The Weimar shot in the arm
Politifact has more on this Robert Malone fella:
Video of Spotify host Joe Rogan’s controversial interview with a doctor known for making false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines was removed from YouTube, just days after Twitter banned the doctor’s account for violating its COVID-19 misinformation policies.
Dr. Robert Malone, who gained hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers in recent months as he promoted anti-vaccine falsehoods, drew a comparison in the interview between COVID-19 vaccination efforts in the U.S. and the environment in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Nazi party rose to power.
I’m not seeing it. Not seeing the similarity between Weimar Germany and the effort to vaccinate populations against a dangerous virus. Also not seeing how the effort to vaccinate populations against a dangerous virus is likely to lead to Nazism. That’s especially true since the authoritarian types are on the anti-vax side rather than the pro-vax side. I get that they portray mass vaccination as itself authoritarian, but that’s bullshit, and apart from bullshit, the comparison makes no sense.
Twitter also booted Marjorie Taylor Greene, but she’s a good deal more ignorant and stupid than Malone.
But unlike Greene, Malone has a medical degree. He bills himself as the “inventor” of mRNA vaccines and has leveraged that title to push one false claim after another.
Not the inventor; a major contributor.
Even as Twitter and YouTube sought to stem the spread of Malone’s claims, videos highlighting various segments from the doctor’s hours-long conversation with Rogan continued to circulate on both platforms and others such as Facebook and TikTok. They’ve been shared by the likes of Seb Gorka, a radio host and former Trump adviser, and Dr. Simone Gold, the founder of America’s Frontline Doctors, a group that has fought restrictions to curb the virus’ spread.
Primum non nocere.
The Atlantic ran a fairly extensive and detailed profile of Malone, who’s exactly the sort of grandiose jackass one would expect: His is no run-of-the-mill narcissism, it’s aggrieved entitlement syndrome on steroids.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/08/robert-malone-vaccine-inventor-vaccine-skeptic/619734/