Joe Rogan’s COVID-19 diagnosis and the COVID censors

 

 

Joe Rogan, who has the biggest podcast in the world, has contracted COVID-19.

 

The 54 year old announced his positive diagnosis on Wednesday the 1^st of September to his 13 million Instagram followers. He felt unwell on the Saturday but seemed to have recovered by Wednesday, stating:

 

“I really only had one bad day, Sunday sucked, but Monday was better, Tuesday felt better than Monday, and today I actually feel good.”

 

The rapid recovery of a public figure, a man nearing the cusp of the high-risk age category, should be reassuring. But the parochial media has come out to attack Rogan, because he dared to take steps, not approved by the authorities, to ensure his optimal recovery. In particular, they attacked him for using ivermectin, a medicine that the authorities have curiously and actively repressed from the marketplace of ideas during the pandemic, despite some evidence of effectiveness in treating and preventing COVID-19. Indeed, many news outlets described Rogan having self-medicated with a “horse drug” or “livestock treatment”.

 

Typically misleading title - ivermectin has been used by hundreds of millions of people for over 30 years.

This squalid episode raises a lot of questions. For instance, why are the institutions, faced with a new virus, appearing so incurious and dismissive about ivermectin? This is a drug that won its discoverers a Nobel Prize in Physiology in 2015, is listed on the WHO List of Essential Medicines, has been studied for decades for its broad antiviral properties, has been given to millions of people, with a 40 year history of clinical use in humans with a well understood and safe profile. Why are the institutions pushing other much more expensive drugs that have apparently less efficacy than reported for ivermectin, such as remdesivir? The $3000 per dose drug is approved for use by the US FDA, even though the WHO does not recommend it for a lack of efficacy. Why do these institutions advocate with such certainty and gusto experimental vaccines whose developments have clearly cut corners? And why are the media largely acting simply as the PR wing of these institutions, instead of asking these obvious questions? All this is in front of a historical backdrop of these same institutions been wrong about so much throughout the pandemic, from the need for masks to the validity of the lab-leak theory.

 

Furthermore, it is verging on the dictatorial to insist that the only way to behave is to listen to the centralized authorities such as the CDC. Not only do individual circumstances and priorities of the billions of people affected by the pandemic differ, this top-down dogmatism is precisely the kind of thing that kills ingenuity, something needed more than ever.

 

Virtually all great advances in science was made against the consensus of the authority of the time. Galileo was right about heliocentrism, but was put into house arrest. Ignaz Semmelweis, the Hungarian physician who discovered that handwashing can reduce infections and deaths in the pregnant women that they treated, was roundly mocked, and ended his life in an insane asylum. The winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology, Barry Marshall, broke the rules and experimented on himself, thereby proving that peptic ulcers, a significant killer of young people, were caused by bacteria and not stress. Progress is by definition not made by following to the letter the present consensus. To dictate what can or cannot be simply contemplated regarding the treatment of COVID-19, even by highly qualified professionals, is fundamentally unscientific. And the collusion between institutions and media that enforces this censorship at this critical time should worry everyone.  

 

The fact that the media has so much disdain for Rogan for daring to think for himself and to have the conviction to act independently shows that they are not in the business of journalism, but are in fact in the business of manufacturing consensus, a contemptible vocation otherwise known as propaganda. Indeed, Rogan, by daring to invite onto his show a wide range of guests who expressed differing opinions on COVID-19, is doing the journalists' job better than the journalists.

 

If the institutions and media were doing their jobs, they would be recommending that people get enough vitamin D, which has consistently been shown to be associated with reduced hospitalization and death rates. They should be advocating increased exercise, which has recently been reported to reduce the risk of death from COVID-19 by up to 80%. These are simple things that individuals can apply for themselves. But instead of promoting things that could save countless lives, the self-appointed gatekeepers and censurers are too busy putting down the Joe Rogans of the world, who dared to step outside the lines they drew in the sand and easily beat the virus, making them, even if they don’t feel foolish, certainly look it.