Fauci urges young people to ignore Joe Rogan's 'incorrect' vaccine advice

The nation's top infectious disease expert is imploring young people to take advice on COVID-19 vaccination from health officials, not podcast host Joe Rogan.

Rogan recently drew criticism for saying on his popular podcast that young healthy people shouldn't get vaccinated against COVID-19 because they're at lower risk. On Wednesday's Today, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, shot that idea down.

"That's incorrect," Fauci said. "The reason why is you're talking about yourself in a vacuum."

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Fauci explained that young healthy people "can get infected and will get infected if you put yourself at risk" and then can spread the virus to others, who might be at higher risk and "really could have a problem with a severe outcome."

So "the reason why you've got to be careful and get vaccinated," Fauci told Today, is that by getting COVID-19, "[you] can do damage to somebody else even if [you] have no symptoms at all," and to follow Rogan's advice would be to "only worry about yourself and not society." Fauci added that despite what Rogan said, healthy young people should "absolutely" get vaccinated.

Rogan's show The Joe Rogan Experience is a Spotify exclusive, and in 2020, it was the platform's most popular podcast. Amid the controversy over his remarks, The Verge reported that Spotify "reviewed this Rogan episode and left it live because he doesn't come off as outwardly anti-vaccine." Brendan Morrow