Joe Rogan and Sanjay Gupta MMA fight!

Rogan and Gupta put on the sparring gear, got into the ring, and talked it out for three hours. Joe still won.

Photo of CNN's credibility after Rogan and Gupta duked it out. // photo by US Department of Defense

Sanjay Gupta, the Chief Medical Correspondent on CNN, went on Rogan to discuss the pandemic. Contrary to the title, it was mostly cordial. It started off with talk about pot and psychedelics, which is just so Rogan.

A lot of conservatives and red-pilled leftists completely trashed Gupta following the interview. I understand the tendency to do so, but I'll try not to too much since I respect Gupta for having the balls to come onto Rogan's show after CNN flat out lied about Rogan with glee when he contracted COVID.

It started off mostly even keeled. Joe Rogan pointed out that vaccinated people still transmit the vaccine and Gupta stated that vaccinated people are 8 times less likely to contract the vaccine in the first place. This is one area I wish many of the libertarian spokespeople would get better in arguing. Some have argued that vaccine mandates are not about protecting others, but just about protecting oneself. If you just focus on the spread after contracting COVID, then yes, that is true. But vaccinated people are less likely to contract COVID in the first place and likely gain a lower viral load, not becoming a vector at all. Still, there are arguments that look at real world examples such as Israel, a highly vaccinated country, doing poorly that potentially indicate the vaccine isn't as effective at preventing outbreaks as previously thought, but that's the point that should be focused on. It may not be as effective a tool to fight the epidemic as popular opinion confers, but it doesn't mean it's not at all effective as a tool to fight the epidemic.

Unfortunately for Gupta, he doesn't seem to lead at all for the rest of the 3 hour conversation. Much of the rest was Joe Rogan just scoring point after point on Gupta in Rogan's normally level and friendly demeanor, despite Rogan's lack of credentials compared to Gupta. 

The conversation went pretty quickly to myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart. Rogan talked about vaccine mandates forcing younger boys to get the vaccine and how this is not a good thing because myocarditis from the vaccine has been linked to a hospitalization rate far higher than the demographic group would get hospitalized due to COVID.

After the second time it was brought up with Gupta seeming ignorant of the study, Joe looked a bit frustrated that Gupta was not keeping up and that he, the head medical consultant for CNN, was not aware of this study.

He had Jamie, his producer, pull up the study, or at least, the article about it, for them to look over. Gupta continually tried making excuses for the findings, though his objections were already covered in the article. The study showed that healthy boys 12-15 years of age are four to six times more likely to be diagnosed with myocarditis due to the vaccine, with 86% requiring hospitalization, than to be hospitalized due to COVID. 

To this, Gupta's first defense was that you need to compare "apples to apples", saying that you need to compare myocarditis from the vaccine to myocarditis from COVID. 

Uh. Why?

We're not trying to compare myocarditis from the vaccine to myocarditis from COVID. We're trying to get at which is riskier for certain age groups.

It says right in the article that the hospitalization from the vaccines far outstrips hospitalization from COVID, for any reason. Going by the metric of hospitalization, which has been a consistent push by the flatten the curve crowd, who cares if someone's son is hospitalized because of myocarditis or COVID? The only reason is that one reason for hospitalization is more serious than the other. I don't know the answer to that, but Gupta never made that argument. Instead, all he had to offer were, quite honestly, embarrassing responses that were completely logically inconsistent. It seemed to be pretty clear that he was grasping for straws to defend the vaccine. It's completely fine to be pro-vaccine and at the same time admit that there are risks to it. This level of desperation to try to disprove the article just made it seem like he, a medical doctor, didn't know his material better than a comedian/MMA announcer/podcaster. It's also not like he didn't prepare for this question. He brought his own statistics and study pertaining to myocarditis.

The other highlight of the interview involved Joe Rogan pushing Sanjay Gupta about Gupta's employer, CNN, continually lying about Rogan taking "horse dewormer", ivermectin. 

In a video a while before the interview, Rogan told his fans that he had contracted COVID, and listed off several medications including monoclonal antibodies, prednisone, an IV drip, and several others along with ivermectin. CNN solely focused on ivermectin, framing it solely as veterinary medicine.

Ivermectin is used extensively for people as an anti-parasitic drug, with the inventor earning a Nobel Prize for its use in humans, saving over 100,000 lives every year just in Africa. CNN made it sound like Rogan contacted his psilocybin dealer and bought a bag of mushrooms and a bottle of veterinary ivermectin. Of course that's not the case. Rogan's doctor prescribed it to him.

As Michael Malice stated a few episodes later, CNN might as well report that a father is feeding his child cat food, when he was just feeding his child regular cow's milk he bought at Whole Foods. 

While CNN was perhaps the worst offenders, they certainly weren't alone, with crack outfits like the New York Times getting in on the action, framing the story the same way, an apparent effort to libelously defame a competitor refusing to fall in line with the corporate media agenda. A competitor, I might add, that is running circles around both the Times and CNN.

Though Gupta resisted for a long while, eventually admitted that CNN should not have said Rogan was taking horse dewormer. 

Ultimately, Gupta's primary stated reason for going on the show, to try to convince him, and by extension, his listeners, to take the vaccine, fell sharply flat. He pushed Rogan to get the vaccine several times which Rogan emphatically kept saying no, stating that he has better immunity than Gupta does, weaponizing Gupta's earlier statement that he feels good about being protected from the virus due to the vaccine. Oddly, Gupta kept talking about how we don't know how long natural immunity will last, as his primary defense. He actually said toward the end of the interview that Rogan's natural immunity is probably 6 to 23 times better than the vaccine, but the "only thing" was that he doesn't know how long natural immunity lasts. But we do know how long natural immunity will last so far. Longer than the vaccines last.

Vaccine effectiveness tends to fall sharply after six months, dropping from 90% effectiveness at injection to around 50% for Pfizer and 64% for Moderna. Natural immunity, on the other hand, continues to deliver strong protection, declining only slightly six to eight months after infection.

All in all, it was a pretty bizarre sight to watch Joe Rogan, a comedian, MMA announcer, and former Fear Factor host, seem to know more about the non-technical aspects of COVID-19 vaccines than Sanjay Gupta, a surgeon and chief medical correspondent for CNN.

After the appearance, Gupta appeared on Don Lemon's show where Lemon furiously misunderstood Joe's entire point, presumably for damage control. But since he doubled down, I suppose he wouldn't mind me saying that he drank horse liquid and ate horse food for sustenance. Hey, I'm not lying. Horses drink water and eat carrots. Gupta, unfortunately, did not push back on the point, after saying on Rogan's show that they "shouldn't have said that". Rogan later defended Gupta when Michael Malice was on his show, saying that Gupta is a slightly socially awkward medical geek and on a show with a TV personality like Don Lemon, someone like Lemon would just take over the narrative. 

Gupta's not dumb. I just think he's been hanging around CNN people too long and it has influenced his objectivity on the matter by being inside that bubble, rendering him useless when arguing against people with other views because he simply has not heard them.

No wonder Joe Rogan by himself has more views than all of CNN put together. Although Rogan is wrong about a lot of things, Rogan has never claimed to be the source of definitive truth and you never get the impression that he is blatantly lying to you. In every show, he shows genuine reflection and consideration of what his guests bring to the table. 

Toward the end of the interview, Gupta said on the pandemic: "This is exactly how I feel about this whole issue about the pandemic. You just contextualized it for me: I don't know."

Yeah, that's the point. You don't know. Neither does anybody else. That's also the point the so-called "anti-vaxxers" make. You don't know the long-term safety of the vaccines versus COVID. So don't force people to vaccinate. Suggest it. Urge people to get it. Don't use the police state to force people to get it.

(Update 11/18/2021) I just heard an excellent point that Michael Malice repeated from someone. Isn't it interesting, that ivermectin has veterinary uses, not just for horses but for a whole range of animals, and yet every single false report focused on "horse dewormer"? If these were truly independent sources, all these media outlets would claim different veterinary use like "cat dewormer" or "dog paste". That all these reporters went for the exact same lie just shows the hivemind that they have. Even high school computer science cheaters know that when they copy code from others, to at least change the variable names.