Dr. Bradley Garrett on the Joe Rogan Experience #1515, fact-checked

What the evidence shows: Rogan claimed that the COVID-19 fatality rate for "healthy people" is very low, well under half of one percent. Contemporaneous and subsequent epidemiological research shows fatality risk from COVID-19 was not uniform even among people without diagnosed comorbidities: a large multi-country analysis (Nature, 2020) found the infection fatality ratio rises log-linearly with age starting around age 30, meaning risk for an older "healthy" adult could be far higher than for a young healthy adult, even without underlying conditions. CDC data separately show age over 50, and especially over 65, substantially raises risk of severe illness and death, and that most COVID-19 deaths occurred in older adults. Averaged infection fatality rate estimates for the whole population in 2020 were often cited in the range of roughly 0.5-1%, but this obscures wide variation: estimates for people in their 20s-40s were commonly well under 0.1%, while risk for people over 65-70 was substantially higher, sometimes exceeding several percent. The claim that fatality is uniformly "less than half of 1%" for "most healthy people" blends together very different age-stratified risks into a single reassuring figure, and omits that hospitalization, ICU admission, and long-term or post-acute effects were far more common than raw fatality figures alone suggest. The underlying point that fatality risk is much lower for young, healthy individuals than for elderly or comorbid populations is broadly consistent with the evidence, but the specific blanket figure understates risk for older subsets of the "healthy" population and omits non-fatal severe outcomes.

What the evidence shows: The claim is astronomically impossible on its own terms. Uranus was not identified until 1781, when William Herschel spotted it through a telescope, and Neptune was not located until 1846, via telescopic observation from the Berlin Observatory following mathematical prediction. Both discoveries came more than 5,000 years after the clay tablets Rogan describes and roughly two millennia after telescopes existed at all, so no Bronze Age Sumerian society could have observed or recorded these planets. The image usually cited for this claim is the VA 243 cylinder seal, a small Akkadian/Sumerian stone seal whose "correctly ordered solar system" reading originates with 20th-century author Zecharia Sitchin; mainstream Assyriologists instead describe the seal's imagery as a religious or astral scene. No genuine excavated Sumerian or Akkadian artifact has been authenticated by mainstream archaeology as depicting a full, correctly ordered planetary system. Current status: false.

What the evidence shows: George Romney was in fact a candidate for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination; his 1907 birth in a Mormon settlement in Chihuahua, Mexico was never a legal bar to running. Because both of his parents were U.S. citizens at the time of his birth, he was widely regarded as a natural-born citizen under the Constitution, and the eligibility question, though raised publicly, was never resolved by a court since he withdrew from the race for unrelated reasons. Rogan's claim that Romney's father was barred from running because of his Mexican birthplace is false.

What the evidence shows: Element 115 (now named moscovium) was first synthesized, not merely "detected" by a "particle collider," by a joint Russian-American team at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, led by Yuri Oganessian with collaborators from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The original synthesis experiments, fusing calcium-48 ions with an americium-243 target in a heavy-ion accelerator (a cyclotron-type fusion device, not a collider like the LHC), were conducted starting in 2003-2004, roughly a decade before the 2013 date Rogan cites. Formal international confirmation and naming came later still: IUPAC and IUPAP jointly approved the discovery of elements 113, 115, 117, and 118 in December 2015, with the name moscovium formally adopted in 2016. The lab-made isotopes of moscovium are extremely short-lived, decaying by alpha emission within a fraction of a second, and have no documented properties resembling the stable, room-temperature anti-gravity fuel source Bob Lazar described in 1989. The real existence of a synthetic element numbered 115 does not corroborate the specific properties or extraterrestrial-propulsion use Lazar attributed to it.

What the evidence shows: On April 27, 2020, the Department of Defense released a statement confirming that three previously leaked Navy videos, showing what pilots described as unidentified aerial phenomena, were authentic. The statement said the release was meant to clear up public confusion about whether the leaked footage was real, and it explicitly characterized the objects in the videos only as 'unidentified,' not as extraterrestrial or non-human craft. Neither this 2020 statement nor any subsequent Pentagon disclosure has said the government possesses recovered craft of non-human or 'not of this world' origin. The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) issued its most comprehensive report in March 2024 and concluded there was no evidence that the U.S. government or private companies possess or have ever possessed retrieved alien technology, and that most historical UAP sightings had mundane explanations. The claim that the Pentagon's 2020 statement confirmed recovery of non-human craft misstates what was actually said, which was limited to confirming video authenticity while leaving the phenomena officially unexplained.