Joe Rogan could help end the pandemic
I had some time off work, so I went for a long road trip. I visited some friends and camped in national parks. Travelling around America is a bizarre experience right now, as you go from completely masked cities to completely unmasked ones. I listened to a lot of podcasts on the road. Among other things, I caught up on some Joe Rogan episodes I’d missed.
I’ve been listening to Rogan for years. He’s entertaining. He gets good guests. I think he’s more honest than the average cable news anchor. Right now, I think he’s causing some harm by repeating covid misinformation and hosting many vaccine hesitant guests.
Before this trip, I spent some time debunking anti-vaccine messages from Steve Kirsch and Bret Weinstein. How dangerous is covid misinformation?
The covid vaccines were widely available by this summer. Since then, we’ve seen over 100,000 covid deaths in America. Most of those were preventable. The CDC claims only 7,000 were in vaccinated people.
Even a single anti-vaxxer with a large audience can kill hundreds of people. Let’s say that Bret Weinstein’s message has reached 10 million viewers, between his own show and his appearances on Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan.
One experiment showed that 6% of people exposed to antivax messaging became hesitant to get the vaccine.
Covid is about 0.6% fatal. Unvaccinated people in the UK (who are younger than average) are dying from Delta at a rate of 0.1% (that is 1 in a 1,000).
Over time, as everyone gets exposed to Covid, maybe 600 people will die among the 10 million viewers.
The worst mass shooter in US history killed 60 people. Bret Weinstein’s message could easily lead to ten times as many deaths.
Republicans are much more vaccine hesitant than Democrats. They aren’t 6% less likely to get vaccinated, they’re 50% less likely:
Many people live in echo chambers where they hear lots of anti-vax messages. Some states end up highly vaccinated, others don’t:
There are 74 million Trump voters. Half of them refuse to get vaccinated. Even if every anti-vaxxer was on the younger side, we’re talking about 37,000 deaths. Many older people are also vaccine hesitant, so the death toll is likely to be well over 100,000. Republicans aren’t the only hesitant group, they’re just the most hesitant. Some political independents are vaccine hesitant. Blacks and Hispanics aren’t getting the shots.
The differences from place to place were obvious, on my trip. It’s not just a state to state difference, America’s covid response changes from one town to another.
Jackson, Wyoming is heavily masked. In the rest of Wyoming, you’d barely know there’s a pandemic. Almost everyone wears a mask in highly liberal Boulder, Colorado. Two hours away, in conservative Colorado Springs, there’s hardly a mask in sight. Towns in the rest of Colorado might be 50/50, depending on local rules and politics.
You see the same differences in where people get vaccinated:
And you see the same differences in where people get sick. Teton county has the lowest case rates in Wyoming. Boulder has some of the lowest rates in Colorado:
It’s the same pattern across the country. Case rates are worse in poorly vaccinated counties. This summer, covid was a bigger problem in red states than blue states:
The first wave of covid, in spring 2020, was largely a blue state problem. The virus has hit Republican counties more and more, with every subsequent wave:
The first wave hit blue cities harder because international travelers brought the virus there first. Also, Cuomo’s response in New York was awful.
The second wave was largely the result of people not taking the virus seriously. Blue states didn’t do better because of herd immunity, most places did not have enough cases for herd immunity, during the first wave.
The third wave, this summer, was mostly an issue of vaccine hesitancy.
I haven’t seen good national reporting of breakthrough cases, but you can find it state by state. Colorado gives a good summary. Covid hospitalizations and deaths are mostly among the unvaccinated:
Covid cases are a bit more evenly distributed:
Vaccinated people that do end up sick or in the hospital tend to be 10–15 years older than unvaccinated:
The vaccines don’t stop all cases of covid. They seem to have lost some potency. I’m not sure how much of this is because of the Delta strain or because the vaccine effects only last so long. Moderna is holding up better than Pfizer. Both are doing better than Johnson and Johnson.
The vaccines are preventing hospitalization and death. When you get vaccinated, your body produces antibodies that fight the virus and prevent infection. Those antibodies decline over time, but there is also a lasting B and T cell response to the virus. Those cells produce new antibodies when you are re-exposed. So, if you do get sick, you should fight the virus off more quickly. You are less likely to end up in the hospital.
The same thing is probably true for natural infection. A study of 4 other coronaviruses showed that antibodies only last 6–12 months after you get sick.
We don’t know how this will play out. It’s possible that we’ll all have to choose between getting covid repeatedly or getting booster shots. It’s also possible that we won’t worry that much about the virus — we’ll get reinfected but repeat infections could be milder.
Full vaccination in the US would have saved about 90,000 lives over the last few months. Full vaccination would still save tens of thousands of lives, in the months ahead.
So, why won’t people take a vaccine to save their own lives?
And is there anything we can do about it?
Mandates won’t solve everything.
A simple solution would be to ignore the debate and just mandate vaccines. Let’s get this idea out of the way: a workplace mandate would save lives, but it won’t stop all covid deaths.
Vaccinated deaths in Colorado have a median age of 81. Unvaccinated, 75. Prior to vaccines, three quarters of covid deaths were over 65. Passing a mandate to vaccinate workers isn’t going to force retired people to get the shot. We could mandate vaccines for every job in America and these people would still be vulnerable.
If tens of thousands of retired Republicans want to die from covid, a workplace mandate won’t change that. I guess they’re being true to their values. They’re listening to Fox News instead of the government. They’re helping the nation’s fiscal crisis: social security is poorly funded, they don’t want to raise taxes.
A mandate might indirectly protect those people, because covid transmission rates should go down. Covid also kills some younger people. A mandate would help save those lives.
Covid hospitalizes younger people. Unvaccinated hospitalizations have a median age of 57. Vaccinated, 73. So a vaccine mandate would protect some workers and prevent them from ending up in the hospital. Some young people also get long covid. I know a few cases in their 30’s, it doesn’t look pleasant. A covid mandate would slow down transmission among workplaces, it would reduce hospitalization and long covid. It would have positive effects, but the death rate could stay high until all the elderly people get sick.
I don’t find mandates frightening. Getting the vaccine is safer than getting the virus, for every age group I’ve looked at (ages 12 and over). We don’t have enough data on vaccine safety for kids under 12.
But I think mandates are heavy handed. Some people don’t need the vaccine, because they have natural immunity. We don’t know the situation on booster shots, yet. Will the mandates require vaccination once, or repeatedly? Will you need to regularly show your vaccine card? I don’t even remember where I put mine. They made the damn things too big to fit in my wallet.
There are rumors that workers will go on strike, to avoid getting vaccinated. Even if the vaccine is safe, there’s a widespread perception that it is not.
Whether or not we have mandates, we still need to deal with the misinformation around vaccines and covid. We need to understand why people are hesitant.
People don’t trust the news anymore.
I’ve been criticizing Republicans a lot, but the antivax movement wasn’t always right wing. It actually started on the fringe left. In 2014, the state with the least vaccinated kids was Oregon. Vermont was close behind:
Presumably, Portland wanted free-range organic vaccines.
A few religious groups on the right were also anti-vax. But deep red Mississippi had the most children vaccinated, at that time.
The movement slowly grew on the right, helped by social media. Antivax sentiment grew from 3 percent to 9 percent in rural Texas, between 2012 to 2018. Activists used the language of freedom to get right wing parents to not vaccinate their kids. As in, “you have the freedom to let your child die from measles.”
2020 changed everything, as covid came along and everything about covid became politicized.
Trump didn’t help, by calling the virus a hoax, or by saying it would rapidly be over. The response of the left wasn’t helpful either. They chose to oppose every last thing that Trump said. At the beginning, most Democrats didn’t realize the virus would be so bad. They just called Trump’s travel bans racist.
Mask wearing was one of the first things to become polarized. This was a whiplash effect for me —I got criticized by liberals and then by conservatives. I started wearing a mask in March 2020. Liberal friends told me not to wear one: they don’t work, I’m not following the science. The CDC told me masks didn’t work but that hospitals needed them. I figured they were lying and just thought I wasn’t important enough to need one.
A couple months later, masks became a thing for the left, but they were rejected by the right. Conservative friends told me not to wear one, for lots of reasons. One day, I was being a coward for being afraid of the virus. The next, they’d try to get me scared of masks: they said that masks would suffocate me, or they would give me cancer:
And then, just about everything got polarized. Hydroxychloroquine became a drug the news hated and Republicans loved.
Liberal friends of mine were overly trusting of mainstream news, and conservatives didn’t trust it at all.
I think a lot of this is because the news is badly biased, sometimes.
Last summer, I would see headlines like this:
It wasn’t just Newsweek doing this:
The covid vaccine itself got politicized, by both parties.
Here’s Kamala Harris saying she wouldn’t take a vaccine promoted by Trump:
This got echoed on left wing twitter. Dr. Eric Topol is now complaining about anti-vax sentiment. He doesn’t understand why people are hesitant to take a vaccine that came out so quickly. Prior to the election, he called on Trump to not release a poorly tested vaccine.
The vaccine release might even have been timed around the election. Pfizer was on track to evaluate their vaccine trial data in October. The plan was changed at the last minute and the results were released in November, a few days after the Presidential election.
I’m sad to see thousands of people dying from a preventable disease that’s all over the news. But I can hardly blame them for not trusting the news.
When people stop trusting the news, they come up with shortcuts to get to the truth. Shortcuts like:
•“Don’t trust the news”
•“Don’t trust the Democrats”
•“Listen to podcasters that sounds smart”.
I’m not immune to this effect. I’m skeptical of anything I read in the New York Times or the Washington Post. I’m also skeptical of Fox News. I don’t have time to research everything for myself. Joe Rogan was on my list of mostly trust-worthy podcasters. This year, I’m not so sure, his show is a mess of covid misinformation.
I think Rogan’s effect is large. In a polarized world, figures at the center can have an outsized impact.
Think of the Senate, where votes are divided 50/50. Most senators just follow their party every time. This means that Joe Manchin usually gets to be the deciding swing vote.
In the media, Fox News is guaranteed to take a right wing viewpoint, the New York Times a left wing viewpoint. Either one would lose their audience if they ever strayed from these biases.
Joe Rogan is actually free to decide. And I think he probably helps make up some independent minds.
It’s probably not the best thing that our climate change decisions are made by a senator from coal country. It’s also not great that a stoned cage-fighting commentator influences our national perceptions about covid. But, that’s just where we’re at. We’re at the mercy of those people being honest.
Joe seems like an honest guy. Some of his guests aren’t.
Rogan just had Alex Berenson on his show. Berenson offered his opinion that vaccines are failing. As one example, he pointed to a report out of the UK:
The black bars show covid case rates among vaccinated people. The grey are among unvaccinated people. It looks bad. For everyone over 40, it looks like you’re more likely to get covid if you got vaccinated than if you didn’t. This doesn’t match what we’re seeing in the US, but the UK did start vaccinating people one month earlier.
Here is literally the next graph in the UK report:
This time, the bars are the opposite. Vaccinated people are much less likely to get hospitalized than vaccinated, for every age group.
Vaccinated people are also less likely to die of covid, for every age group:
So, what’s going on here? Why does the first graph look different than the second two?
I don’t know. First off, the CDC says the situation is different in America. They claim that vaccinated people are less likely to get covid, for every age group in America.
The UK report presented the first bar graph with this disclaimer:
“Interpretation of the case rates in vaccinated and unvaccinated population is particularly susceptible to changes in denominators and should be interpreted with extra caution.”
Elderly people in the UK are close to 100% vaccinated. But we don’t have exact numbers of how many people are or aren’t. If it’s actually 6% unvaccinated when we think it’s 3%, that would change all the gray bars in these graphs by a factor of 2. The vaccine would be twice as effective as the graph says.
The black bars in the graph wouldn’t change much. That denominator would only change from 97% to 94%.
It’s also likely that people that choose to get vaccinated also get covid tested more often. So they get diagnosed with mild cases more than unvaccinated people.
The UK report also warns that:
“The vaccination status of cases, inpatients and deaths is not the most appropriate method to assess vaccine effectiveness and there is a high risk of misinterpretation. Vaccine effectiveness has been formally estimated from a number of different sources and is described earlier in this report.”
It is clear from the UK data that the vaccine does prevent hospitalization and death. It’s unclear how much it prevents mild illness.
Berenson made up his own theory that the vaccines aren’t even preventing covid deaths. He thinks that people in the UK that got vaccinated are naturally healthier than unvaccinated ones. Even Joe Rogan called this pure speculation.
The vaccines are obviously working in the UK. We can see this at a glance. Cases are as high as ever this summer, in the UK. Deaths are 10 times lower than during the 2nd wave:
The big picture appears to be that vaccines have cut the death rate down in the UK, maybe by a factor of 10. Maybe not quite that much, testing has gone up a bit.
The UK has turned a bad virus into something more like the flu. But Alex Berenson has lost the plot. He found one conflicting data table and concluded that vaccines have failed.
This is the kind of shit that got Berenson kicked off of Twitter. He jumped to these kinds of conclusions regularly, and told people that vaccines were dangerous or ineffective. So, Twitter just decided to deplatform him one day.
I have no idea how Twitter made that decision. Cancel culture sucks. And it’s inconsistent. I can find a hundred crazier opinions on Twitter, any day that I log in.
Joe concludes that Berenson must have something important to say, since he’s been cancelled, and brings him on the show.
And that spreads misinformation across America.
In the US, death counts aren’t down 10 times from the 2nd wave. They’re only down 50%. The UK is doing much better.
The difference, I would guess, is that more people in the UK got vaccinated. And now people in the US are refusing the shot because someone on Joe Rogan is claiming it didn’t work in other countries.
Joe was willing to take every covid treatment except for the vaccine.
I don’t think Joe is spreading misinformation to make a profit. Lots of people are doing that. Conspiratorial posts and videos draw a lot of attention, it’s a great way to make money.
Joe already has lots of money and attention. I see him more as an everyman, the victim of the misinformation, as much as the source.
A lot of this came out during Joe’s interview with Rhonda Patrick. Rhonda said she was interested in discussing vaccine misinformation. Joe asked her a lot of questions, she wasn’t ready for some, Joe emphasized that she didn’t have all the answers.
Among the questions, Joe asked why he’d never gotten covid. Rhonda, that arrogant scientist, didn’t have the answer. Joe insisted he must be immune.
A week later, Joe got covid.
In his interview with Tom Segura, Joe admitted he’d been taking ivermectin to try to prevent covid.
When Joe got sick, he treated his infection with monoclonal antibodies, ivermectin, prednisone, azithromycin, and intravenous vitamins.
It’s not a crazy treatment regimen. Monoclonal antibodies reduce your odds of hospitalization by 60%. Vitamins are good for you, I don’t know if they treat covid. Ivermectin is fairly harmless, I don’t know if it treats covid. Prednisone helps treat covid if you’re seriously ill, but you probably don’t want to take it when you first get sick (it reduces inflammation but also depresses your immune system).
What confuses me is why someone would trust monoclonal antibodies but not the covid vaccine.
I have a crazy uncle who believes in QAnon. When he got covid, he stayed home and trusted his own immune system. At least he’s consistent.
I have friends who don’t trust big pharma. They bought ivermectin online and plan to stay home and take it when they get sick.
Joe Rogan didn’t trust the vaccine, but then ran straight to the hospital to get drugs made by big pharma.
Every objection that people have to the vaccines also applies to monoclonals:
•We don’t know the long term effects of monoclonal antibodies.
•We don’t know how many people they’ve killed — we only give them to covid patients, so if anyone dies, that would surely be called a covid death.
•They were tested on a cell line that came from an aborted fetus.
•The antibodies cause the virus to mutate. That’s actually been observed to happen, if you give the drugs to a patient with a weak immune system. With vaccines, it’s merely speculation that we’ll see mutations.
•The drugs are expensive. They’re making a big profit for the pharmaceutical companies. The government paid $20 per vaccine dose, but over a $1,000 for Regeneron’s antibodies. That doesn’t include the hospital bill for getting the injection.
I’m glad that Joe recovered quickly. I don’t care that Joe threw a lot of different drugs at the virus.
I just think that Joe’s treatment shouldn’t be anyone’s first choice. It’s costly. It’s not a treatment that’s readily available to everyone (you have to get rapidly tested and find a doctor who’ll give you the antibodies). It’s a lot easier and safer to just get vaccinated. His treatment might be a reasonable plan B.
Joe’s a fit guy. He does a good job at encouraging people to get healthier. He also suggests that people are avoiding vaccines because they’re healthy enough that they don’t need them.
On average, that’s not true. Highly vaxxed counties have thinner people. We have counties in America that are 20% vaccinated and 40% obese:
People aren’t getting vaccinated because they think that the vaccine is dangerous, the virus is harmless, or ivermectin is better than the vaccine. And Joe is helping to propagate all of these ideas.
In his interview with Rhonda Patrick, Joe claimed that 95% of covid deaths had multiple comorbidities, that no one dies from covid unless they’re already very ill.
I hear this one all the time. You can view the list of common comorbidities here. The two most common ones are pneumonia and respiratory failure. Those are effects of covid, you don’t already have respiratory failure and then get covid. You get covid, then you get pneumonia, then you die of respiratory failure. The death certificate says you died of 3 things.
It’s like, the Titanic crashes and everyone starts saying, “those people didn’t die from the crash! They died from drowning and hypothermia! Every death certificate has at least 2 comorbidities! One guy even died from falling and hitting the propeller, the authorities are clearly mislabeling the cause of these deaths!”
If you look past the “cause of death” data, you find that 95% of people hospitalized for covid had at least 1 comorbidity. Hypertension and obesity are the most common. 42% of Americans are obese. The list also count things like anxiety or depression.
The report states:
The percentage of the US adult population known to have 2 or more underlying medical conditions ranges from approximately 38% to 64% by state
So, covid’s not that bad, unless you’re in the 1/3rd to 2/3rds of the population that is vulnerable.
People repeat this line a lot — covid’s not bad, 95% of covid patients were already very ill. Joe repeats it. Trump retweeted it. And it’s harmful. I’ve met 300 pound people that insist they won’t get vaccinated because they “don’t have any comorbidities”.
Most Americans don’t need to hear statistics about comorbidities. They don’t need to read about vaccine side effects. They need to hear that they are fat, covid is dangerous, and the vaccine is usually safe.
Censorship is wrong, and unlikely to work.
If most people don’t need to hear these debates about safety, why don’t we just censor them? Misinformation during a deadly pandemic will kill far more people than racist hate speech. Or holocaust denial. Or people talking on incel forums. Or even Jihadist propaganda.
If there’s anything we should censor, this is it.
It sounds like the Biden administration has a plan to ban anti-vaxxers from social media. Jen Psaki said that if you get banned from one social media platform, you should get banned from all of them.
This is a bad idea, for so many different reasons.
The algorithms are bad. I’ve seen guys like David Fuller or Avi Bitterman get censored while debunking ivermectin misinformation. Youtube’s algorithms thought they were promoting ivermectin.
Even if the algorithms were perfect, we don’t know where to draw the lines, for censorship. Think through the history of anti-vax ideas I mentioned above. Which people should we have censored? Bret Weinstein? Granola loving moms in Portland, in 2014? Eric Topol? Kamala? All of them have said vaccine hesitant things.
No one has a monopoly on the truth. Last March, promoting mask wearing would have been against the official government position.
Censorship also tends to backfire.
This is sometimes called the Streisand effect. In 2003, a photographer took aerial pictures of Barbara Streisand’s Malibu mansion:
This wasn’t intended to invade her privacy. It was part of a series of photographs documenting coastal erosion in California.
Streisand sued to have the image taken offline. Prior to the lawsuit, the image had been downloaded 4 times. As a result of the publicity, it was seen more than 400,000 times.
The same thing happens with anti-vaxxers. As soon as you make information taboo, some people want to see it more. Censoring Weinstein got him onto Joe Rogan’s show. It got him onto Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson. Dozens of articles were written about him. And all that attention worked. He gained 100,000 Twitter followers and his Patreon income doubled.
Censoring Alex Berenson also got him an appearance on Joe Rogan.
Joe Rogan can’t be cancelled, so bad ideas can’t be silenced. They can only be pushed onto his show.
The truth is, free speech and open debate are better than censorship.
But Joe doesn’t do it quite right. He doesn’t always host both sides of debates. We’re at his mercy for who he hosts.
Some people selling you free speech are selling free speech™.
Fox News perfected this form of double speak with slogans like:
•“fair and balanced”
•“we report, you decide”
•“The no spin zone”
Joe Rogan sounds increasingly like another right wing hack, by endorsing free speech while promoting only one side of an issue. He does this when talking to Yeon-Mi Park about socialism or Jordan Peterson about “cultural marxism”. He could rise above this, if he wanted to. The man has financial freedom, no corporate owners to please, and a widely viewed platform. He can choose his guests.
He could host actual debates. He could host guests who could actually refute bad arguments. I’d love to see Dr Kory debate someone like Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz. I’d love to see Bret Weinstein talk to Yuri Deigin. I’d like to see Alex Berenson talk to any competent epidemiologist.
Joe could interview long covid survivors. Or doctors that treated covid.
I think free speech and debate might help resolve some of these issues, and Joe is in a place where he could actually help. He could host good voices, have actual debates. He could work harder to figure out why people got censored before hosting them. He could ask doctors good questions, instead of trying to prove they don’t know everything.
But there’s something Joe could do that would be even more effective.
To get to my last idea, I need to talk about how we test drugs.
There’s a problem with how we test drugs and vaccines.
Vaccine trials need to prove 2 different things: safety and efficacy. Safety is how bad the side effects are. Efficacy is whether or not the vaccine prevents covid.
When we tested the Pfizer vaccine, 20 thousand people got the injection and 20 thousand got a placebo.
The large number of subjects is important to test safety. If there’s some rare side effect that only happens in one person out of 10 thousand, you won’t see it in a small trial. We are making a mistake, right now, with testing the vaccine for children. Pfizer’s trials only included 4,500 kids. Half got the vaccine and half got a placebo. So, if there’s a side effect rarer than 1 in 2,250, we won’t see it.
For the most part, we do fine at testing safety. Where we usually go wrong is in testing for efficacy. Measuring efficacy takes a lot less people than measuring safety.
In the original Pfizer trial, we injected those 40 thousand people, and then we just sat and waited for a few months for some of them to randomly catch covid. Only 170 people caught the virus, during the trials. 8 of them were vaccinated, 162 were in the placebo group. That proved that the vaccine works very well, at least at first.
While we waited for those people to get sick, other people were also catching covid. Here’s a timeline:
While we waited for trial participants to get sick, 100,000 Americans died from the virus. Then, the CDC took a month to review the trial data, while another 100,000 people died. Then, it was a race to get people vaccinated while covid surged in the winter and 300,000 died.
We actually got lucky that the first shot worked. It’s possible that the first vaccine trials would have failed, that Pfizer would have had to start over with a new vaccine, and wait a few months more.
This isn’t a theoretical concern. Pfizer and Moderna both got their formulation just right. A third company that makes mRNA vaccines, CureVac, failed. Their shot was only 50% effective. Arcturus pharmaceuticals also had their vaccine fail. Merck’s vaccine failed. GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccine failed.
We could have proved vaccine efficacy a few months faster with a human challenge trial. Instead of injecting 40,000 people and waiting, we only needed to inject 100 with the vaccine, 100 with a placebo, and then deliberately expose them all to the virus.
The fastest strategy would be to do a quick human challenge trial to prove efficacy, then inject 40,000 people to prove safety, then roll out the vaccine.
It’s generally thought that human challenge trials are unethical. 100 people would get sick from the challenge trial, 1 might die.
But the results would have come in a few months faster, the vaccine gets rolled out before winter hits, 300,000 lives get saved.
That seems like an easy ethical decision to make. It’s like the trolley problem with 1 person vs. 300,000.
We made the wrong decision, and 2020 looked more like this:
Someone made a registry of people willing to volunteer in human challenge trials. 40,000 people signed up, but no one conducted a trial because the FDA thinks that idea is unethical.
We could also use challenge trials to easily find out if ivermectin works to prevent covid. Instead of debating the drug for months, it would take a couple weeks to find out. Just give the drug to 100 people and 100 controls and expose them all to covid.
The reality TV solution to end covid misinformation.
That idea still isn’t quite right. The results from that human challenge trial would just be numbers on paper. They would help the FDA evaluate drugs much faster. But some people still wouldn’t believe the numbers.
The problem is we all consume different media. We all live in separate realities. Some of us even live on different planets (I met a flat Earther on my trip).
To get people back into the same reality, I would conduct an ivermectin challenge trial as a reality TV show.
Americans love reality TV. Our top podcaster started out on Fear Factor. We had a reality TV star for President. I won’t be surprised if our justice system someday gets replaced with 3 judge tribunals.
So, why not make a show out of the challenge trial? There will be no shortage of volunteers, everyone wants to be on TV. In one episode, some people get vaccinated, we see the side effects. In another, we get a bunch of people in a room. Some are vaccinated, some take ivermectin, some go in with no protection. Then, a few more episodes to track who gets sick, and follow how bad they get.
The perfect host for that reality show is Joe Rogan. This is basically just a new version of Fear Factor. Instead of eating disgusting things, contestants would eat ivermectin and then get exposed to covid.
The host and producer would have to be honest. I worry that if Fox News created the show, they’d rig the results to show that covid is harmless, or that Trump was right about hydroxychloroquine all along. If NPR created the show, it would focus on how much covid harms women and people of color and emphasize how the virus is mostly spread by white men.
I think Rogan could actually create an honest version of Covid Fear Factor. It would just be people doing dumb stuff, catching covid, and getting sick.
We would quickly find out if ivermectin actually works better than vaccines. I’d be surprised. The study that said ivermectin is 100% effective appears to be a fraud. The meta-analysis has fallen apart because so many of the studies it used have been redacted. But it would be great to find out if the drug works. We’d have another tool to use to fight the virus.
We would learn whether Bret Weinstein was lying about ivermectin or whether Google was suppressing the drug. And, hopefully, we’d act on that information.
The show could help people that are afraid of the vaccine, by showing them it’s safe and it works. It could also help people that are too afraid of the virus, by showing them that covid isn’t that bad for young people, or for vaccinated people. It could help them stop being so cautious. Boulder, Colorado could finally take their masks off.
We don’t need the Joe Rogan who reads about science and tries to interpret it for us. He’s not very good at it.
We don’t need the Joe Rogan who interviews lots of pandemic skeptics. That’s not helping people learn about covid.
We need the Joe Rogan that made people eat cockroaches and drink donkey juice. That’s the man who could actually help end the pandemic.
