Science Vs - Joe Rogan: The Malone Interview

Episode Date: February 5, 2022

Recently, Joe Rogan aired an interview that scientists are up in arms about — with Dr. Robert Malone. Malone talked smack about the Covid-19 vaccines, talking about scary side effects and implying that the vaccines are a risk to our fertility. Enter Science Vs. We fact check the bejesus out of it and zoom out to talk about the bigger picture: what to watch for if you’re worried about getting sucked in by misinformation online. Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/3rqgRjy UPDATE 2/11/22: When we first published this episode, we said that in more than 60 papers we'd gone through, we'd found only one reported case of someone dying from myocarditis after a Covid-19 vaccine. Some listeners questioned this, and we re-checked our work and found several more deaths. The episode has been updated — and thanks to the listeners who picked this up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Fest from Gimlet. Today on the show, we are diving into the world of misinformation. We had been busily working on other episodes for our new season, but then quickly shifted gears because of... Joe Rogan, host of the most listened to podcast on Spotify, being accused of being a public health menace for repeatedly promoting falsehoods about COVID-19 on his show. Now, if you miss this, perhaps too busy watching the Australian Open, on your ash party, destiny

is fulfilled. Anyway, if you're out of the loop, here's the hot tea. Joe Rogan is an incredibly popular podcaster. It's been reported by a bunch of news outlets that millions of people listen to his show. And back in December, he aired this interview with a guy called Dr Robert Malone. Now, Malone did some early fundamental research with mRNA,

but since then, he's become famous for getting kicked off Twitter after some say he spread misinformation about the vaccines. Now, in this interview with Joe Rogan, Malone did make the COVID vaccines look bad. He talked about scary side effects, seemed to suggest that boosters could increase your risk of getting COVID, implied the vaccines are a risk to our fertility, and that's kind of the tip of the iceberg.

Scientists were so up in arms about this interview that hundreds of nerds sent a letter to Spotify calling on them to do something here. Why Spotify? Well, Joe Rogan has an exclusive deal with them. So you can only listen to his show on Spotify. Some artists have demanded their music be taken off the platform. And now to an upheaval in music streaming. Legendary singer-songwriter

Neil Young is pulling his music from Spotify. Now, Spotify did some stuff like releasing its platform rules. But soon after, even the White House commented, saying tech companies should do more. To ensure the American people have access to accurate information on something as significant as COVID-19. That certainly includes Spotify. And it's all quite awkward because she says Spotify? Spotify. And it's even more awkward because Science Versus, this show, is owned by Spotify. And for the past few months, I've been encouraging you all to join up to Spotify. So I'm feeling like a bit of a chump here. Which brings us to today. We are going to dig into what Malone and Rogan actually talked about on Rogan's show.

And we're going to take a close look at the science and also the bigger picture here. Because we are going to walk you through the ways that misleading claims can confuse us into believing stuff that doesn't line up with the best science we've got. Now, as always, if you want to look at any of the evidence that we talk about on this show, we have a transcript that's full of citations, receipts for everything we say. There's a link in the show notes. So, when it comes to misinformation, there's a lot of it flying around.

Spotify. So get out your fly swatters. Because then, there's science. Science vs. Joe Rogan is coming up. Oh, and we're not going to have any ads on this episode. But if you do need a little brain break, here's the sound of one of my favorite Aussie birds, the kookaburra.

Kind of sounds like he's laughing. All right. Back to the show. Today we are fact-checking the Joe Rogan episode that everyone's up in arms about. And what we're going to do in this show is not just fact-check that episode, but show you how we at Science Versus sort through the confusing claims about science that we hear. And we're kind of hoping that this will just in general

help you to navigate the world of misinformation, you know, even away from this episode of Joe Rogan. And to help me with this, I have my trusty sidekick, producer Rose Rimler. Hello. Hi, Wendy. How do you feel about being my trusty sidekick? producer Rose Rimler. Hello. Hi, Wendy. How do you feel about being my trusty sidekick? I feel emasculated.

So what did you feel like when you were listening to this episode? My first thought when we were talking about going through this episode and breaking it down was I felt kind of overwhelmed because, um, there's a lot going on in this episode. They cover lots of stuff. So much, so much. And so here's what we're going to do. Instead of going through the claims one by one by one, we have decided to pick out the parts of this interview that tell a larger story about the general tools that you that tell a larger story about the general tools that you see over and over again in the misinformation game.

But we do want to say a couple of things up front. The first is that we reached out to both Joe Rogan and Robert Malone. Rogan didn't get back to us. Malone pointed us to some posts online, but he didn't respond to our specific questions. Also, earlier this week, Rogan said that he's not trying to promote misinformation. And Malone, he might believe the things that he said in that episode. All right, let's jump in. Okay, so the first thing we want to talk to you about, something you might be familiar with, cherry picking the data. Yeah, that's the classic. So cherry picking is when you are just

picking out either pieces of information or specific studies that support your point of view and ignoring any data that doesn't support that point of view. Yes, yes, exactly. And an analysis of misinformation around COVID-19 found that cherry picking was a common thing that you see. And so the example that I want to zoom in on, something I noticed while listening to this Malone interview, was when he was talking about this condition called myocarditis. So this is basically inflammation of the heart muscle, and it can feel a bit like chest pain or heart palpitations. Sometimes it can give you like shortness of breath.

And it's often caused by viral infections, but it can be caused by other things. So it's not a specific disease. It's more like just the condition of having some inflammation around your heart, which could happen for all kinds of reasons. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And it can be serious, but actually in many cases, it goes away and can be treated pretty easily.

So you can have like an inflammation of your heart that is not that big of a deal. It's kind of weird because it sounds like it'd be a horrible thing. It sounds bad. That's right. That's right. And you can have very scary myocarditis when it's caused by viruses. But here's what Malone said about when people get myocarditis after getting vaccinated? So, a recent paper out of Hong Kong, comprehensive analysis, myocarditis in boys hospitalized. Okay, that make sense?

Yes. That's word string. So, that's the data analysis. So, that's saying the myocarditis was so bad after vaccination, and these are all verified post-vaccination. Myocarditis was so bad after vaccination, and these are all verified post-vaccination. The myocarditis was so bad that you went to the hospital. Incidence rate is 1 in 2,700. Now, there's all kinds of hand-waving that, oh, myocarditis is mild, and they recover from it. Okay? Those statements aren't, let's say, gently based in fact. I asked one of the authors of this paper about this, Dr. Mike Kwan.

Are those statements not, let's say, gently based in fact? I can tell you those are factual. Those are factual. Those patients, they recover completely. Mike is a pediatrician and expert in infectious diseases at Princess Margaret Hospital in Hong Kong. I was chatting to him on Sunday night. And he said that the story with this study begins with this reporting system that Hong Kong has to pick up side effects from the vaccines. So if some people in Hong Kong get like a weird symptom after they get the COVID-19 vaccine, it gets reported. And Mike was the guy in Hong Kong that would get pinged if teens in particular were suspected of having myocarditis. Even in the middle of the night, 2am, 3am? Yeah, so we'd get these messages saying, we think we have a case, we think we have a case.

And then he would make sure that these patients got all these tests done on them to confirm, yes, this is myocarditis. And all of this monitoring was going on for three months in the middle of last year when like lots and lots of teens in Hong Kong were getting vaccinated. So in the end, 178,000 teens who were between 12 and 17 got the mRNA vaccine. And 33 of them got myocarditis. Most of them were boys. And in most cases, it popped up after the second dose. Now, when you zoom in on the stats for boys, it actually did turn out in this study that one in 2,700, just what Malone said, had myocarditis. So just looking at that study, Malone is right. And having

anything going wrong with your heart, like it could freak you out. And I asked Mike about this. When you saw the boys who had this, were they scared? Were they worried? Yeah, they were actually quite scared at the time. So were they okay? Were they okay? Yes. Well, that is the big, big question. Like how dangerous was this for the kids? And, you know, you heard Malone said that like the myocarditis was so bad that they went to the hospital for it. But the thing is, if you read the paper that Mike wrote, it's very clear that all of the cases were mild.

And in fact, Mike told me that a big reason the kids were in the hospital is because Mike wanted to do all these fancy tests on them, like cardiac MRIs that aren't available in like a regular doctor's office. All cases were hospitalized because we would like to perform a detailed workup for them. So they didn't need to be there to like keep them alive? No, no, no, no, no, no. In fact, he said that these patients, they all cleared up with either painkillers like ibuprofen. Some of them even not require medications

and they just take a rest and eventually they recover by themselves. And none of them got severe complications and no case of mortality, most importantly. And all of them recovered and went back home. And so far, some patients have been followed for around seven months. And they're very good, no problem. So this is very good news.

Yeah, so they've followed the patients for months now. And Mike said that they are, quote, perfectly normal. And he's going to keep following them up just in case something changes. That is good news. Good. I'm glad they're okay. Yeah. So, you know, when I think about how Malone talked about this study, it was almost, I don't know what's going on in his head, but it felt like he trusted and focused on the negative things in this study, but then didn't trust all the positive stuff. Yeah, it almost sounds like he had a copy of the study where all the neutral and good parts were like blacked out,

like redacted for some reason. Yes, exactly. You know, and since that Hong Kong paper, there's been other research, say this even bigger study that came out of Canada, which had something like more than 300,000 boys in that same age group. And it found that the rates of myocarditis after the vaccines were even lower. So in that case, so in that study, it was roughly one in 10,000. And again, no deaths. So like a bigger study found an even smaller risk. Exactly. Now, some data from that Canada study actually found that generally speaking,

the rate of myocarditis was even lower when people spaced out the doses of their vaccines. So like, instead of having them a few weeks apart, you just waited longer. And you know, like when I think about when I was listening to the interview with Robert Malone and Joe Rogan, like I don't know whether they intended this, but I just got this feeling like, you know, we really can't trust science and the scientists don't care or aren't thinking about these rare side effects. But, you know, despite the fact that in Mike's work, all the cases were mild, despite the fact that this is really, really rare, Hong Kong actually changed its policy on teens and vaccines to still reduce the risk of it happening. And so, you know, as of December,

they've now recommended that teens wait 12 weeks before getting their second shot. So they're spacing it out. So they're taking this mild, rare side effect very seriously. Yeah. This is what Mike said about it. Even if it's mild, we don't want this to happen. So what's the policy here? Have we changed our policy? Well, here's where I think things get really nuanced and curious. So in the US right now, the CDC still recommends that kids in this age group get their two shots three weeks apart. And so you've got to be asking, why is that?

A good reason for it would be because in the US, in many parts of the US, COVID rates are very high, very high compared to Hong Kong. So Hong Kong is a little bit smaller in population than New York City. And I'm just going to look up the COVID rates now. Okay. So like recently, when you look at a seven day average, they've got about 113 reported cases each day. 113. Oh, okay. What are we at in New York? Is it like thousands? day. 113. Oh, okay. What are we at in New York? Is it like thousands? Yeah, all right.

Yeah, exactly. Like I'm literally on my way to get coffee today, bumped into 113 people that had COVID. No, that's not true. But when you look at the daily average in New York City, it's something like 2,800. You know, like the cases are so much higher. You're just much more likely to get COVID here than in Hong Kong. Yeah. So that means like when you're doing this cost benefit analysis, it's like if your chance of getting COVID is higher,

thus your chance of getting a complication from COVID is higher. And we know that kids have less of a chance of getting really sick from COVID, but it does happen. Obviously, there's kids in the hospital in the US right now who have COVID. And so we have to be thinking about this. And if you're worried about myocarditis for your kid, that is a complication of COVID. You can get myocarditis from getting COVID, the disease. Yes, yes. In fact, one study from the CDC found that one in every 750 kids under the age of 16 who got COVID also got myocarditis,

which is higher than the risks associated with the vaccine. You know, I do want to say that we really went down the rabbit hole to see if we could find any cases of myocarditis from the vaccines that were not mild. And, you know, we did find reports of people who had complications. We even found several cases of people who had died. But the vast majority were fine. And if you're going searching for the worst case scenario, then you really need to be also thinking about the deaths from COVID. I would say, looking at the data, if you are worried about these conditions, you know, you're worried about myocarditis, I feel like you should be more worried

about your kids getting COVID versus your kids getting a vaccine. That makes sense to me. All right. So that is my story about cherry picking the data. You don't tell people how COVID, the illness we are trying to vaccinate for, can cause complications. You focus on the very, very scary things. I don't know if he intended to miss all of this, but it is a classic case of cherry picking. Okay, so the next thing that we're going to talk about is looking out for anecdotes,

stories, especially like scary or like really emotional stories. This is a classic, a classic one for the misinformation game. Yeah, yeah. We know that anecdotes carry a lot more weight than they really have any business to. So I found this gigantic meta-analysis from 2020 that looked at 61 studies of what kind of information is most persuasive to people. And so they compared statistics and data with anecdotes. And they found that sometimes people are totally interested in hearing the statistical data to make decisions. But one big exception to that is when they're making a decision that affects their own health in that case

Yeah, especially if there are there's possible severe consequences so in that case People are more likely to believe an anecdote than they are to listen to stats. That is so interesting and it's funny because like That's probably when you should be relying on stats the most is serious medical decisions. I heard some anecdotes in this episode. So here's an example of what I'm talking about. So I took two doses of Moderna. With the second dose, I developed stage 3 hypertension with systolic blood pressure of up to 230.

I'm lucky to be alive. You know, what it means is I've had a stress test of my aorta and my cerebral vascular system, and I didn't have a stroke, and I didn't tear my aorta all to shreds. But it's a good thing. Whoa, he's saying that came from the vaccine. So the context here is he's saying that people who got COVID before they got vaccinated had a worse reaction to the vaccine. So the context here is he's saying that people who got COVID

before they got vaccinated had a worse reaction to the vaccine. And he's one of those people. He got COVID and then he got vaccinated. Right. And he's saying his reaction was so bad, he's basically implying he nearly died. I'm lucky my aorta didn't tear all to shreds. Yeah, yeah, that's a memorable line.

So is, I guess first thing, very powerful anecdote. Is it true? Is any of that? I mean, obviously, I don't know what happened to him personally, but is this a thing that happens that if you get COVID and then get the vaccine, your symptoms can be worse? Yeah, we can't say what happened to Malone, but we're moving beyond the anecdote, which is the whole point of science.

So I looked into this, and I did find a couple of studies that asked this question. And they did find that actually there's some evidence that if you had COVID before you got your COVID shot, you might have worse side effects from the vaccine. Oh, okay. Okay. One study that followed people who were describing their symptoms over time, whether they had COVID and then after they got the vaccine, they found that if you had never had COVID before you got your vaccine, for example, with Pfizer, your chances of getting a flu-y sort of side effect from the vaccine are about one in five. Got it. But if you had had COVID before you got your shot, your odds were more like one in three that you'd have like a flu-like. Oh, okay. So you are at a slightly higher risk if you had COVID, then got the vaccine of getting, you said, flu-like symptoms. What does that involve? This is stuff like fatigue and headaches. It's like feeling crummy. And the researcher told me

that the side effects cleared up on their own and they weren't dangerous. Oh, okay. And so Malone described that super scary, like aorta thing, stage three hypertension. How common is that? Well, in these studies, they don't report anything like that. And so this is following a group of more than 14,000 people. They didn't find it. Okay. Okay. But this was for like a very specific situation that he was talking about where you have had COVID and then you get the vaccines. But what if we just like look at people generally, like generally when you get the vaccine, can you have stage three hypertension? Yeah, I wanted to know that too. And I looked for that and I did find a report of nine people

in Switzerland who had stage three hypertension after they got their vaccine. They were all over the age of 50. This was out of thousands of people, by the way. So like you just talked about, Wendy, it could be a rare side effect. And if it is, you still have to weigh it against your risk of getting a similar issue from COVID. And we know that COVID, the disease, can mess up your cardiovascular system. The most serious way of being like it could stop your heart if you die from it. Right. So, yeah, it's like, again, what you said earlier, it's a risk benefit thing. If you want another anecdote, I got COVID and then got my booster shot. And it was fine. I know a few people that got COVID in 2020 and got vaccinated in 2021.

And we're perfectly fine. My shoulder hurt a little, though. It was a little bit sore. I'm sorry. Do the listeners even care? Do they even notice? They're still thinking about that aorta that almost tore open. Well, that's the thing.

Like, then you're going to the pharmacy to get your booster or whatever. You're just thinking, torn aorta. Aorta torn to shreds, aorta torn to shreds, aorta torn to shreds. It's freaky. So it sticks. And there's one more thing I want to bring up here. So we know that stories can be really good at grabbing our attention and our emotions, and they can actually be more memorable than just hearing stats. We know that because we use them on our show,

on Science Versus. We often have anecdotes in our episodes. Sprung! No, no, no, no. But like, I don't mean to put smoke up my own ass, but like, when we use anecdotes, we are really careful to use them to try to represent the bigger picture of science. Right. It's to illustrate a point that we see in the data. Like, I don't know the takeaway necessarily. Like, the takeaway isn't like, if you hear a story on a science podcast,

you should run screaming. But you also want to be listening for your data that backs up whatever that story is trying to tell you. After the break, can the vaccine mess up your period? You know, you get the needle and the damage done. We dive into the science and you might be surprised. Coming up. Let's take a break. Let's listen to the sound of wind blowing on the beach. Welcome back. Today on the show, we're looking into the interview that Joe Rogan did with Robert Malone,

where they talk about the COVID-19 vaccines. And people have been very upset about this interview, saying that it is peddling misinformation. So we're taking a closer look. You know, we just keep searching for a heart of cold, hard facts around this. Don't we, producer Rose Rimler, who is here to help me? Yes.

Hi, Wendy. All right. So the next thing we're going to talk about that was happening in this interview is what I'm going to call the canary in the coal mine effect. And it's this idea that one thing that some people are seeing is a signal for something that's much larger and much more dangerous. And I have noticed this quite a lot in the, as we've been calling it, misinformation game. But here is the example that I want to focus on in this Malone interview. It's how he talks about how the shots might be affecting our fertility. And in the interview, this kind of starts with Malone's discussion with Rogan about menstruation.

Oh, I love when men tell me about menstruation. I know, that's why they call it menstruation. All right, have a listen to this. There's a huge number of dysmenorrhea and menometriosis. What are those? This is alterations in menses in women. Oh, right. That is a huge issue. And they deny it.

So are people denying it? Like, what's going on here? To find out, I called up Dr. Victoria Mayle. Hi. Hey, Dan. Right. She's British, a reproductive immunologist at Imperial College London. And first I asked her if she thought that scientists had been denying this period vaccine's possible connection. You laugh. Why is that? Because I couldn't really be further from the truth. So it definitely did take a little while for people to start taking this so seriously that big money got put into studying it.

But actually, this is something that people have been talking about for 10 months. So here's the first thing that tipped researchers off, that the vaccines might be messing with our periods. So different countries have these official systems where people can report weird reactions from the vaccine. We talked about a kind of similar one in Hong Kong. And what they started noticing in the UK and the US is that people started going to this reporting system and saying, hey, my period has changed after the vaccine. And enough people were saying this that the NIH actually handed out $1.67 million to scientists to study this. And that was available. There was a press release about it months before the Rogan interview.

So there was research happening. Yes, there was no bloody cover-up. No one was padding the data. Well, you know, I had heard this too, actually. I'd heard it around that getting the vaccine changed your period, like for some people. So I guess I'm curious, like, is it actually true? Okay, well, the results of one of the studies that the NIH funded has already come out. Now, it was not available at the time

of Malone's interview, but we have it now. So what does the science tell us? All right. This study was published in early Jan. And what they did is they got almost 4,000 people who had been using a period tracking app. It's like one of those apps where you log like when you get your period. And then they also tracked, you know, if these people got vaccinated, when they got vaccinated, and did an analysis to see did getting the vaccines change your period. And what they found was on average, it did. Hmm. Really? Yeah, yeah. But it was by average, it did. Hmm. Really? Yeah.

Yeah. But it was by less than a day. Okay. Yeah. So here's Victoria again. Well, this is the thing. That is a change, but it's really small. All right.

Now that stat of less than a day, it's an average. So that means that for some people in the study, their periods did change by more. So this was especially true for people who got the two shots in the same cycle. And in that case, for some of them, their periods came around two days late. Okay, so that's a real thing because I have to say I was like a little skeptical. And so that's really interesting that there was like a real effect. Okay, well, one reason I was skeptical was I was like, well, why on earth would that have anything to do with your period? We don't know exactly the mechanism, but we can make some guesses, some educated guesses. Victoria told me that the reason this might be happening is because we know that sex hormones, which play a

big role in when we get our periods, can affect the immune system, and the immune system can affect sex hormones. It's all intimately connected in the wonder that is our bodies. And so it's possible that when we give the immune system a big stimulus, a big stimmy package, if you will, like a vaccine, that that could affect your menstrual cycle. But here is what's really important in this period piece. What the study found is that after two months, people's periods,

they went back to normal within two cycles. Interesting. So this is a real change that we can detect, but it goes back to normal really quickly. So that all fits into this picture that it really could be an immune system reaction that happens after we get the vaccine and then the immune system settles down,

our periods go back to normal, life is all hunky-dory. Now, curiously, two more studies have come out looking at periods, but focusing on having unexpected or heavier bleeding. And they actually found that, yes, the COVID vaccines can increase your risk of this stuff happening. But, you know, like one study said, the changes weren't dangerous and were probably short term. Still, though, you know, when I listened to Malone talk about this,

to me, anyway, it really sounded like he was saying that these changes from the vaccines to our periods really could be a sign of something bigger, like that the vaccines are also messing with our fertility. That's why we call this the canary in the coal mine effect. The periods are a sign of fertility problems. So for example, he said that he was asked to testify to the Hasidic Jew Rabbinical Court in New York. And here's some tape from that. It turns out that the rabbis in the Hasidic Jew community carefully monitor, we don't need to go into how, the menstrual cycle of the fertile women in their congregations. Cl closely monitor it because there is strict guidance about cleanliness and intercourse. And they had a major problem because they, these, you know, these are all

60 plus up to 80, long beards, gray hair, that had exquisite understanding about the menstrual cycle in all the women in their congregations. And they all knew that these menstrual cycles were being disrupted all the time. And for them, this was a major crisis because it meant that if you're in the Hasidic community, increasing the size of the population of Hasidic Jews is kind of important to you. It's centrally important to them. And this was a major threat to reproductive health in their communities. Now, there have been some questions around how he represented rabbinical rules and the Hasidic community. I'm just going to leave that where we found it and focus on the science. I will say that

it doesn't sound bonkers to me that if our periods are being affected by the vaccines, that that could be having an effect on our fertility, right? It's just that we don't need to go to a rabbinical court to settle this one because we have actual scientific data on this, which was not mentioned on the show. So even in the early days of the vaccine trials, we started to get some inklings that the vaccines didn't seem to be affecting our fertility. So have a listen to Victoria again.

So even in the clinical trials, the participants were asked not to become pregnant, but these were really large trials and accidents happen. We're all stuck in lockdown. Exactly. And those pregnancies happened equally in the vaccinated and in the unvaccinated arms of the trials. If you were getting shot with the placebo, you would have the same chance of getting pregnant as if you were getting shot with the actual vaccine. Exactly. Exactly. That's what we already started to realize once we were getting the clinical trial data. Now, not that many people did get pregnant in either arm of the trial because people were told to use contraception

because scientists were being careful because they didn't know what was going to happen. So they didn't want people to get pregnant. Yeah, it makes sense. But Malone didn't mention any of this on the show. We don't know if he knew about it or not. But there were other studies around at the time that have looked at the vaccines and all sorts of stuff related to fertility, like does it mess up your eggs? Does it mess up your sperm?

We found four studies that came out before that show aired. Some of them were in people doing IVF. None of them found bad effects from the vaccine on any of this stuff. So it didn't affect a bunch of these different parameters that measure fertility. Exactly. Exactly. Which I think is pretty important to tell people when you're telling people about how vaccines might affect fertility. So we just have all these pieces in the puzzle suggesting that the vaccines aren't affecting our fertility. And it was just nowhere to be seen on the episode.

Right, right. I mean, it's more fun to talk about a bunch of rabbis. It's true. It's true. But I think another way to look at all this is that if you did know about those studies, this is another example of cherry picking. That's a really classic cherry picking. You can make a great pie out of all those cherries. All right. Now, just so our audience knows, since the airing of that Rogan podcast,

there's been even clearer data to suggest that the vaccines don't affect our fertility. Here's the study that we have. Victoria told me about it. It looked at a cohort of more than 2,000 couples who were trying to conceive over the course of about 10 months and asked them, it checked in with them every couple of months, you know, since last time we checked in, have you become pregnant? Did you get vaccinated? Did you have COVID? And getting vaccinated made no difference to the couple's chances of becoming pregnant, whether it was the female partner or the male partner. What's actually really interesting about this study, though, is that catching COVID, that made no difference if it was the female partner that

caught COVID. But if the male partner caught COVID, for two months, there was a decreased chance that the couple would conceive. So that tells us that in males, COVID is actually reducing fertility. Luckily, temporarily, but it is. So the vaccines don't have an effect on fertility, but in people with sperm, getting COVID does. Yes, that is the picture that we are getting. So, you know, if you really want to have a kid and are worried about your fertility and you've got testicles, it seems to me like you should be trying to avoid COVID, not the vaccine. Makes sense to me. All right. The final thing that I want to talk about just quickly is this phenomenon of seeding doubt

in the establishment and giving off this feeling of a conspiracy theory. And I don't know whether Malone intended to do this, but he just gave me this feeling that like you can't trust the media, the CDC, the scientific consensus. It's all a big conspiracy. I mean, have a listen to this. What we're experiencing is a coordinated media warfare, the level of which we have never seen before. And I and my peers who are experienced in multiple outbreaks have never seen this level of coordinated propaganda. Okay. And this is something that actually you tend to see with conspiracy theories. People who are promoting them offer this sense of like, I know something you don't know, which is fun. Like everyone wants to be involved in gossip. You know,

be the smartest person in the room. Exactly. Smartest person in the room. You know, and once you do that, once you say, I know something you don't, and you can't trust the establishment, you know, then who are you left to trust? Malone, right? Which is why what he said towards the end of the show really struck me. He was talking about how we're all just sheeple to Fauci on the CDC, basically. The answer is mass formation psychosis. When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety and a sense that things don't make sense. We can't understand it. And then their attention gets focused by a leader or a series of events on one small point, just like hypnosis. They literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere. And one of the aspects of that phenomena is the people that they identify as their leaders,

the ones typically that come in and say, you have this pain and I can solve it for you. I and I alone, okay, can fix this problem for you. Okay. Then they will lead, they will follow that person through hell. And, you know, like this hypnosis thing, that is going too far. But the research does show that when our lives feel out of control, we do tend to look for stability elsewhere to cope with this anxiety. Because it does give you a sense of security when there's someone you can trust and be thinking, even though things are totally bonkers, someone is telling you, you are going to be

all right. You are going to be all right. I have the solution. But as I was listening to this episode, I couldn't help but feel that Malone himself, I don't know if he intended to do this at all, but he was whipping us into a frenzy, like making me feel anxious about not trusting the establishment

and the things I'm hearing. And then he was offering a solution, which was, you know, he talked about ivermectin and like, we're not going to talk about that. Maybe we'll save it for another day. It's not the solution, by the way. I have looked into it. But I just found that just so ironic. Like, you know? I mean, the thing that makes me really want to scream and made me want to scream the whole time I was listening to the podcast, especially as it wrapped up and I realized like what they had kind of missed. And you touched on this, Wendy, a little bit with the myocarditis stuff. But in general, they are not talking about the studies that show that vaccines work. They just don't mention them. And they just don't mention

any of the positives. And so like you said, vaccines are a risk-benefit analysis. What's the risk of the shot versus the risk of the illness? And in this episode, it seems like they don't really consider the benefits of the vaccines at all. It's like they're making a big pro-con list and they're just writing stuff in the con side and they're not writing anything in the pro side. So that makes it kind of frustrating to listen to all these little tidbits of criticisms or studies that they cite or weird mechanisms of like, oh, is that true about T-cells? When actually, big picture, they're missing this really good data we have from real people in the real world showing that if you get vaccinated, you're less likely to get COVID, you're less likely to get sick, and you're less likely to die. And I mean, the latest data we have looks at almost half a million people with COVID. This is during Omicron in the U.S.

And it shows that unvaccinated people are 23 times more likely to be hospitalized than people who had two shots and a booster. And, you know, this data is new. They didn't have it at the time of that interview. But they had gobs of other studies that show something similar, that vaccines keep you out of the hospital. And so to not talk about that in your conversation about this stuff, to me, feels completely lopsided. And that's just like the major problem I have here.

Well said, Rose. Well said. You too, Wendy. And one more note, going through this episode of Rogan's show, hearing the misleading stuff in there was pretty frustrating. And that's why on Monday, me and our editor, Blythe Terrell, announced on Twitter that

until Spotify improves its policies, we aren't going to make any more new Science vs. episodes, except those intended to counteract misinformation being spread on the platform, which I should say is bigger than Joe Rogan. Now, there's also been a correction in this episode. When we first published this ep, we said that we only found one reported case of someone who had died from myocarditis after getting COVID vaccines. We went back and rechecked our work, and we actually found several more deaths. So we fixed it in this version of the episode. And I'm just really sorry we didn't catch that the first time. Now, like we said at

the beginning of the show, if you want to look into any of the things that we talked about on the show, any of the studies, you want to dive into the details, please do in the show notes, you'll see a link to our transcript with all the citations in them. There's more than 150. Yeah, so go knock yourself out. That's Science Versus. Podcasts talking, saying something about vaccines. There was cherry picking and hawkers hawking and the claims were flowing free. There was some gish galloping going on about a big conspiracy Look at misinformation on the run In the 21st century Look at misinfo on the run in the 21st century. you