Joe Rogan and Aaron Rodgers Pat Themselves on the Back Over Their Hot Takes on Covid Vaccines

Joe Rogan and Aaron Rodgers patted themselves on the back during a podcast chat about their stances on the Covid-19 vaccines.

The two college dropouts found a lot of common ground in an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience posted Saturday, with host Rogan interviewing one of the most prominent NFL players to refuse to get vaccinated. Rodgers has repeatedly pushed unproven anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and faced major backlash earlier this year after he was caught lying about his vaccination status.

Rogan commented that “many people” had “just bought the narrative that was being promoted by CNN and MSNBC and wherever, that if you get vaccinated, you can’t get Covid, you can’t spread Covid.”

“I get it,” said Rodgers, adding that he thought it was “fine” if “you want to test everybody every day.”

“But as we look back now, let’s not revise history,” Rodgers continued. “And what actually happened and what was said, because what was said was, you get the vax, you can’t spread it or contract it.”

“And no one seems upset that that was a lie,” said Rogan.

Rodgers brought up President Joe Biden’s comments about how Covid was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” which he has criticized before.

Rogan replied that it was “just so wild” because “we had already realized, like, oh, this is — 78% of the people hospitalized were obese. Most of the people that died were either obese or very overweight or uh, rather, uh very old.”

“Co-morbidities,” interjected Rodgers.

“Yeah, four co-morbidities,” said Rogan. “At least four, for like more than 50% of the people.”

What Rogan appears to be referencing is a CDC study of 1.2 million people who were fully vaccinated against Covid between Dec. 2020 and Oct. 2021, but he’s both mixing up and misrepresenting the statistics and ignoring the core finding of the study, one which is literally at the very top of the CDC website where the study was published: “COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective against COVID-19–associated hospitalization and death.”

Screenshot via CDC.gov.

Looking at the total universe of those 1.2 million fully vaccinated people, only 189 (0.015%) had severe Covid (defined as needing ventilation, being admitted to the hospital with a diagnosis of acute respiratory failure, being admitted to the ICU, or death) and only 36 (0.0033%) died.

Those extremely low percentages mean that it is in fact accurate to say that severe Covid or death from Covid is indeed rare for fully vaccinated people.

The study further noted that everyone in the study who had severe Covid or died had at least one risk factor, including being over 65 years old, immunosuppressed, or other underlying conditions. Among the 36 who died, 28 people (78%) had at least four risk factors.

In other words, it isn’t true as Rogan suggested that “78 percent of the people” who were hospitalized or died from Covid had multiple co-morbidities, a common argument used by vaccine opponents to attempt to characterize Covid as a disease that only strikes the vulnerable.

That 78 percent is a figure that was from the teeny tiny fraction (less than 1/5 of one percent!) of fully vaccinated people who had severe Covid or died. The vast majority (99.985%) of the 1.2 million vaccinated people were fine, and either never caught Covid or experienced mild and survivable symptoms.

The CDC and other government agencies made multiple missteps in their communication efforts during the course of the pandemic, some of which can be attributed to the chaos of responding to a brand new virus and some to general government bureaucratic incompetence, but the core message of “pandemic of the unvaccinated” remains true.

It is not a public health emergency if people get infected with a virus and are either asymptomatic or have only mild cold symptoms. It is a public health emergency if people are dying or spike demand for ICU medical services like ventilators. The vaccines are indeed highly effective at preventing severe disease or death, a fact that neither Rogan nor Rodgers want to acknowledge.

And while the majority of Americans seem to have moved on from the pandemic, hospitals are still facing capacity issues with Covid patients.

Watch above, via The Joe Rogan Experience.