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‘Joe Rogan Is Getting This Completely Wrong,’ Says The Scientist Who Conducted The Vaccine Study


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Joe Rogan’s public misrepresentation of a 2015 vaccine study has gone viral. His misunderstanding of the study leads Rogan to wrongly conclude that vaccinating people against COVID-19 will increase the chances of some hyper-virulent mutation. You can watch the video below. But before you do, the lead scientist and author of the study who spent 10 years conducting this research has something to say. Because he’s horrified.


“Joe Rogan is getting this completely wrong,” says Andrew Read, professor of biology and entomology at Pennsylvania State. “He's taking very careful work about evolutionary scenarios of the future, and from that, erroneously concluding that people should not be vaccinated now.”

Rogan quotes a line from the paper’s abstract out of context: “Vaccines that keep hosts alive but still allow transmission could thus allow very virulent strains to circulate in a population.”


Read responds: “We're talking a very different virus and very different vaccines. The details in biology really matter a lot. The chicken vaccines we worked with, the first-generation vaccine, definitely reduced disease, severity and death.” But unlike the COVID mRNA vaccines, the chicken vaccine “didn't stop transmission at all.” And this is one of the key differences between what was being studied in Read’s paper and our current situation with the global pandemic. “Those [vaccinated] chickens just kept churning out the virus for weeks and weeks and weeks.” Again, this is a key difference. “It’s a very different virus from SARS-2. A key issue here is transmissibility.”

More transmission increases the likelihood of mutation. Thankfully, COVID-19 Vaccines reduce transmission and reduce opportunity for mutation.

“Think about what's happening with evolution,” offers Read. “Mutations can occur anytime the [virus] replicates. So the more replication, the more variants are generated. At the moment, the vast majority of the replication is happening in unvaccinated people. You can tell that because the majority of cases in the hospital are unvaccinated individuals. That is where the evolutionary action is happening at the moment.”


“Evolution, at the moment, is all happening in the unvaccinated. That's where the majority of cases are. That's the majority of transmission. Every time a virus replicates, it can mutate. So the evolution is, right now, occurring in the body of people who are not vaccinated. Rogan is completely wrong trying to deduce anything else.”


The Delta variant emerged from populations who lacked access to vaccines.

“Delta came in India where there was crazy amounts of transmission, not amongst the vaccinated, but amongst the unvaccinated. That's what we need to stop. The unvaccinated need to either get vaccinated or socially distance, mask up, stopping transmission. That's the trick here.”

Read agrees with the vast majority of health experts that vaccines are our best weapon against COVID-19. He adds, “the best way to slow evolution is to stop the virus. It's as simple as that. No replication, no evolution.”

Could a variant evolve in vaccinated people?

Even though variants are more likely to emerge in unvaccinated people, a variant from a vaccinated person is still possible. Either way, the answer is vaccines. If a new variant emerges, “we can get second-generation vaccines,” Read accurately points out, as pharmaceutical companies are already developing boosters and second-generation vaccines. “There’s tons of things we can do in the future. Right now we need to vaccinate as much as possible.” He pauses, “I would be delighted, I have to say, to get to the point where the vast majority of the evolution that's going on is in vaccinated people because there's only vaccinated people around. If we get to that position in a year or something, we can keep a very good eye out on what evolution is happening. But right now the problem is the unvaccinated.”

Is there any reason to avoid vaccination for fear it could produce a vaccine-resistant mutation?

“It's a bizarre line of logic that some hypothetical possibility down the line would hold back lifesaving medicine now. Especially when the vaccines themselves cut down on the amount of virus circulating in the population.”

Are mRNA vaccines ‘leaky’?

Rogan seems to think that mRNA vaccines are quite leaky because of breakthrough infections. Read points out that no vaccine is 100% effective. Although we still need more data to determine how leaky they are, the rate of breakthrough infections in vaccinated people remains statistically low enough to consider the mRNA vaccines highly effective at preventing infection.

“We don't know at the moment how leaky these things are. It's conceivable that they are actually close to non-leaky. I'm amazed how good these mRNA vaccines are. They're incredibly good.”

Read’s very concerned that misrepresentation of his research is causing vaccine hesitancy.

“The study was tweeted a thousand times last night, according to our metrics,” says Read. “I had a physician in England reach out to me on Friday asking me to [clarify] because his patients are using my paper to argue against vaccination.” Calling into question the effectiveness of vaccines was never the intention of his 2015 study. “I am genuinely shocked. I've been doing work for 20 years now on how vaccines might drive the evolution of viruses. There's nothing in any of that 20 years work that argues in favor of withholding lifesaving vaccines. It's just shocking to me.” He adds, “There are 600,000 Americans dead so far. The vast majority of those deaths are vaccine-preventable. There's not a single scenario that would argue in favor of not using [vaccines] to save the next hundred thousand. Not one scenario.”

And another thing: vaccines even worked on the chickens Read was studying.

“The [poultry] industry was being hammered by that virus. They made the discovery in the 1960s of a way to vaccinate that saved the industry a fortune,” says Read. “[It] kept many, many chickens from dying horrible deaths. It was absolutely terrific. And then after 10 years, evolution caused some problems which required a different vaccine, which was developed very quickly. And that held for another 10 years. And then the third generation of vaccine is why your chicken nuggets are still cheap. It's worked now for 30 or 40 years. And it stopped the virus evolution. Almost certainly the reason it stopped the virus evolution is because it stopped transmission. So even in the chicken case, there's no argument at all why you'd want to be an unvaccinated chicken.”

Is Read vaccinated?

“Yes. My partner, my kids, everybody, as soon as we could. Yeah.”

Is Read being pressured to conform to mainstream Science?

“No!” He throws his head back, laughing. Then his tone shifts…

The price we pay from misinformation

“What really gets me, apart from the fact that I do think this is a public health threat–[that] people who are arguing against vaccinations are doing other people great harm. Apart from that, I really get concerned that this sort of disinformation, or this inappropriate interpretation means that it's very difficult for us scientists to actually ask serious questions about how evolution might proceed and get a good look at it because we get this concern that our work will be taken and twisted.”

“Those of us who are very interested in the way the evolution might go, have trouble doing the work, or at least talking about it, because of the concern that people like Joe Rogan will twist it and use it in the wrong way.”

“I think we have a moral obligation as scientists and public health people to look at the evolution going forward, keep a good eye on it, make sure that if anything is happening that we don't like, that we rapidly develop vaccines to pick it up and sort it out. I can't see any scenario where we can't address possible evolutionary consequences by tweaking the vaccines or [by developing] next-generation vaccines. Vaccines are the way out of this.”

You can read the study here. And watch the Joe Rogan clip below.



https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrea...-conducted-the-vaccine-study/?sh=3e3d428a7bd1

 

Why is that bullshit?

 

Okay, for starters. But people who are vaccinated are sick for a less amount of time. So for enders, non vaccinated people are contagious for a longer amount of time.

Also the Venn diagram of people who won't take the vaccine and who won't wear a mask is pretty much a circle. So even if the viral load is the same, the "sharing" of that viral load with others is going to be greater with people who aren't vaccinated and refuse to wear masks.

So you have, not all but a lot of, unvaccinated people who are sick longer and not masked so they're spreading the virus for a longer amount of time to a greater number of people.