Episode 1693: Evan Hafer
Introduction
Episode 1693 of the Joe Rogan Experience, featuring Evan Hafer — founder and CEO of Black Rifle Coffee Company and former Green Beret — aired on August 6, 2021. While portions of the episode covered legitimate topics such as Hafer’s military service, the founding of his coffee company, and right-wing cancel culture targeting his brand after a New York Times article, the episode is notable for containing significant COVID-19 vaccine misinformation driven primarily by Rogan himself.
During the episode, Rogan made sweeping false claims about vaccine efficacy, promoted the misleading “leaky vaccine” narrative by misrepresenting a 2015 scientific study, compared vaccine passports to dictatorship, and falsely characterized New York City’s public health requirements as authoritarian overreach. Clips from this episode went viral on TikTok before being removed for medical misinformation. This episode contributed to a broader pattern identified by Media Matters, which documented over 350 hours of JRE content containing COVID-19 misinformation, right-wing myths, and harmful rhetoric throughout 2021.
The Guest’s Background
Evan Hafer served twenty years in the U.S. Army, including fifteen years in special forces as a Green Beret with the 19th Special Forces Group, deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. He also reportedly worked for the CIA. After his military career, Hafer founded Black Rifle Coffee Company in December 2014, which grew into a publicly traded veteran-owned coffee brand. He attended the University of Idaho and is also a host of the Free Range America podcast.
Hafer’s expertise is in military service, entrepreneurship, and the coffee industry. He has no credentials in epidemiology, virology, immunology, or public health — fields central to many of the claims discussed during the episode.
Key False and Misleading Claims
Claim: Vaccine Passports Are “One Step Closer to Dictatorship”
Rogan told Hafer that “the problem with applauding vaccine passports” is that politicians “are not going to give that power up.” He stated: “You’re moving one step closer to dictatorship.” He argued that “as soon as you give politicians power — any kind of power that didn’t exist previously — historically they don’t relinquish that power. They find new reasons to use it.”
Fact-Check: This claim proved empirically false. Every major vaccine passport program in the United States was temporary and was rescinded as pandemic conditions improved:
- New York State lifted its statewide indoor mask-or-vaccine requirement on February 10, 2022, with Governor Hochul explicitly describing it as “a temporary measure”
- New York City lifted its indoor vaccination mandate for businesses, dining, and events on March 7, 2022
- NYC ended its private employer vaccine mandate on November 1, 2022
- NYC ended its employee vaccine mandate in February 2023
Far from leading to dictatorship, these public health measures followed standard emergency powers protocols with defined endpoints, exactly as constitutional law experts predicted they would.
Sources: NBC News - New York City to lift vaccination mandate; Cooley - NYC to End Private Employer COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate; Governor Hochul Winter Toolkit Announcement
Claim: COVID-19 Vaccines Don’t Prevent Disease
Rogan stated: “All you hear is, ‘Take this vaccine that doesn’t even prevent you from getting the disease’ or you can’t go … wherever the f—k you wanna go.”
Fact-Check: This claim was misleading. At the time of the episode (August 2021), the COVID-19 vaccines had been demonstrated in large clinical trials and real-world data to be highly effective at preventing symptomatic disease, hospitalization, and death. While breakthrough infections did occur — as with virtually all vaccines — the vaccines significantly reduced the risk and severity of illness. The CDC reported that unvaccinated individuals were far more likely to be hospitalized or die from COVID-19 than vaccinated individuals.
Characterizing vaccines as ineffective because they don’t provide 100% sterilizing immunity reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how vaccines work. No vaccine in history has provided absolute prevention of infection; rather, vaccines reduce disease severity, transmission, and mortality.
Source: NPR - What the Joe Rogan podcast controversy says about the online misinformation ecosystem
Claim: Leaky Vaccines Create More Dangerous Variants
Rogan cited a 2015 study about Marek’s disease in chickens to argue that COVID-19 vaccines could be creating more dangerous variants of the virus — the so-called “leaky vaccine” theory.
Fact-Check: The author of the 2015 study, Penn State biologist Dr. Andrew Read, publicly stated he was “terrified” that his research was being misinterpreted to argue against COVID-19 vaccination. Read explicitly clarified that his findings about Marek’s disease in chickens — a herpesvirus with fundamentally different biology from SARS-CoV-2 — could not be directly applied to COVID-19 vaccines.
Key distinctions Read and other scientists emphasized:
- Marek’s disease virus is a herpesvirus that establishes lifelong infection, unlike SARS-CoV-2
- The chicken study involved a very specific set of circumstances not analogous to the COVID-19 pandemic
- Read’s own conclusion was that the solution to leaky vaccines is better vaccines, not no vaccines
- The study actually supports vaccination as the appropriate response
This misrepresentation of scientific research to promote vaccine hesitancy is a classic misinformation tactic: citing a real study while stripping it of essential context and applying it to an entirely different situation.
Sources: KARE 11 - Author of 2015 vaccine study ‘terrified’ his work is being misinterpreted; Complex - Scientist Slams Joe Rogan for Getting His Vaccine Study Wrong; BOOM - Joe Rogan Misinterprets Study To Claim Vaccinated People Create Variants
Claim: NYC Vaccine Requirements Were Discriminatory Against Minorities
Rogan and Hafer argued that New York City’s vaccine requirements discriminated against minorities because of lower vaccination rates among Black and Hispanic communities at the time.
Fact-Check: While vaccination disparities along racial lines were a real and documented public health concern, the solution advocated by public health experts was targeted outreach and improved access to vaccines in underserved communities — not the elimination of public health measures. The argument that vaccine requirements should be abandoned because of existing racial disparities in vaccine access inverts the logic of health equity. Public health officials and civil rights organizations worked to address these disparities through community-based vaccination sites, mobile vaccination units, and culturally competent outreach — approaches that were effective in narrowing the vaccination gap.
Using racial disparities as an argument against public health measures — rather than as an argument for improving equitable access — co-opts legitimate equity concerns to undermine pandemic response.
Joe Rogan’s Role
This episode is notable because the misinformation came primarily from Joe Rogan himself rather than from his guest. Rogan drove the vaccine passport and COVID-19 vaccine discussion, making claims about dictatorship, vaccine inefficacy, and leaky vaccines with Hafer largely listening and agreeing.
Rogan as the primary source of misinformation: Unlike episodes where Rogan fails to challenge a guest’s false claims, here Rogan was the one initiating and promoting the misinformation. He presented his opinions on vaccines and vaccine passports as informed analysis despite having no medical, scientific, or public health credentials.
Using his platform to spread fear: Rogan’s comparison of temporary public health measures to dictatorship was not a nuanced discussion of civil liberties — it was fearmongering. He stated as certainty what proved to be demonstrably false: that politicians would never relinquish vaccine passport authority.
Misrepresenting scientific research: Rogan’s citation of the 2015 Marek’s disease study demonstrated a pattern of cherry-picking scientific papers without understanding them and presenting them in misleading ways to support a pre-existing anti-vaccine narrative. The study’s own author publicly condemned this misuse.
Announcing Madison Square Garden cancellation: Rogan used the episode to announce he would refund tickets for his Madison Square Garden show rather than require fans to be vaccinated, further signaling to his audience that vaccine requirements were illegitimate and worth resisting rather than reasonable public health measures.
Real-World Harm
This episode aired during a critical period of the COVID-19 pandemic when the Delta variant was surging. At the time, the Joe Rogan Experience reached an estimated 11 million listeners per episode, making it the most popular podcast on Spotify in 2021.
- Viral spread of clips: Clips from this episode went viral on TikTok before being removed for violating medical misinformation policies
- Contributing to vaccine hesitancy: The episode aired during a period when vaccine uptake was stalling in the United States, and influential voices discouraging vaccination contributed to preventable hospitalizations and deaths
- Part of a documented pattern: Media Matters’ year-end review documented this episode as part of a systematic pattern of COVID-19 misinformation on the JRE throughout 2021
- Medical community response: This episode was among those cited when over 1,000 doctors, scientists, and health professionals signed an open letter calling Rogan’s podcast “a sociological issue of devastating proportions” and demanding Spotify take action
Sources: Media Matters - Joe Rogan Wrapped: A year of COVID-19 misinformation; Rolling Stone - Doctors Demand Spotify Puts an End to Covid Lies on ‘Joe Rogan Experience’; The Hill - Joe Rogan: Vaccine passports ‘one step closer’ to dictatorship
What Was Good About This Episode
In the interest of balance, portions of this episode were unproblematic and even interesting:
- Cancel culture from the right: Rogan and Hafer had a thoughtful discussion about how Black Rifle Coffee Company was targeted by right-wing cancel culture after a New York Times article, with Rogan noting “it was so weird to see cancel culture come from the right.” This was a legitimate media criticism discussion.
- Military service stories: Hafer shared genuine experiences from his Special Forces career, which is well within his area of expertise.
- Entrepreneurship discussion: The conversation about building Black Rifle Coffee Company, including Hafer’s $36,000 in personal debt and the company’s growth, was a standard business interview.
- Veteran support: Discussion of the company’s donations to veteran nonprofits and commitment to hiring veterans was positive content.
Conclusion
Episode 1693 illustrates a recurring problem with the Joe Rogan Experience during the COVID-19 pandemic: even when the guest is not a misinformation vector, Rogan himself frequently introduced and amplified false claims about vaccines and public health measures. With an audience of 11 million listeners per episode, Rogan’s claims that vaccine passports would lead to dictatorship (they did not), that COVID-19 vaccines did not prevent disease (they significantly reduced illness and death), and that vaccines might create more dangerous variants (a misrepresentation condemned by the study’s own author) contributed to vaccine hesitancy during a deadly pandemic wave.