As a frequent target of harassment who routinely receives threats of physical & sexual violence, Dr. Gottlieb nails it.
I cope because it's valuable to advocate for scientists & public health as best I can & I'm fortunate to have this platform. But Twitter can do better.
And I'm not the only one. Many of my colleagues have had similar run-ins with people threatening us, our friends, & our families. And accounts that consistently encourage this behavior continue unchecked, as do those that actually engage in this behavior.
Here's an example. This account has been locked multiple times for violations of every @TwitterSafety rule in the book, yet is still not suspended. "Violent threats," "Hateful conduct," "Abusive behavior"...still gets his nth 2nd chance to regain access.
Here's one tweet that I reported from this account. I tagged @TwitterSafety. Nothing happened. Meanwhile he was free to harass me & numerous colleagues ad nauseum. And several bigger, verified accounts kept following him, winking at him & amplifying him.
And what was amplified? Sharing personal information about people's family members, including their children. Naming their workplaces & schools. Encouraging people to harass them there. False allegations of serious crimes. Abhorrent sexism, racism, & ableism. Viciousness. Lies.
Only after weeks of this did @TwitterSafety step in. But vast damage can be done in that time. Not only does this encourage people to harm others, it can encourage the targets to harm themselves. So miss me with "but we can't censor people or silence the debate" excuses.
A relentless campaign of social media abuse can inflict severe damage to the target's mental health. That's the point: to break down the target by causing them so much anguish and endangering them to the point they leave the debate.
So who exactly is being silenced here?
Being the subject of a Twitter brigade can be agonizing. It's doubly so when you talk about what has happened to you & the pain it has caused, & that's trivialized & you are blamed for bringing it upon yourself.
This is not about disagreement or insulting people. It's a tactic.
And @TwitterSafety needs to seriously improve its ability to distinguish between protected speech—even when it's offensive—and patterns of dehumanizing abuse before they get to the stage of causing irreparable physical or emotional harm.
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Very disappointing from @janeqiuchina, since she is well aware that scientists haven’t shut down legitimate inquiry into a “lab leak.” There is no evidence to support it.
Trust is lost not by scientists publishing evidence, but by dishonest actors misrepresenting the evidence.
Here’s a link to the entire odious piece. It reads like it was ghostwritten by Alina Chan:
-scientists silenced dissenting opinion
-virology is dangerous
-virologists are arrogant
-some people think it was lab leak
-trust is gone!
I note she neglects to even discuss the actual body of evidence supporting one origin hypothesis over another. Instead she brings up the same tired tropes that you hear from the likes of Rand Paul: reckless virology, overconfident virologists, GOF, conflicts of interest…
Gonna fact check Jay B on his lies to the Senate in real time. Follow along for what promises to be a deeply annoying time. appropriations.senate.gov/hearings/a-rev…
Breaking news: Susan Collins is concerned about the effects of cutting $18B from the NIH budget, especially about Alzheimer's.
Jay's response is that we need more advances and the budget is collaborative. So...the first of many non-answers.
Tammy Baldwin wants to know who is withholding grant funds. Jay is trying to bullshit about the "range" of decisions but Baldwin won't let it go. Jay says he's doing all the ideologically motivated funding cuts. Jay blames Trump for punishing Harvard & Columbia.
In case you you were wondering what’s going on in Canadian medical freedom/anti-vax news, the embarrassing off-brand J6ers of the True North convoyed out to BC to prevent 400 H5N1-infected ostriches from being culled.
This got me thinking about H5N1 in ostrich hosts 🧵👇🏻
When I came across this bright idea that these ostriches are somehow now H5N1 cure factories. I blame the movie Outbreak for giving people the idea that you can cure highly pathogenic viruses with serum or whatever. But H5N1 pathogenicity exists across a range of severity.
If ostriches don’t get very sick, it’s not obvious which ones are infected or not. And there aren’t a whole lot of ostrich challenge studies out there, but here’s one. They infected ostrich chicks with high path H5N1 & they didn’t get sick.
New EO banning “dangerous gain-of-function” experiments dropped Monday.
Allow me to break out my deranged anti-vax kakistocrat translator.
Will this improve the safety & security of biological research?
Hell yes, because biological research won’t exist anymore!
I do kind of love the idea that Trump’s path to dictatorship includes a proclamation on his political position on mouse adaptation, unregulated DNA synthesis, & whatever else is deemed subjectively dangerous by authors who obviously know fuck all about it. whitehouse.gov/presidential-a…
This seems bad:
GOF lab leak
Biden allowed GOF free for all
NIH gave $$ to leak-prone foreign labs
Bold claims. Got any evidence to back them up?
Last I checked, GOF moratorium was lifted under Trump in 2017.
For the millionth time, evidence is consistent with zoonotic origin
I am often challenged to provide an example of a vaccine that could not have been developed without doing gain-of-function virology research.
Thanks to HHS @SecKennedy and former @BiosafetyNow board member @DrJBhattacharya, I now have an answer:
Generation Gold Standard
Can't complain about half a billion for a "next-generation universal vaccine platform"! What is this amazingly innovative new vaccine technology? Tell me more, because this says "BPL-inactivated, whole virus platform". That describes current flu vaccines. hhs.gov/press-room/hhs…
The press release did not offer more details so I looked at a paper about it. This was testing a quadrivalent BPL-inactivated vaccine (vaccine made of 4 inactivated low path avian viruses) by a heterosubtypic (different HxNy subtype) challenge. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11…
I am the co-Editor-in-Chief of @Els_Vaccine & I’ll be the first to say that a lot about academic publishing needs reform.
But replacing peer review with ideologically-driven censorship or shutting journals down in the name of “free speech” is not reform.
FYI to the NIH Director: having your paper rejected because peer reviewers found it lacked scientific merit is not censorship or gatekeeping. It means your work didn’t pass muster & wasn’t up to scientific standards. Expert peer review is what distinguishes a journal from a blog.
I can’t speak for CHEST but I assume their editorial viewpoint is similar to @Els_Vaccine’s: publish the best quality scientific work in the field (vaccines in Vaccine, chests in CHEST). If your paper is rejected, it’s because it wasn’t of sufficient quality or rigor, not POV.