Common Knowledge Edinburgh

“Which is precisely why I believe in pushing for vaccine passports, dude. I think we need to do vaccine passports. The big part of the problem is unvaccinated folks.” Hasan Doğa Piker holds a B.A. in political science and communication studies from Rutgers University (2013), after a stop at the University of Miami. That is the medical file: a Young Turks hire whose uncle co-founded the network, then a Twitch streamer with millions of followers. No M.D., no epidemiology, no immunology, no public-health degree, no clinic. The credential for a domestic passport is a chat room. On July 27, 2021, he streamed “Please take the vaccine.” Cases were up, the South was struggling, and he said the unvaccinated were the big part of the problem. He noted that vaccinated people were still catching Delta with a higher viral load, mentioned a vaccinated friend who got it anyway, and landed on passports. In October Piker played Noam Chomsky’s line that people who refuse the shot should isolate themselves from society, and treated the isolation demand as the grown-up position, with force reserved for later if they kept “running around.” In January 2022 he titled a segment “Joe Rogan Goes on Another Unhinged Vaccine Rant.” The platform was a daily stream filmed, by then, from a West Hollywood house he bought in 2021 for about $2.7 million. The training was communication studies. He wanted a document to enter ordinary life, issued by a man who already had the house, the stream, and the shot. The passports did not stop infection or transmission. He is still streaming. The unvaccinated he filed as the problem did not get a segment when the document failed the one job he assigned it. Hasan asked for papers at the door. The door was his, and the papers were a bit.