Joe Rogan’s polio vaccine comments, explained
If you go to Joe Rogan for medical advice, you deserve everything coming your way. But, even by his standards, a recent episode featuring antivax crusader Dr. Suzanne Humphries went a little too far into cuckoo bananas territory.
Humphries is notorious for writing the 2013 self-published book Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History, which argues that, contrary to mountains of evidence, vaccines did nothing to contribute to the decline of formerly widespread diseases like polio. During her Rogan interview, Humphries reiterated her claims that there is no correlation between polio vaccine rollouts and an enormous reduction in polio cases.
Her take is that what made people ill was “environmental toxins” picked up through questionable sanitation and poor personal hygiene. Going further, she claimed that tuberculosis “was a side effect of the smallpox vaccine”, that COVID-19 contained “snake toxin proteins”, and that polio was actually a consequence of the banned insecticide DDT. I’m probably insulting your intelligence by pointing out that all the above is complete nonsense, but well, it is.
Once upon a time, Rogan might have pushed back against this claptap but, let’s face it, he’s not the interviewer he once was. Nodding along passively, Rogan swallowed her garbage and said:
“I would have told you that vaccines are one of the most important inventions in human history. And it saved us from polio, it saved us from smallpox. I would have been that guy ranting off all those statistics. I would have told you that. But then I read your book.”
Rogan went on to sing her praises on X:
“Dissolving Illusions” is a really great book. I probably would have never thought about exploring the real history of vaccines if we hadn’t gone through the insane Covid gaslighting of the last 5 years, but after Dr. Humphries’ book I’ll never look at it the same way again.… https://t.co/gNWMEhZYCd
— Joe Rogan (@joerogan) March 27, 2025
As a measure of how wrong Rogan is, even Elon Musk very gently pushed back on him going full antivax:
My opinion on the subject:
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 27, 2025
If forced to choose between greatly improved sanitation and vaccines, sanitation matters much more.
But vaccines, essentially training your immune system for battle, do work well for addressing many diseases.
The essence of science is continuously… https://t.co/Z98706LC55
It’d be easy to begin tossing out data that underlines that the polio vaccine was one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time and has saved millions of lives. However, as we should all know by now, antivaxxers aren’t going to be swayed by a silly little thing like objective reality. In fact, at this point bringing them back to normalcy feels like a waste of time.
That would probably be fine, were it not for the fact that they’re not the ones going to suffer for their nonsensical beliefs. The ones bearing the consequences of this tide of disinformation will be their children, some of whom will spend the rest of their lives suffering with the lasting effects of polio and wondering how their parents could be so cruel as to deny them a simple preventative jab.
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