Despite his allegiance to the conspiracist far-right and a McDonald’s visit with anti-vax health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., it seems that Elon Musk draws the line at claiming that vaccines are totally ineffective and potentially dangerous.
Earlier this week, Musk’s podcaster pal Joe Rogan hosted Dr. Suzanne Humphries, a nephrologist who co-wrote the self-published 2013 book Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History, which falsely claims that vaccines do not account for the decline of infectious diseases including smallpox and polio. In her interview, Humphries advanced her conspiracist narrative that medical researchers falsified their data in order to justify vaccinations, whereas what really made people ill were environmental toxins spread through poor sanitation and hygiene — which rapidly improved from the Nineteenth century onward, stemming the spread of disease.
Humphries made one outrageously false claim after another on Rogan’s podcast, at various points claiming that tuberculosis “was a side effect of the smallpox vaccine,” that polio cases were caused by the insecticide DDT, and that Covid-19 was lab-engineered to include “snake toxin proteins,” apparently echoing a years-old conspiracy theory about people getting the disease from snake venom in drinking water. “I would have told you that vaccines are one of the most important inventions in human history,” Rogan told Humphries during their conversation, appearing to accept everything she told him as fact. “And it saved us from polio, it saved us from smallpox. I would have been that guy ranting off all those statistics. I would have told you that. But then I read your book.” He also said: “Giving a Covid shot to a baby today is insane.”
“‘Dissolving Illusions’ is a really great book,” Rogan later wrote on X, sharing a post from a user who declared the Humphries episode “his most important podcast of the year.” He went on to note, “I probably would have never thought about exploring the real history of vaccines if we hadn’t gone through the insane Covid gaslighting of the last 5 years, but after Dr. Humphries’ book I’ll never look at it the same way again. She’s a very brave and brilliant woman.”
Musk, a repeat Rogan guest who typically aligns with him on culture war issues — the pair also backed Donald Trump in the 2024 election — pushed back on his social media platform, though still hedged slightly. “My opinion on the subject: If forced to choose between greatly improved sanitation and vaccines, sanitation matters much more,” declared the oligarch now overseeing the decimation of federal agencies and regulators by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). “But vaccines, essentially training your immune system for battle, do work well for addressing many diseases. The essence of science is continuously looking at the evidence to lessen the error between your understanding of reality and reality itself.”
Vaccines are a peculiar fault line within the MAGA movement that Musk and Rogan have joined. Trump, for instance, has sought to take credit for the Covid-19 vaccines developed during his first term, yet a significant portion of the GOP base now distrusts vaccine science, turning it into a partisan issue since the advent of the pandemic. As head of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has already moved to investigate the childhood vaccine schedule for diseases including polio and measles, which this year has infected hundreds and killed two in the U.S., and hired a discredited anti-vax researcher to study the long-debunked “connection” between immunizations and autism. Kennedy has misleadingly claimed that factors such as malnutrition or preexisting health conditions contribute to measles infections, and downplayed the possible effects of the disease, which can permanently blind or deafen patients who survive it, touting the benefits of natural immunity post-infection.
Similarly, Humphries seemed to suggest on Rogan’s podcast that polio is not the terror that many people imagine it to be, since most cases are asymptomatic. But in the mid-Twentieth century, it killed or paralyzed half a million people each year worldwide and was a major cause of childhood disability. The worst recorded outbreak in U.S. history, in 1952, saw 3,000 people die. Thanks to safe and effective vaccines that first became available in 1955, polio was considered to be eliminated in North and South America as of 1994.
Musk has turned X, formerly Twitter, into a haven for misinformation, often amplifying such content himself. So it was no surprise that his gentle pushback on Rogan’s vaccine skepticism drew plenty of dissent in the replies. “I started down the vaccine rabbit hole after Covid-19, and I now suspect that we’ve been lied to on an industrial scale about them,” commented a verified blue-check user with more than 100,000 followers. “I think the evidence, if we look at it honestly, shows overwhelmingly that vaccines are unnecessary at best, and have caused tremendous harm/negligible benefit at worst.”
Given the kind of platform and audience he has cultivated, it doesn’t appear that Musk will be earning plaudits for going against the emerging consensus in his party that inoculations are worse than the diseases they guard against. It’ll certainly be surprising if he challenges this worldview again.
