I disagree with blanket opposition to GMOs — there is legitimate concern about adequate regulation — but the stakes are far lower: thousands of people are dying every day from COVID-19 and vaccination lowers that rate by at least an order of magnitude, while nobody will die because they choose not to eat GMO[1]. I think there’s a really big distinction between having an opinion on a topic which does not have a simple consensus and offering comprehensively-disproven medical advice at a time when the daily death toll is measured in thousands and illness is causing widespread economic disruption.

1. Yes, I’m aware of the value of GMOs for improving crop yield. That’s important, likely necessary to mitigate the impact of climate change, but it’s not a direct cause of death like a virus and most of the food insecurity in the world traces back to politics rather than an absolute shortage.

Cumulative worldwide Covid deaths since the start of the pandemic : 5.63 million

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

Yearly deaths due to hunger : 9 million

https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/people-and-poverty...

More people may die from hunger than Covid :https://www.forbes.com/sites/shaynaharris/2020/07/09/more-pe...

Yearly hunger deaths are nearly double Covid deaths.

One of the major issues with hunger is that you can not just ship food from a place that has it to a place that doesn't, that ends up wiping out local farmers and creating more food instability.

GMO are the best way to create crops that are drought and insect resistant. This is huge in bot resisting the effects of global warming and also reducing the amount of pesticides we use.

The idea that we can have food that is better for us and the environment and yet there are people that do their best to prevent it's use is insane.

Again, I don’t oppose GMOs (as you might note from the examples in my comment) but it’s the height of sophistry to claim that they’d solve this problem as effectively as vaccines reduce the risks from the virus actively circulating now. The latter is a direct causal relationship, the former is one factor affecting one of multiple overlapping problems.

Let's say Young gets his wish and GMOs are banned worldwide. Do you still think nobody will die?

You're comparing two different types of situation: the first is a direct casual relationship: if you get infected with the COVID-19 virus, you are less likely to infect others and are an order of magnitude less likely to die from it if you've been vaccinated — and that's a non-hypothetical situation with how widespread it is and the strain this has placed on the healthcare system, impacting patients with completely unrelated needs.

In contrast, the link between GMOs and food insecurity is nowhere near that simple. If you are starving because you are a member of an ethnic group which is not in power, GMOs won't do a thing. If you are starving because you don't own your farmland and the owner charges too much in rent, GMOs won't change that dynamic. If you are starving because you lack adequate water or have contaminated farmland, GMOs may or may not help enough to make a difference. If you are starving because insects or fungus destroy your crops, GMOs might help if you can afford the seeds but not if, say, they help by letting the crops survive if you spread pesticides which you can't afford. If you are starving because your lack of access to birth control means that you (as was common throughout human history) have more children than your farmland can feed, GMOs probably won't help enough to change your life. If you are starving because other economic conditions force you to sell too much of your crop to pay for other things like shelter, clothing, medicine, etc. GMOs won't really help, either. If you have any of these problems and the company which made the GMOs won't sell you seeds at an affordable price, well, guess what?

That's not saying that GMOs don't have a useful place — as you might note, I described them as necessary for the impacts of climate change on agriculture — but unlike COVID there isn't a single problem and it's not something which can be fixed with a cheap, infrequent action. The problems GMOs help with are only part of a complex set of overlapping problems and they don't solve anything as much as they help manage it — American farmers jumped on Roundup-resistant crops for obvious reasons but it wasn't a game changer for them because the benefits are partially canceled by the ongoing cost of buying seed and pesticides.

Also, insisting on only having non-gmo does not force other people to drink non-gmo stuff.

refusing to vaccinate or wear masks, means that if you get sick, you will make others sick

Young has been foolish and reactionary in his songs plenty of times. "Let's impeach the president" is not exactly lyrical nuance. That doesn't make Rogan better. He also doesn't have an army of fans who insist up and down that he is actually a proponent of reasoned analysis and listening to expertise.

I’m not saying that Young has all of the answers, only that in this case it’s good advice to go with the medical consensus when there’s an easy way to prevent thousands of deaths daily.

I do agree with you, and Rogan has platformed a lot of people who are famous for opposing the medical consensus.

> This is why "masks don't work" was truth from Fauci but wrong with Rand Paul said so about cloth masks.

This only works because you’re misrepresenting the claims: we always knew that masks worked but it was initially unclear how effective they were and widespread shortages lead to reasonable questions about reserving them for the highest risk jobs, not to mention avoiding people unnecessarily exposing themselves because they thought wearing a mask was safe. Remember, it still wasn’t clear exactly how COVID spread and it was quite plausible that someone might have, say, worn a mask but gotten infected by a droplet on their skin. There was also, as you might recall, considerable political pressure from the White House muddying the waters, too.

What’s tellingly different is what happened as the data became clear and the supply situation improved: Fauci wasn’t afraid to update what he said based on the evidence but the right-wingers you’re relying on repeatedly switched from one wrong thing to another because their goal was being politically correct rather than actually correct.

I’ve seen people on the left furious at Fauci for his errors. I’ve seen people on the left flabbergasted that the lab leak theory was initially dismissed and we all went along with it.

What is happening is that you have one side who expects to get it wrong sometimes: the left. And then you have the right, where getting it wrong is not allowed.

Don't you find it ironic that you are posting a comment about how people were flabbergasted that the lab leak theory was dismissed and banned from discussion, on a thread about someone being dismissed, and calls for his ban from discussion are coming from those same people who banned lab leak discussion?