Boycott Joe Rogan

Censuring The Joe Rogan Experience—a podcast whose eponymous host, a muscle-bound man most famous for providing MMA color commentary and pressuring people into eating bull testicles for money—has become an online cause célèbre in recent months after a group of 270 doctors penned an open letter to its distributor, Spotify, accusing the show of having “a concerning history of broadcasting misinformation, particularly regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The letter took particular issue with a recent episode featuring guest Robert Malone, a biochemist who conducted a series of groundbreaking laboratory studies on cells using mRNA technology in the late-1980s and early-1990s. Malone is a pharmaceutical executive and lab researcher with no history of treating patients—he did not even complete his medical residency, according to his own CV. This did not stop him from floating wild, baseless claims about the COVID-19 pandemic, including that vaccine efficacy is a mirage attributed to “mass-formation psychosis” (despite Malone himself being vaccinated), and that hospitals are engaged in a grand conspiracy of misdiagnosing COVID-19 deaths in order to up their profits. He further compared the current public health climate to the rise of Nazism. Rogan not only provided Malone with a large platform and failed to push back on any of his pandemic conspiracies—which he has been banned from Twitter for constantly spreading—but appeared to agree with them. The episode was immediately removed from YouTube for violating its COVID-19 disinformation policy.