Joe Rogan discussed COVID vaccines on a recent podcast. It is not surprising that he is not a fan of mandates or passports. But one segment of his podcast is causing the vax-at-all-costs crowd to lose their minds. The public health bureaucracy has everyone so worked up about virus mutation that they do not want to hear that the very therapeutic being pushed and even mandated can perpetuate mutations.
On mandates, Rogan noted that prominent commentators such as Don Lemon publicly say that the unvaccinated should be barred from shopping and working. He went into a rant, laced with a few f-bombs, pointing out that we have only been experimenting with self-governance and freedom since 1776. Yet, they allowed the United States to become a superpower and unleashed unprecedented economic success and innovation.
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Rogan believes that we are one step closer to a dictatorship with the government and private businesses under pressure from political leaders who are requiring Americans to receive the vaccine as a condition of participating in society:
“That’s what is going to happen with a vaccine passport, that’s what’s gonna happen when and if they close borders. You can’t enter New York City unless you have your papers. You can’t go here unless you have that. You can’t get on a plane unless you do what I tell you.
People say well it’s all about protecting people from the, no it’s not. It’s not because we’ve shown, this is a fact. Just a couple of months ago the idea of a breakthrough case was unheard of. Nobody heard of anybody catching COVID that had a vaccine. Right?
That was the whole idea you get a vaccine and you don’t have to worry about it. Now we know, not only do you get it, you can spread it. And some people have died. Apparently, it’s a small number, I don’t know what the numbers are. But I know that most people get vaccinated and when they do have the disease they have a better time of it than people who are unvaccinated.
All of that is accurate. Between the Texas fleebag Democrats who ran away from an election integrity bill vote, the Major League Baseball players and Olympic athletes testing positive, and the CDC’s own report, the agency’s estimate is undoubtedly low. The CDC stopped tracking all breakthrough infections on May 1, and just from looking at data from the UK and Israel the underestimate is apparent.
Rogan went on to comment on a potential risk of so-called leaky vaccines. The current COVID-19 vaccines certainly qualify as leaky, which means an individual can become infected post-vaccination. The primary marketing pitch has morphed from saying they prevent infection to saying they prevent severe disease and death.
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Several mainstream media outlets have acknowledged this could lead to viral mutation. NPR noted that mutants could make vaccines less effective and cause mutations. CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta also said exposing vaccinated people to the virus could inspire mutations.
When he brought up the subject, Rogan said clearly the information he was sharing was not to endorse or discourage vaccination. He cited a 2015 study from Penn State that talks about the mechanism by which a leaky vaccine could allow more virulent pathogens to be transmitted (emphasis added):
There is a theoretical expectation that some types of vaccines could prompt the evolution of more virulent (“hotter”) pathogens. This idea follows from the notion that natural selection removes pathogen strains that are so “hot” that they kill their hosts and, therefore, themselves. Vaccines that let the hosts survive but do not prevent the spread of the pathogen relax this selection, allowing the evolution of hotter pathogens to occur. This type of vaccine is often called a leaky vaccine.
When vaccines prevent transmission, as is the case for nearly all vaccines used in humans, this type of evolution towards increased virulence is blocked. But when vaccines leak, allowing at least some pathogen transmission, they could create the ecological conditions that would allow hot strains to emerge and persist. This theory proved highly controversial when it was first proposed over a decade ago, but here we report experiments with Marek’s disease virus in poultry that show that modern commercial leaky vaccines can have precisely this effect: they allow the onward transmission of strains otherwise too lethal to persist.
Thus, the use of leaky vaccines can facilitate the evolution of pathogen strains that put unvaccinated hosts at greater risk of severe disease. The future challenge is to identify whether there are other types of vaccines used in animals and humans that might also generate these evolutionary risks.
Note this says leaky vaccines prevent the effectiveness of normal evolutionary selective pressures. Viruses with high kill rates generally burn out because their transmission is limited. A vaccine that mitigates illness severity but still allows transmission can permit more deadly viruses to circulate more broadly in a population. It does not say vaccinations cause variants, though some researchers have said they may.
This finding is consistent with what we have known about bacteria for decades. Some strains of staphylococcus and tuberculosis are drug-resistant. They have evolved to evade the pharmacology of the drugs previously used to fight them. Evolutionary pressure is a heck of a thing, and it is not always clear how human intervention will affect it.
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Dr. Robert Malone, a vaccine developer who contributed to mRNA development, has repeatedly cautioned against mandatory vaccination policies. Recently when asked by Peter Navarro how he would advise political leaders on the response, Malone said:
“So as I see it, we’ve gotten locked into some fundamental policy positions that just don’t make a whole lot of sense. And one of the core problems is you really can’t vaccinate your way out of an ongoing pandemic. You shouldn’t really be doing that. You need to focus your strategy on protecting the people that are most vulnerable, providing alternative options for those that do get sick, and preparing for a protracted (time) where you’re going to have virus circulation. Now that it’s fully in the population, you can’t avoid that.”
Every public health expert and researcher who has suggested this has been silenced, censored, and nearly depersoned, beginning with Dr. Scott Altas, who advocated for focused protection. No matter the clinical evidence, the doctors and professionals who signed the Great Barrington Declaration, which endorsed focused protection, and any physician advocating for repurposed generic drugs have all received similar backlash.
Now the vaccinate-at-all-costs crowd has the knives out for Joe Rogan, saying he is using his platform irresponsibly for reading a peer-reviewed study on air. To date, Rogan has proved to be pretty uncancelable. Hopefully, he can get away with touching the third rail on vaccines.
