The $100 million misinformation machine continues this month with the latest comments from podcast personality Joe Rogan.
During a recent episode of his Spotify-housed podcast, the comedian and choo-choo train cosplayer railed against vaccine passports before turning his attention to the increasing tensions between vaccinated and unvaccinated Americans.
Rogan, to whom Dr. Fauci previously advised no one should listen to, questioned the blaming of anti-vaxxers and erroneously contextualized a 2015 vaccine study as showing that COVID-19 inoculations could cause detrimental virus mutations. This, of course, is not accurate.
“Here’s one important quote,” Rogan said on his podcast, as seen below. “‘Vaccines that keep the host alive but still allow transmission can thus allow virulent strains to circulate in a population.’ So, vaccines that don’t kill the virus. … can possibly lead to more potent viruses.”
Sunday, Andrew Read—the lead scientist and author of the study Rogan was referencing—spoke out against these comments.
“Joe Rogan is getting this completely wrong,” Read, an entomology and biology professor at Pennsylvania State University, told Forbes’ Andrea Morris. “He’s taking very careful work about evolutionary scenarios of the future, and from that, erroneously concluding that people should not be vaccinated now.
Details in the field of biology, Read added, “matter a lot.”
For example, it’s transmission that causes mutation-centered issues. The COVID-19 vaccines, notably, are shown to reduce transmission and, in turn, reduce the chances of virus replication.
“At the moment, the vast majority of the replication is happening in unvaccinated people,” Read noted. “You can tell that because the majority of cases in the hospital are unvaccinated individuals.” Read also pointed out that the vast majority of current cases are among those who are not vaccinated, as is the majority of transmission.
“Rogan is completely wrong trying to deduce anything else,” he said.
Meanwhile, Fauci recently warned that unvaccinated Americans could cause the birth and spread of a new variant that eludes vaccine protection.
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