By V. J. Mercer | A Mind Less Wasted
I listened to Joe Rogan’s November 4, 2026 interview with Dr. Peter McCullough, and I found parts of it fascinating. They covered just about everything that made the COVID pandemic such a divisive experience: censorship, government overreach, pharmaceutical influence, medical treatments, vaccine injuries, and the unwillingness of public institutions to admit when they got something wrong. These aren’t trivial concerns, and some deserve far more attention than they’ve received. Others have been debated for years without much progress toward a satisfactory resolution.
But as I listened, something else began bothering me. It wasn’t necessarily the opinions being expressed or even how controversial some of the claims were. It was how easily the conversation moved from one extraordinary assertion to another without spending nearly as much time examining the evidence behind them.
McCullough isn’t some random guy with a podcast and a medical opinion. He’s a physician with an extensive publication history in cardiology and clinical medicine. Rogan, meanwhile, has an enormous audience and has built much of his reputation on asking questions that others might avoid. Put the two together, and you have a conversation capable of influencing how millions of people understand some complicated medical issues.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. I’ve argued for years that questioning authority is healthy, that institutions deserve scrutiny, and that scientific disagreements shouldn’t be settled by censorship or appeals to credentials. Independent voices have an important role to play, particularly when institutions become defensive about their own mistakes.
But questioning authority is only half the job. You also have to question the people questioning authority. Otherwise, you’re not practicing skepticism. You’re simply deciding whom to trust.
What really caught my attention was McCullough’s level of certainty. At one point, while discussing his public medical commentary, he declared, “I’m not wrong.”
That’s quite a statement, especially in medicine, where uncertainty is unavoidable, evidence evolves, and even well-established conclusions can change when better research comes along. I’ve never understood why anyone making scientific claims would want to place themselves beyond the possibility of being mistaken. If the evidence is as strong as you believe it is, scrutiny should be an opportunity to demonstrate that strength, not something to avoid.
So I decided to go through the transcript and examine some of the more consequential claims against the published research. Not because I wanted to defend the CDC, pharmaceutical companies, or anyone else. They can answer for themselves. And certainly not because McCullough holds controversial views. Being controversial doesn’t make someone wrong any more than being credentialed makes someone right.
I wanted to know something much simpler: Did the claims accurately reflect the research being cited? Were important details left out? Were reasonable interpretations being presented as established facts? And did Rogan ask enough follow-up questions to separate what we actually know from what someone strongly believes?
What I found was worth a closer look.
Apparently, Misinformation Didn’t Exist Before COVID
Early in the interview, McCullough told Rogan that the word misinformation had never appeared in medical literature before 2020. He used that claim to argue that the term had become a convenient way to discredit anyone challenging official COVID policies.
There’s a fair point to be made about the misuse of labels. Calling something misinformation doesn’t make it false, and dismissing someone as a conspiracy theorist isn’t a substitute for addressing their evidence. But McCullough weakened that argument with a claim that was remarkably easy to disprove.
On March 15, 1989, Annals of Internal Medicine published an article titled “The Misinformation Era: The Fall of the Medical Record.” The word appeared in the title of a medical journal article more than 30 years before COVID.
That doesn’t mean accusations of misinformation weren’t misused during the pandemic. It’s an entirely separate question. But McCullough’s historical claim was simply false.
What bothered me wasn’t just the error. It was how confidently he made the statement, how surprised Rogan seemed by it, and how quickly they moved on without questioning whether it was true. Nobody expects a podcast host to fact-check everything on the spot, but when a claim can be disproved with a simple PubMed search, you have to wonder how carefully the more complicated claims are being examined.
Confidence isn’t evidence, no matter who’s speaking.