Joe Rogan isn't the best source of medical advice, but he has been smeared by the media on behalf of big pharma. His approach to treating COVID came from a doctor and was not "horse paste"... CNN was proven to have edited video of Joe Rogan to make his skin look off-color. Also, never forget that the mainstream media said the "vaccines" would stop transmission of the virus when all the experts knew it wouldn't do so, from the start. They also lied about side effects.
Science doesn't work like that, religion does. "Science" harmed itself with some people and an ideology heavily censoring opponents, and by shutting down any debate, including scientific one.
During COVID, most everybody was operating from an incomplete data set. Public officials were wrong about some things. You can choose to see this as a conspiracy set up by big pharma, or you can see it as imperfect people doing what they could to mitigate a public health crisis.
And yes, critique the peer review process all you want. It's flawed in many ways. But this "it's us versus science" narrative is extremely, insidiously damaging to society at large. It only serves powerful people who benefit from whipping an audience into a frenzy to buy their shitty supplements or bumper stickers or whatever.
Simply depriving these people of airtime does NOT quash their views and make them go away. It fuels conspiracy theories such as about how big pharma is censoring ideas about natural (or already highly-available) treatments in order to make billions on devoloping their vaccines and using government levers to force people to buy them. (They did try to do that too, though they got lucky in that none of the "natural" treatments seemed to really work. But had they worked, their reaction would have been the same.)
It also means the discussions people see are going to happen on shows/forums/podcasts where the host doesn't push back on them and offer challenges and critical thinking. This not only sets a terrible example for people by demonstrating through social proof that one should accept these things uncritically, but it makes it appear as though the case is very strong and there isn't a good counter-argument! This double effect makes a strong impression on people in the exact opposite way that we want.
I think Joe Rogan has done more to bring sanity to these things than most people. Have you ever watched those episodes? He is very conversational but if there is ever a claim that doesn't seem supported, he will ask Jamie (his assistant or producer or whatever) look it up, and they are highly skeptical and choosy of sources.
We should know by now that censoring information these days does not work. We're no longer living in the society where the average person only gets information from TV or books available at their library or local book store. If there's a quack theory out there, it will get to people through the internet. The answer is not to shut down the internet. We need to expose these ideas and defeat them using logical and scientific refutation, and we need to encourage and teach critical thinking skills. This is a new world we are living in, and the tried and true techniques or censoring and book burning do not work anymore. Embrace it and use it.
> We should know by now that censoring information these days does not work
This argument (repeated) is a bit of a red herring. I haven't seen anyone saying we can make pseudoscience go away forever. We're just questioning the wisdom of embracing and amplifying it to reach people it wouldn't have before.
> It fuels conspiracy theories
This is kind of a corollary to the above point: People are going to theorize conspiracies no matter what. There are undoubtedly conspiracy theorists who think the exact opposite: that including pseudoscience is a conspiracy to make people think it isn't being censored in other ways.
Thus, that a given action might strengthen or weaken the conspiracy theories of at least 1 pseudoscientist isn't enough to justify doing the action or not. Neither choice will make conspiracy theories go away.
By the way, Rogan himself has a few entries on Quackwatch for promoting questionable supplements that he has a financial interest in. So he’s not, as you imply and he would love to have you believe “just asking questions”. He is actively engaged in the same bullshit his quack guests come on and peddle.
And vaccines do reduce transmission, which is all I ever heard about it. Not sure what side effects you're talking about.
