Episode 1717: Alex Berenson | The Brogan Report

Introduction

Episode 1717 of the Joe Rogan Experience, featuring journalist and author Alex Berenson, aired on October 12, 2021. Berenson — dubbed “the pandemic’s wrongest man” by The Atlantic — used this appearance to promote a range of false and misleading claims about COVID-19 vaccines, misrepresent UK government health data, question the scientific basis for vaccine mandates, and promote skepticism of mainstream media coverage of COVID treatments like ivermectin.

Berenson is a former New York Times reporter and fiction author who has no medical, epidemiological, or public health training. Despite this lack of scientific credentials, this episode provided him a platform to present cherry-picked and misinterpreted data to an audience of millions, contributing to vaccine hesitancy during a critical period of the pandemic when the Delta variant was causing tens of thousands of deaths among the unvaccinated.

This episode was subsequently fact-checked by multiple organizations including Full Fact (the UK’s independent fact-checking organization), PolitiFact, and Health Feedback, all of which found significant false and misleading claims.

The Guest’s Background and Credentials

Alex Berenson graduated from Yale University in 1994 with degrees in history and economics. He worked as a business reporter at The Denver Post and later at TheStreet before joining The New York Times as a business investigative reporter in 1999, where he covered the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. He left the Times in 2010 to write fiction full-time, producing a series of successful spy novels.

Berenson has no formal training in medicine, epidemiology, virology, immunology, or public health. His pivot to COVID commentary began in 2020, and his claims became increasingly at odds with established scientific evidence. On August 28, 2021 — just six weeks before this episode aired — Twitter permanently suspended Berenson’s account for repeated violations of its COVID-19 misinformation policy.

Source: Alex Berenson - Wikipedia

Key False and Misleading Claims

Claim: Vaccinated People Over 40 Are More Likely to Catch COVID-19 Than Unvaccinated People

Berenson directed Rogan to Public Health England (PHE) vaccine surveillance data covering weeks 34-37 (up to September 19, 2021) and pointed to a chart on page 13 showing COVID case numbers by age and vaccination status. He claimed this proved that vaccinated people over 40 were more likely to become infected.

Fact-Check: This claim is false and is based on a fundamental misuse of the PHE data. Full Fact, the UK’s independent fact-checking organization, published a detailed rebuttal explaining two critical problems with Berenson’s interpretation:

Flawed population denominators: PHE used population estimates from the National Immunisation Management System (NIMS), which are higher for older age groups than Office for National Statistics estimates. This makes COVID case rates among unvaccinated people appear artificially low.
Behavioral confounders ignored: Vaccinated and unvaccinated people differ in ways that affect their exposure to COVID. Vaccinated people may take more social risks, which could increase their apparent infection rate even while the vaccine substantially protects them.

Berenson also failed to mention the explicit footnote on the same page of the PHE report, which warned: “Interpretation of the case rates in vaccinated and unvaccinated population is particularly susceptible to changes in denominators and should be interpreted with extra caution.”

Source: Full Fact - The Joe Rogan podcast misused English Covid-19 data

Claim: Over 70% of COVID-19 Deaths in England Were Among the Fully Vaccinated

Berenson stated that “in the UK, at least 70% of the people who died from COVID in August were fully vaccinated, and that’s straight from British government documents.”

Fact-Check: While the raw percentage cited was technically present in UK data, presenting it without context is deeply misleading. Full Fact published a separate analysis explaining why this statistic does not demonstrate vaccine failure:

When a large majority of a population is vaccinated (as was the case in England by August 2021, particularly among older and more vulnerable groups), it is statistically expected that a majority of deaths will occur among vaccinated individuals. This is a basic mathematical principle known as Simpson’s Paradox. The critical metric is the rate of death per 100,000 people in each group — and by that measure, unvaccinated individuals were dying at dramatically higher rates than vaccinated individuals of the same age.

Source: Full Fact - Joe Rogan podcast uses Covid-19 death data out of context

Claim: Vaccine-Induced Immunity Is Inferior to Natural Immunity and “No Longer Works” After Mutation

Berenson claimed that “vaccine immunity is tailored to one single part of the spike protein, so if the virus mutates just a little bit, that vaccine immunity no longer works,” while asserting that natural immunity is “much more robust” and provides broader protection.

Fact-Check: This claim is a significant oversimplification that distorts the science:

While it is true that mRNA vaccines target the spike protein and natural infection generates a broader immune response, the conclusion that vaccine immunity “no longer works” after mutation is false. Real-world data from the CDC showed that mRNA vaccines remained 90% effective against infection and over 91% effective against hospitalization even months after vaccination during 2021, including against the Delta variant.
Multiple studies, including from the CDC, demonstrated that vaccination after infection provides stronger and more durable protection than either vaccination or infection alone — a concept called “hybrid immunity.” The CDC recommended vaccination even for those who had recovered from COVID.
Berenson cited an Israeli study suggesting natural immunity was superior, but this single study had significant limitations and was not representative of the broader body of evidence, which consistently showed vaccines dramatically reduced hospitalization and death.

Sources:

Claim: Vaccine Mandates Have “Absolutely Nothing to Do with Medical Realities”

Berenson characterized vaccine mandates as having no scientific justification, arguing that because vaccines do not completely prevent infection or transmission, mandating them is unsupported by evidence.

Fact-Check: This argument mischaracterizes the purpose and evidence basis for vaccine mandates. While COVID-19 vaccines were not 100% effective at preventing infection (no vaccine for any disease achieves this), they dramatically reduced the risk of infection, hospitalization, and death. Public health mandates have always been justified on population-level benefits, not individual-level perfection. The same logic underpins longstanding mandates for MMR, polio, and other vaccines in schools and healthcare settings.

Real-world data from 2021 showed unvaccinated individuals were approximately 11 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than fully vaccinated individuals. The scientific and public health consensus at the time supported vaccination as a critical tool for reducing transmission, severe illness, and strain on healthcare systems.

Claim: Ivermectin Has Legitimate Uses Being Suppressed by Media

During the episode, Berenson and Rogan discussed ivermectin in the context of CNN’s coverage of Rogan’s own COVID treatment. While it is true that ivermectin has legitimate uses in humans as an anti-parasitic drug (and that CNN’s characterization of it purely as a “horse dewormer” was misleading), the broader implication of the discussion — that ivermectin was a proven COVID-19 treatment being suppressed by mainstream medicine — was not supported by evidence at the time.

Fact-Check: Multiple large-scale, randomized controlled trials (including the TOGETHER trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine) subsequently found that ivermectin did not significantly improve outcomes for COVID-19 patients. The FDA, WHO, and NIH did not recommend ivermectin for COVID-19 treatment outside of clinical trials. While CNN’s “horse dewormer” framing was inaccurate and inflammatory, the scientific evidence did not support ivermectin as an effective COVID-19 treatment.

Source: McGill University Office for Science and Society - Science vs. Joe Rogan

Joe Rogan’s Role

Joe Rogan was not a neutral interviewer in this episode. His role warrants specific scrutiny:

Failed to challenge misuse of data: When Berenson presented the PHE data claiming vaccinated people were more likely to catch COVID, Rogan accepted this at face value without questioning the methodology, the footnotes Berenson omitted, or the well-known statistical pitfalls of comparing raw rates between groups of vastly different sizes. Rogan had the data pulled up on screen and read along with Berenson without skepticism.
Amplified misinformation through agreement: Rogan repeatedly expressed agreement with Berenson’s claims, using his own experience with COVID (he had been infected shortly before this episode) and his use of ivermectin as a personal anecdote to validate Berenson’s broader anti-vaccine narrative.
Personal grievance drove editorial framing: Much of the episode’s discussion of CNN’s “horse dewormer” coverage was driven by Rogan’s personal anger at being mocked by mainstream media. While Rogan had a legitimate point that CNN’s specific characterization was misleading, this grievance became a vehicle for dismissing all mainstream media reporting on COVID treatments and vaccines, creating a false equivalence between media imprecision and Berenson’s systematic misrepresentation of scientific data.
Platformed a serial misinformation spreader without pushback: By October 2021, Berenson had been identified by major fact-checking organizations, medical professionals, and The Atlantic (which called him “the pandemic’s wrongest man”) as a consistent source of COVID misinformation. Despite this well-documented track record, Rogan provided no counterbalancing perspective and offered no meaningful challenges to Berenson’s claims.

Real-World Impact

This episode aired during a critical period of the pandemic. In October 2021, the Delta variant was causing approximately 1,500 deaths per day in the United States, with the vast majority occurring among unvaccinated individuals. Anti-vaccine misinformation directly contributed to vaccine hesitancy, and the Joe Rogan Experience — as one of the most-listened-to podcasts in the world — served as a powerful amplifier.

Berenson’s appearance on this episode was part of a broader pattern that eventually led to an open letter signed by 270 medical professionals, scientists, and educators calling on Spotify to address misinformation on the platform. The letter specifically cited the JRE’s history of platforming COVID misinformation without adequate pushback.

The misuse of UK health data on this episode was so widespread that Full Fact published multiple dedicated fact-checks, and the UK Health Security Agency had to issue clarifications about how its data should and should not be interpreted — in part because of the viral spread of clips from this episode.

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Conclusion

Episode 1717 represents a textbook case of how misinformation spreads through credentialed-seeming but unqualified commentators given access to massive platforms. Alex Berenson — a former newspaper business reporter with no medical or scientific training — was presented as an authority on vaccine science, epidemiological data interpretation, and public health policy. His systematic misrepresentation of UK government data, oversimplification of immune responses, and dismissal of the scientific consensus on vaccines were presented unchallenged to millions of listeners during a pandemic that had already killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

The episode’s harm was compounded by Joe Rogan’s failure to provide any meaningful pushback, his use of personal anecdote as evidence, and his conflation of legitimate media criticism with wholesale rejection of mainstream scientific reporting.