There are plenty of comedians joking around COVID, conspiracy theories, vaccines, and making people laugh.
Joe Rogan as a comedian is very different than Joe Rogan as a podcaster. He tries to be a very serious podcaster, and brings in serious people to debate serious subjects.
But he treats them all with the same respect and reverence. Which is a good attitude to take with people you meet 1on1, but may not be a dispassionate neutral position when you have a massive audience of tens of millions.
So when he brings in an astrophysicists and they teach the audience about the lifecycle of stars, it's educational and people both learn and are entertained. And the next guest is a conspiracy nut with a lot of PhDs that tells everyone COVID is overplayed and vaccines don't work, they also learn and are entertained.
Rogan has a sizeable enough audience that the impact of his COVID misinformation can be included as one of the reasons why Americans have so much COVID vaccine hesitancy, and directly contributes to the elevated COVID death toll in the US.
Joe Rogan as a comedian is very different than Joe Rogan as a podcaster. He tries to be a very serious podcaster, and brings in serious people to debate serious subjects.
But he treats them all with the same respect and reverence. Which is a good attitude to take with people you meet 1on1, but may not be a dispassionate neutral position when you have a massive audience of tens of millions.
So when he brings in an astrophysicists and they teach the audience about the lifecycle of stars, it's educational and people both learn and are entertained. And the next guest is a conspiracy nut with a lot of PhDs that tells everyone COVID is overplayed and vaccines don't work, they also learn and are entertained.
Rogan has a sizeable enough audience that the impact of his COVID misinformation can be included as one of the reasons why Americans have so much COVID vaccine hesitancy, and directly contributes to the elevated COVID death toll in the US.