Look, if you’re taking medical advice from Joe Rogan, you’re already playing a risky game. But even by his usual standards, his recent episode with anti-vaccine advocate Dr. Suzanne Humphries took things to a whole new level of absurdity.
Humphries is known for her 2013 self-published book Dissolving Illusions, where she claims—despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary—that vaccines had nothing to do with the decline of once-devastating diseases like polio. During her appearance on Rogan’s show, she doubled down on this idea, insisting there’s no connection between polio vaccine rollouts and the massive drop in polio cases worldwide.
Her theory? It wasn’t vaccines that stopped people from getting sick—it was just better hygiene and fewer environmental toxins. But she doesn’t stop there. Humphries also claimed that tuberculosis was somehow a side effect of the smallpox vaccine, that COVID-19 contained “snake toxin proteins,” and that polio wasn’t actually a virus but a result of exposure to the now-banned pesticide DDT. If that all sounds like a wild conspiracy rabbit hole, that’s because it is. And honestly, I hate to state the obvious, but none of this is backed by science—at all.
Now, once upon a time, Rogan might have at least questioned this nonsense. But lately? Not so much. Instead of challenging Humphries, he just nodded along and even admitted that he used to believe vaccines were one of the greatest achievements in medical history—until he read her book. Yep, that was all it took. He even went on X (formerly Twitter) to praise her.
And if you need a sense of how far off the deep end this conversation went, even Elon Musk—who’s not exactly known for being a strong voice of reason—gently pushed back on Rogan’s sudden embrace of anti-vax rhetoric.
At this point, we could throw out mountains of data proving that vaccines have saved millions of lives, particularly the polio vaccine, which is one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time. But let’s be real—hardcore anti-vaxxers aren’t interested in facts. They’ve made up their minds, and no amount of logic or history is going to change that.
The real tragedy? They’re not the ones who will suffer the consequences of their misinformation. It’s their children. Kids who will grow up vulnerable to preventable diseases, some of whom will live with the lifelong effects of polio, all because their parents refused to let them get a simple, life-saving shot. And that’s the heartbreaking reality of this whole mess.
