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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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.
The clade 2.3.4.4.b viruses circulating in the US have infected many different mammalian species. In the course of this, we are seeing many opportunities for these viruses to adapt to mammalian hosts, including switching receptor usage & increasing virus fitness.
Viruses going back & forth in many mammalian hosts creates a lot of unique and complex selection pressures. It also leads to more infected individual animals, including in species we have frequent contact with: cows, poultry, dogs, cats, rodents, peridomestic wildlife.
Take the National Flu Surveillance numbers. When President Trump was sworn in on Jan 20, 89K specimens were tested using an assay that can detect novel flu A viruses. To date this has identified 3 H5N1 cases.
Hardly a surprise that Tracy Beth Høeg is now in at FDA as the Grima Wormtongue to Commissioner Marty Makary.
Høeg’s only “extensive experience working in vaccine science” is making up imaginary risks about vaccination to further monetize her various anti-vax platforms.
Like her fellow contrarians in the HHS conman clown car, she’s been persecuted & censored by the public health industrial complex for her dissenting views.
Evidently LinkedIn removing false info—like this omg plasmids with a SV40 origin in Pfizer vaccines thing—is proof of truth
But it isn’t censorship to point out when someone is wrong—especially if it’s intentional. That’s also called lying & Høeg has been doing it about infectious diseases & vaccines for years now.
We don’t have many of these, because viruses evolve too fast, infections are diagnosed too slow, & unlike bacteria, viruses can be so different that there aren’t many broad spectrum antibiotics. The AViDD centers were funded to develop antivirals for potential pandemic viruses.
I’ve now been asked about the USDA H5N1 action plan quite a few times, so maybe I should say a few things about it.
There are a few things I like about it, more things I don’t, and some things about it that are completely WTAF.
This is the 5 step plan:
Basically this is the plan:
$500M for biosecurity improvements
$400M for indemnifying producer losses
Deregulation
$100M for vaccine research
Relax import controls to make it easier to buy flu-free eggs from abroad
Obv I think investing $100M in vaccine research is a great idea. IMO the cow & poultry outbreaks will not be controlled without vaccination. It’s backed up by evidence from 🇨🇳 & 🇲🇽 that it ends avian outbreaks & stops transmission to humans.