Fauci debunks Joe Rogan’s ‘incorrect’ argument young people don’t need COVID vaccines
American comedian, podcast host and UFC commentator Joe Rogan went against what most, if not all, infectious disease experts have been telling the public since the coronavirus pandemic began.
On his April 23 episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Rogan said if a healthy young person were to ask him if they should get vaccinated against COVID-19, he’ll suggest passing.
“I think you should get vaccinated if you’re vulnerable. ... People say, do you think it’s safe to get vaccinated? I’ve said, ‘yeah,’” Rogan told comedian Dave Smith, who shared his views on the pandemic.
“But if you’re like 21 years old, and you say to me, ‘should I get vaccinated?’ I’ll go no. Are you healthy? Are you a healthy person? Like, look, don’t do anything stupid, but you should take care of yourself,” Rogan said. “If you’re a healthy person, and you’re exercising all the time, and you’re young, and you’re eating well, like, I don’t think you need to worry about this.”
However, Dr. Anthony Fauci, long-time director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Joe Biden’s medical adviser, said “that’s incorrect.”
“You’re talking about yourself in a vacuum,” Fauci said of the podcast host on NBC’s “TODAY.” “You’re worried about yourself getting infected and the likelihood that you’re not going to get any symptoms. But you can get infected, and will get infected, if you put yourself at risk.”
Young, healthy people should “absolutely” get vaccinated, he added.
Young people may have ‘false sense of confidence’
As of April 27, 128 children under 4 years old, 315 kids between 5 and 17 years old, and 2,251 people between 18 and 29 years old have died of COVID-19 in the U.S., according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. (The data is on about 443,000 deaths in the nation — the total currently stands at about 573,000).
While percentages of deaths among young people are low compared to those for older adults, the possibilities of infection and death are still there, experts agree.
“We’re talking about something that is not statistically dangerous for children,” said Rogan, whose two kids’ experience with COVID-19 was “nothing.” “But yet people still want you to get your child vaccinated, which is crazy to me.”
Just this week, a first grader with no underlying conditions in Minnesota died from COVID-19 — the third child under 10 to die of the disease in the state — and another boy 10 or younger who did have medical conditions died from COVID-19 while on vacation in Hawaii with his fully vaccinated parents.
However, it’s not just about infection and death risks among the young and healthy, Fauci said. It’s also about “inadvertently and innocently” spreading the virus to older, more vulnerable people.
In some regions of the U.S., data show that increased infections among young adults are followed by increases in cases among older adults four to 15 days later, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine.
“Since young people are less likely to have severe cases of COVID-19, they may have a false sense of confidence regarding their safety,” Johns Hopkins experts wrote. “They may feel that mingling with others in large groups, attending parties, not wearing masks and ignoring community pandemic guidelines will not seriously endanger them.”
That’s what happened to Michael Lang, 18, of Illinois, when he arrived at his college campus last fall. After contracting COVID-19, Lang suffered cardiac arrest that put him in a coma, ABC News reported in November. He later died. His mother said he had no preexisting conditions and had never been to a hospital prior to his coronavirus diagnosis.
“Nobody’s immune to COVID, unless they’ve had it already,” Dr. Leora Horwitz, director of the Center for Healthcare Innovation and Delivery Science at NYU Langone, told USA Today. “It doesn’t matter how healthy you are, how young you are, how few diseases you have, how many marathons you’ve run — nobody’s immune.”
“You can’t be sure if you’re going to be one of those people who just happen to get very sick from this,” she added.
And kids matter, too, when it comes to herd immunity — when enough people have protection against COVID-19 that the virus can no longer spread easily between people.
Fauci said during a Senate hearing in March that “we don’t really know what that magical point of herd immunity is, but we do know that if we get the overwhelming population vaccinated, we’re going to be in good shape.” He added that “we ultimately would like to get and have to get children into that mix,” especially high school students who are capable of spreading the coronavirus at a higher rate than younger kids.
‘Still many unknowns’
Scientists are still learning about long COVID-19 among healthy people, as well — a prolonged state of disease that causes mild to severe symptoms such as fatigue or brain fog for months after infection has cleared.
ABC News contributor Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, speculated that young, healthy people may be coming down with severe COVID-19 because of a genetic predisposition for increased susceptibility or because of the amount of virus they are exposed to.
Other experts say young adults are vulnerable to serious COVID-19 because they tend to work in health care, food and essential services such as public transportation, as well as in high risk exposure areas such as bars, schools, malls and child care centers.
“We have to remember while sometimes we still think of this as an infection that disproportionately affects the elderly ... It can affect everybody. The virus doesn’t necessarily respect age boundaries,” Dr. David Priest, a Novant Health infectious diseases specialist, told North Carolina reporters in February, The Charlotte Observer reported.
“That’s been some of the mystery of the COVID pandemic in general — you have a very elderly person with a lot of different health problems that recovers, and then you can have someone younger who has no health problems who doesn’t.”
This story was originally published April 28, 2021 at 9:26 AM with the headline "Fauci debunks Joe Rogan’s ‘incorrect’ argument young people don’t need COVID vaccines."
