I’m just asking questions.” Rogan has also platformed many discredited physicians and academics who have spoken out against the vaccine, such as Dr. “I don’t know if this guy is right or wrong. “This doctor was saying ivermectin is 99 percent effective intreating Covid, but you don’t hear about it because you can’t fund vaccines when it’s an effective treatment,” he said on the same April episode of his podcast, as Rolling Stone previously reported. Rogan has also promoted taking ivermectin to treat Covid-19 symptoms, despite the fact that there is limited evidence to support ivermectin’s efficacy as a Covid-19 treatment and that ingesting it can lead to such side effects as dizziness and uncontrolled vomiting. In an Apepisode, for instance, Rogan actively discouraged young people from getting the vaccine, saying in a conversation with comedian Dave Smith, “if you’re like 21 years old, and you say to me, ‘Should I get vaccinated?’ I’ll go no.'” The Malone segment is far from the first time Rogan has been accused of platforming misinformation on his podcast. Ben Rein, a neuroscientist at Stanford University who co-authored the letter with Rivera and other doctors and educators. “P eople who don’t have the scientific or medical background to recognize the things he’s saying are not true and are unable to distinguish fact from fiction are going to believe what saying, and this is the biggest podcast in the world.

The letter was initially appended with a lengthy fact-check of all of the claims presented in Malone’s interview with Rogan, from the “mass formation psychosis” supposition to Malone’s claim that the Biden administration is suppressing evidence supporting the efficacy of ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment. “Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform, though the company presently has no misinformation policy.” “With an estimated 11 million listeners per episode, JRE, which is hosted exclusively on Spotify, is the world’s largest podcast and has tremendous influence,” the letter reads. Rivera is one of 270 doctors, physicians, and science educators who signed an open letter calling on Spotify, which obtained exclusively streaming rights to the Joe Rogan Experience in a r eported $100 million deal, to take action against misinformation on the platform, such as that contained in the interview with Malone. “When I saw they were falling victim to this, I spoke to some colleagues and we said something has to be done at this point,” she says. Yet Rivera was even more horrified to discover that people in her life, whom she considered to be “quite wise and discerning,” were hoodwinked by Malone’s patina of academic credibility, considering his views on the vaccine legitimate. The episode featuring Malone went viral, and was shared widely in right-wing media circles as well as on Facebook, where the link on Spotify has been shared nearly 25,000 times, according to CrowdTangle data.

When she watched the interview, she was horrified to see that he espoused various conspiratorial and baseless beliefs, from the idea that “mass formation psychosis” is responsible for people believing in the efficacy of vaccines to the claim popular among anti-vaxxers that hospitals are financially incentivized to falsely diagnose Covid-19 deaths. She knew that Malone had been banned from Twitter for promoting Covid-19 misinformation, and that he had been making the rounds in conservative media circles undermining the efficacy of the vaccine. Rivera was familiar with Rogan, as well as Malone.

Robert Malone, a virologist who touts himself as one of the architects of mRNA technology. A few weeks ago, her followers started sending her a link to an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, the most popular podcast in the world. As an infectious disease epidemiologist and research fellow at Boston’s Children’s Hospital who debunks health misinformation on Instagram -where she has more than 380,000 followers - Jessica Malaty Rivera regularly receives tips from her followers about viral content to debunk.

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