According to a story from Forbes, Joe Rogan’s hit podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which is the most popular podcast on Spotify and commands an enormous following, has been no stranger to controversy. Rogan has never hesitated to host guests with fringe, pseudoscientific views, enabling scientifically verifiable falsehoods to gain purchase among his large audience of followers.
In a recent episode, the program platformed HIV/AIDS denialism by hosting former evolutionary biology professor Bret Weinstein. But fancy credentials do not an expert make. Weinstein expressed the view that the HIV virus doesn’t play a role in the development of AIDS after Rogan expressed his own skepticism. During the COVID pandemic, Weinstein also pushed ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug, as a treatment for the disease, a position which to this day has no valid scientific basis.
However, there is a wealth of scientific study regarding this disease. In fact, it’s one of the most rigorously studied infectious diseases in history. There’s been a widely held consensus on the cause of this disease that was first established in the 1980s: HIV causes AIDS and is the sole cause of AIDS. This is the scientific consensus.
In what effectively amounts to victim-blaming, Rogan and Weinstein instead expressed the belief that “party drugs,” such as poppers, are what causes AIDS, because don’t we all remember when millions of people, including infants and children, were doing poppers in the 80s? AIDS denialists also blame poverty, malnutrition, and antiretroviral meds as the cause of the disease. There are millions of people around the world that have died from the disease through the decades that didn’t suffer from malnutrition or poverty, nor were they abusing poppers or other drugs.
Rogan has also hosted UC Berkeley professor Peter Duesberg, another denialist who has spread misinformation about HIV/AIDS for around 40 years. Rogan’s contrarianism and skepticism, reflected in his willingness to host widely discredited public figures on his podcast, may seem like worthwhile, genuine curiosity about the world, but in all likelihood appears to amount to little more than petulant attention-seeking—and getting attention is something at which he is particularly adept.
It would all be rather amusing if it weren’t for that fact that millions are tuning in and getting exposed to actively harmful falsehoods.
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James is a staff writer for Patient Worthy and has an educational background focused on history and the nonprofit sector. Since beginning work at Patient Worthy, he has developed a strong passion for writing stories that center on the voices of rare disease patients and also keeps them informed of the latest developments. James also believes strongly in the value of learning about patients’ experiences at rare disease conferences and other events firsthand.
