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A complete of 270 US medical doctors, scientists, healthcare professionals and professors have written an open letter to streaming firm Spotify, expressing concern about medical misinformation on The Joe Rogan Expertise podcast, listed because the platform’s most popular program.
The letter additionally asks the platform to “set up a transparent and public coverage to reasonable misinformation on its platform”.
It accuses controversial host Joe Rogan’s present of getting a “regarding historical past of broadcasting misinformation, notably relating to the Covid-19 pandemic”.
The letter was first reported by Rolling Stone, which quoted Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist at College of Illinois Chicago faculty of public well being, calling Rogan “a menace to public well being” for airing anti-vaccine ideology.
And, particularly, the letter calls out a extremely controversial episode of the podcast from final December that options Robert Malone, a virologist who was concerned within the mRNA vaccine know-how that led to a few of the main Covid-19 vaccines however has since been criticized for spreading vaccine misinformation.
The episode has been broadly criticized for selling baseless conspiracy theories.
“Dr Malone used the JRE platform to advertise quite a few baseless claims, together with a number of falsehoods about Covid-19 vaccines and an unfounded idea that societal leaders have ‘hypnotized’ the general public. Many of those statements have already been discredited,” the letter mentioned.
Within the episode, Malone espoused a number of baseless beliefs, together with “mass formation psychosis” being accountable for folks’s perception in vaccine efficacy, in addition to the false declare that hospitals are financially incentivized to falsely diagnose deaths as having been attributable to Covid-19.
Rogan mentioned on air: “There’s all these rumors that you’d hear about what a hospital will get paid per Covid dying and that the federal government provides them cash and that they’re incentivized”, to which Malone replied: “It’s not rumors” and continued with additional misinformation on the subject.
The specialists’ letter countered that: “Mass-misinformation occasions of this scale have terribly harmful ramifications.”
It continued: “As scientists, we face backlash and resistance as the general public grows to mistrust our analysis and experience. As educators and science communicators, we’re tasked with repairing the general public’s broken understanding of science and medication. As physicians, we bear the arduous weight of a pandemic that has stretched our medical methods to their limits and solely stands to be exacerbated by the anti-vaccination sentiment woven into this and different episodes of Rogan’s podcast.”
The letter additional asserts that Malone is “certainly one of two current JRE friends who has in contrast pandemic insurance policies to the Holocaust. These actions are usually not solely objectionable and offensive, but in addition medically and culturally harmful.”
Rogan, who has been described by the New York Instances as “one of the vital consumed media merchandise on the planet”, has legions of devoted followers however all through the pandemic has repeatedly spread deceptive and false claims.
The letter concluded: “This isn’t solely a scientific or medical concern; it’s a sociological problem of devastating proportions and Spotify is accountable for permitting this exercise to thrive on its platform.”
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