rogan has since rowed back on his comments about vaccines. So clarifying his views on vaccines, he said, I'm not an anti-vax person and added, I said, I believe they are safe and I encourage many people to take them. I just said that if you're a healthy young person, you don't need it. Their argument was you need it for other people. And yes, that makes sense. So yes, he's admitted the error. That was precisely the criticism we had of him is to say that you didn't take into account that getting vaccinated isn't just for yourself. Someone has pointed that out. He said, okay, fair play. That was fair enough. The issue here is you've already done a podcast which streams to millions and millions of people around the world and millions and millions of people who are considering whether or not to get a vaccine. And this is, you know, in some areas of life, I actually respect it when people, you know, they're like, you know, it's not the end of the world if I get something wrong, let's just speak openly and honestly. And if something's, you know, if I need to correct my mistake, I'll do that in the future. I think on some issues, that's fine, right? Especially if you don't put yourself forward as a news presenter, you put yourself forward as an open-minded podcast host. When it comes to the issue of vaccines, the issue that's going to get us out of this pandemic where the personal choice of each of your viewers is incredibly important, you have to do this research first. You just have to, especially as it's not even that fucking complicated, right? Like, even the most basic level of professionalism means that you don't talk about vaccines in a ridiculous way and tell people not to take them unless you've properly researched the argument. And this apology, whilst it's, you know, it's good that it's come, shows that he hadn't even considered, right, that you might be taking the vaccines for other people, which means he hasn't done the most basic element of research here. I mean, that's all I'm going to say about Joe Rogan. Just to close it out, let's take a look at a clip of Joe Rogan speaking in response to the criticism. These are not, like, planned statements. Let's be real clear. When I say something stupid, I'm not thinking about what I'm going to say before I say it. I'm just saying it, right? I don't have an off-air and on-air voice. I don't. I have me. This is it. Yeah. Yeah. I got through the fucking net and I'm swimming in open waters, okay? And that's just how I live. Don't live like that when it comes to vaccines, Joe Rogan. You can live like that on a lot of issues. You can't live like that when it comes to COVID-19, because whether you like it or not, if there are millions of people who listen to your podcast, you have some responsibility.