Around 270 scientists and doctors have signed an open letter to the audio streaming service Spotify asking to take action over one of Joe Rogan’s podcasts which they believe spreads misinformation. They feel that the podcast’s topic is concerning especially during current times.
The podcast episode they were talking about is the episode of ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ featuring guest Dr. Robert Malone. In that episode Dr, Malone talked about his opinion about the pandemic and expressed a belief that this is all planned.
“There was an intentional, very comprehensive suppression of early treatment in order to promote fear, suffering, isolation, hospitalization, and death. It seemed to be completely organized and intentional in order to create acceptance for and then promote mass vaccination,” said the 63-year-old doctor.
The scientists disagree with this claim. This prompted them to send a letter to Spotify. Spotify is the exclusive distributor of Joe Rogan Experience thanks to a record breaking deal signed in May of 2020 and reportedly worth around $100 million per year.
They want Spotify to take action and mitigate any misinformation contained within the world’s largest podcast.
Here’s what they write in the letter:
“Mass-misinformation events of this scale have extraordinarily dangerous ramifications As scientists, we face backlash and resistance as the public grows to distrust our research and expertise. As educators and science communicators, we are tasked with repairing the public’s damaged understanding of science and medicine. As physicians, we bear the arduous weight of a pandemic that has stretched our medical systems to their limits and only stands to be exacerbated by the anti-vaccination sentiment woven into this and other episodes of Rogan’s podcast.”
Robert Wallace Malone is an American virologist and immunologist who was recently banned from Twitter for violating the social media platform’s COVID-19 misinformation policy. YouTube already took action ahead of Spotify and deleted that podcast video.
As of right now the episode is still up on Spotify.