Joe Rogan Speaks Out Against Anti-Vaxxers

Well, I seek the advice of experts whenever possible. And what I was seeing was that there was a lot of weird misinformation and conflicting information. A lot of people saying, don't worry. And a lot of people that were terrified, I'm like, okay, I got to talk to an expert. And luckily, you were willing to sit down with us and help us out. Well, and the other thing I think that maybe it's a function of age, but straight talk is so important today. I'm so tired of having people say to me, oh, if you tell them this stuff, they're going to panic. And I say, well, what's panic? Have you seen anybody riding in the streets yet? Have you seen cars turned over, smashed? Have you seen people hurting themselves over this issue? They're concerned. But they want legitimate information. And so what you need to do is just tell them the truth. And we have many experiences like that. A few years ago, when I was at the state health department in Minnesota, we had a big outbreak of meningitis, a type of brain infection, bacterial brain infection. A number of high school students were very sick all of a sudden in one day, they were in a hospital. And this community of 20-some thousand people were on edge. And so we had a big town meeting. Several thousand people showed up. And I addressed them and gave them everything I knew about meningitis, what we're going to do about it, et cetera. And then towards the end of the talk, I said, and I just need to let you know about one on every seven cases of this dies. And people with me said, why did you tell them that? And I said, because they needed to know it. Two days later, one of them died. And you know what? Everybody in town was terribly sad, very emotional, but they all said, we knew it. We knew it. You told us. We knew it. And then they got on with dealing with it. We vaccinated the whole town. Twenty thousand people, we vaccinated one weekend for this bacterial meningitis. But it was because they had faith in us because we told them the truth. And we said what we know and what we didn't know. So that's what we need to do here. We need to just have straight talk. Don't tell them it's low risk. That's like the hurricane. Okay. I would be really bad at you if I thought you were a hurricane forecaster and you knew this was coming, but you kept telling me, oh, it's low risk. Don't worry about it. Right. Yeah. And once it hit. Yeah. So that's what we need to do today is just say, this is going to be challenging and we're going to get through it though. We are going to get through it. I hope this wakes people up to the value of vaccines too. There's so many wackos out there that think that vaccines are, you know, a scam or they're dangerous or it's there. There's so many people out there that won't vaccinate their children. I know. And that's one, you know, one of your best shows you ever did was Peter Hotels. He's a dear friend of mine. I do too. He's a dear friend of mine as you. And you know, he is one of the champions out there on this very issue. I couldn't agree with you more. I think that's really an important point that, you know, we got to get this idea. These vaccines can be lifesaving. If we had one right now, think how different the situation would be in the world right now. It would be radically different. But do you see the measles making a comeback and directly attributed to a lack of vaccines? You know what? And it's not only the vaccines themselves, but it's the prioritization of vaccines. I mean, you know, one of the real tragic stories right now in Africa is we are just finally bringing to a close this outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, far northeast part of the Congo. You know, 20 some thou or 2,800 people have died from this. OK, bad. Been going on for almost two years. And everybody talks about that. And I understand why Ebola is a challenge. Like, you know that during that same time period, over 7,000 kids in that same area have died from measles because everybody was preoccupied trying to deal with Ebola. And those deaths were totally preventable. Totally preventable. So, I mean, I think that's, you know, I have to say, and you know, I'm already on this show, so I'm not trying to thank you for what you do say about vaccines because people listen to you and we need every positive voice because we have so many crazy voices out there right now. There are people paranoid and delusional and they want it all to be a conspiracy. There's been an amazing medical innovation in human culture and that's vaccines. It's amazing what it's done. And have there been adverse effects on people? Of course, everything. Everything that people do. There's some people that are going to react in a bad way. It doesn't mean it's not a positive thing. And there's a reason why the cases of polio are so tiny. There's a reason why smallpox went away. It's because of vaccines. Absolutely. And you know, that's one of the challenges you know today between the anti-science misinformation that's out there, but then when they don't see it. And the reason they don't see it is because we did vaccinate until we get enough people not vaccinated and then look what happened. There's a famous photo of two twins from the early 20th century. One of them has smallpox and one of them was vaccinated. Have you seen that photo? I have. It's a black mai photo. It's a very telling. Jamie will find it because people need to see it. That is the difference folks. There it is. Yep, yep, yep. There it is. Right there. That's the one. One kid whose body is just devastated by what looks like pebbles glued to his skin all over his body, his face, his hands, and then his brother right next to him with nothing. And you know what's really important to note here is that in that body all those things are very painful but what's going on inside the body is equally bad. And so you're exactly right. I couldn't agree with you more that you know this is really an important point. Yeah, diseases are terrifying. They're really terrifying. And when something like this can be prevented and the reason why people don't do it is because they're paranoid of vaccines and they get that information from some wacko website or some person who really has no business talking about it. You know whether it's the people out there that think it causes diseases or that it's a government plot or that it's a medical scam because just trying to raise money, it's just all of it. All of it is very, very disturbing. But it's a part of people. You know the human beings for whatever reason there's a percentage of us that lean towards conspiratorial thinking and they lean towards thinking that there's some sort of a plot against them or the government's against them and it's just you've got to listen to medical experts. You know and I hope that if there's any good to come out of this terrible coronavirus situation is that there's a wake up call. If we'd had a vaccine for this or one that even worked partially, think how different we'd be. And you know what, we got new other ones coming like this. We have to use our creative imagination. You know as I said in the book, the chapter on coronavirus is the title of SARS and MERS, the harbinger of things to come. We can use our creative imagination to say we should be funding these things almost like we pay for our fire department. Imagine if we had to go out and buy a fire truck when the 911 call came in. We need to do it now.