Following Joe Rogan’s June 15 interview of RFK Jr., which featured a lengthy conversation about vaccines and the safety thereof, a hullabaloo ensued about medical misinformation. On June 17, Joe Rogan challenged Dr. Peter Hotez, professor of molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, to debate RFK Jr. about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Although Hotez has appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience in the past, Hotez declined to do so again to debate RFK Jr.
In the ensuing days, many op-eds have come out defending Hotez’s decision not to engage with RFK Jr.: “Joe Rogan, RFK Jr. don’t get it: Vaccine science isn’t up for debate” in USA Today; “Why Peter Hotez Should Not Debate RFK Jr. On The Joe Rogan Experience” in Forbes; and “Anti-Vaxxers Don’t Want a Debate; They Want a Spectacle” in the Intelligencer, to cite a few. The motif of the articles is that empirical truths are indisputable, and that debating them only serves to legitimize and promulgate falsehood.
But this is not the case: The authors are wrong to assert that debating views one holds untrue is tantamount to lending credence to such views. When people refuse to debate that which is wrong, “they lose, what is almost as great a benefit [as debating that which is true], the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
That’s John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty from 1859. We’ve had plenty of time to heed his wisdom.
Here’s more from Mill: “To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty.” Everyone ought to have more epistemic humility than infallibility. Of equal importance, those who decline to defend the truth when they are best equipped to do so have little grounds to complain when the public is persuaded by exponents of falsehood.
If Dr. Hotez feels he is ill-equipped to defend vaccines in a public setting, then he shouldn’t do so. But someone who feels confident doing so ought to.