Prince Harry has become the latest public figure to criticize podcaster Joe Rogan for his controversial remarks regarding the Covid vaccine. The Duke of Sussex broached the topic during a recent conversation with Dax Shepard and Monica Padman on their podcast Armchair Expert, and said that Rogan should “just stay out of it” when it comes to making any kind of comment which could be interpreted as advising against getting vaccinated.
The Joe Rogan Experience is one of the most popular podcasts on streaming service Spotify, with whom Rogan has a $100 million contract and one of the single largest audience of listeners in the world. At a time when as much as 85 percent of the population needs to be vaccinated in order to even come close to achieving herd immunity, Prince Harry expressed concern that Rogan casually claiming he personally wouldn’t take the vaccine will influence his many fans.
“With a platform comes responsibility,” he said, referring to the “misinformation endemic” that has surrounded coronavirus for the last year. “You’ve got to be careful about what comes out of your mouth,” he added.
Rogan originally heavily implied that people who are young and healthy do not need to take the vaccine, but clarified his comments after facing a backlash. “I’m not a respected source of information—even for me,” he said. Such a simple caveat might be interpreted as disingenuous, given that for many of his podcast’s passionate listeners, he may in fact be one of their sole sources of commentary on current affairs.
Prince Harry’s criticism of Rogan comes after chief presidential medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci publicly described his stance on the vaccine as “incorrect” and pointed out that individuals who choose not to get vaccinated still pose a potential risk to other people.
“Even if you don’t have any symptoms, you’re propagating the outbreak because it is likely that you — even if you have no symptoms — that you may inadvertently and innocently then infect someone else who might infect someone who really could have a problem with a severe outcome,” he said. “If you want to only worry about yourself and not society, then that’s OK. But if you’re saying to yourself, ‘Even if I get infected, I could do damage to somebody else, even if I have no symptoms at all’… That’s the reason why you’ve got to be careful and get vaccinated.”
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