Image Credit: Spotify

Spotify may take action against Joe Rogan’s comments on vaccinating younger people from COVID-19 in a recent episode with Dave Smith.

It been a turbulent few week for Joe Rogan, after Spotify removed over 40 older episodes with controversial guests and questions over his followers since signing with Spotify. When Rogan signed exclusive with Spotify in May last year, it was made clear the deal was only for distribution rights, while Rogan and his team would retain full creative control of episodes moving forward. This was tested as Rogan invited conspiracy theorist Alex Jones onto an episode last October. However it seems the most recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience may be pushing the boundaries and violate Spotify’s policies.

According to a source in contact with Digital Music News, episode #1639 with comedian and political commentator Dave Smith, published April 23 is currently under review at Spotify for ‘COVID misinformation’. This comes after Rogan stated he would not advise younger people to vaccinate themselves against COVID-19, based on their lower risk profile.

“People say, ‘do you think it’s safe to get vaccinated?’ and I’ve said, ‘Yeah, I think for the most part it’s safe to get vaccinated, I do, I do, But if you’re 21 years old, and you ask me if you should get vaccinated, I’d say ‘no.'”

“Are you healthy? Are you a healthy person? Look, don’t do anything stupid, but you should take care of yourself. If you’re a healthy person and you’re exercising all the time, and you’re young, and you’re eating well, I don’t think you need to worry about this.”

Joe Rogan | The Joe Rogan Experience: #1639 – Dave Smith

Questioning whether people should be forced to vaccinate themselves or their children, Rogan continued:

“But there are a lot of jobs that will tell you that you need to have [the vaccination]. People are worried about them doing it for their children. And we talked about this earlier — that you might have to have your children vaccinated.”

“And I can tell you, as someone whose children got the virus, it was nothing. I hate to say that if someone’s children died from this, I’m very sorry that that happened, I’m not in any way diminishing that. But I’m saying, the personal experience that my children had with COVID was nothing. One of the kids had a headache, the other one didn’t feel good for a couple of days. I mean, not feel good like — hmmm, no big deal, no coughing, no achey, no agony, nothing like that. It was very mild, it was akin to them getting a cold.”

Joe Rogan | The Joe Rogan Experience: #1639 – Dave Smith

Dave Smith talked on the virtue signaling and theatrical display of getting the vaccine:

Yeah, and you can have this thing with virtue signaling and this theatrical display of ‘I got the vaccine, what a good person I am, I care about everyone.’ But look, my daughter’s a lot younger than your kids, but yeah, I’m not injecting my daughter with something to f—king virtue signal. I’m not doing that. If there’s something that she statistically has no risk from, I’m sorry I’m not doing any experiments on her.

Dave Smith | The Joe Rogan Experience: #1639 – Dave Smith

Commenting on the low risk that COVID poses to children, Rogan said:

But it’s amazing that that’s controversial. That even saying, ‘I’m not going to inject my child with the vaccine,’ is so controversial. Because again, we’re not even talking about the flu, which we just found out killed 22,000 people last year. We’re not talking about that — we’re talking about something that is not statistically dangerous for children. But yet people still want you to get your child vaccinated, which is crazy to me. You should be vaccinated if you’re vulnerable!

Joe Rogan | The Joe Rogan Experience: #1639 – Dave Smith

Spotify have made no comment regarding the episode. It’s currently unclear what action if any the streaming service will take. Spotify may decide to pull the episode entirely, remove the portion discussing the COVID-19 vaccine, or place a pre-show disclaimer.

Listen to the full episode here: