‘I hope you die’: how the Covid pandemic unleashed attacks on scientists

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02741-x

by pseudolus • 5 years ago

53 77 5 years ago

"The police officer who visited Kuppalli after a second death-threat call suggested she should get herself a gun."

It is hard to overstate how bad this advice is, and how demonstrative it is of the broken policing system we have in the U.S.

Gun owners are substantially more likely to die of gun violence than non-gun owners. Gun owners have a 3x higher risk of suicide. In the event that someone does break in, gun owners are more likely to die than non-gun owners.

All of this is publicly available information, and the cop's advice to someone facing substantial psychological stress was to "get a gun."

We are so, so far away from a sane, functioning public safety system in this country it can be depressing.

twofornone• 5 years ago

Gun owners are substantially more likely to die of gun violence than non-gun owners. Gun owners have a 3x higher risk of suicide.

It is disingenuous to conflate "gun violence" with suicide.

In the event that someone does break in, gun owners are more likely to die than non-gun owners.

I've never heard of this statistic and I suspect that the relevant literature is an interpretation based on questionable assumptions. Do you have a source?

We are so, so far away from a sane, functioning public safety system in this country it can be depressing.

Allowing responsible gun ownership is neither insane nor an indication of dysfunction. In fact if you remove a single demographic from gun violence statistics, the US becomes one of the top 5 or so safest nations, in spite of the highest rate of gun ownership in the world.

op00to2• 5 years ago

Do tell, what is that one “single demographic” which is allowed to be removed from counting in the US, friend?

iammisc4• 5 years ago

Your downvotes show why this problem will never be solved. Getting rid of guns is not going to solve violent people.

dangerlibrary11• 5 years ago

I'm not talking about allowing responsible gun ownership.

I'm talking about the fact that a person whose ostensible role in society is enforcing laws and ensuring public safety told a psychologically stressed out person facing death threats to take an action that increases their risk of death by suicide by 3x.

This is not a criticism of responsible gun ownership. This is a criticism of the idea that "owning more guns will solve public safety problems," which is demonstrably false.

goto112• 5 years ago

In fact if you remove a single demographic from gun violence statistics, the US becomes one of the top 5 or so safest nations, in spite of the highest rate of gun ownership in the world.

Did you also remove "a single demographic" from these other nations gun violence statistics?

If you remove the poorest segment of the US population form all statistics, I'm sure the US is going to look a lot better in many ways compared to the full population of other nations.

simonh3• 5 years ago

>Gun owners are substantially more likely to die of gun violence than non-gun owners. Gun owners have a 3x higher risk of suicide. >It is disingenuous to conflate "gun violence" with suicide.

They were called out separately, and distinctly in their own sentences and one of them had a specific statistic. That is not conflation.

poo-yie6• 5 years ago

Put yourself in the shoes of that police officer. What would you have advised?

dangerlibrary11• 5 years ago

Bear spray.

Also, increased monitoring on a vulnerable person with known death threats against them.

Also, if it were available, counseling.

simonh3• 5 years ago

I'm not a security or safety trained professional, but off the top of my head a domestic security system maybe including video, top of the line door and window locks, advice on car security, who knows what else.

All that is completely beside the point though, because none of it is pertinent to whether the advice to get a gun was reasonable.

waltbosz2• 5 years ago

That's a fun thought experiment: imagine you're a police officer tasked with helping a woman being anonymously threatened.

I suppose for the police officer, solving the problem of "a stranger is making death threats" is to take a proactive defensive measure and arm yourself.

----

What if you were to imagine the advise from some sort of other professional? Maybe a social worker who helps victims of domestic violence ?

What other professionals would have good advice to offer the scientist ?

----

I did think it odd that the article mentioned the "go get a gun" response. Was the author's intention to drive home the point that the police were unhelpful ?

bell-cot• 5 years ago

With all the creepy surveillance of America's phone system, internet, etc. that seems to be happening - is "we'll try to trace those death threat calls" even on the table?

spywaregorilla• 5 years ago

In the event that someone does break in, gun owners are more likely to die than non-gun owners.

That sounds like some backwards causality to me. It seems way more likely that people own guns when the likelihood of murderous break ins is high, rather than the idea that the same break in situations are happening and they're just getting into firefights and losing.

throw0101a• 5 years ago

It seems way more likely that people own guns when the likelihood of murderous break ins is high, rather than the idea that the same break in situations are happening and they're just getting into firefights and losing.

A person with a gun may feel like they can "handle" the intruder more than someone who is unarmed. If you're unarmed you may take the less risky action of barricading yourself in a room and calling the police.

nvelty• 5 years ago

Gun owners are substantially more likely to die of gun violence than non-gun owners.

I'd imagine that people living in areas more prone to gun violence are also more likely to arm themselves.

the cop's advice to someone facing substantial psychological stress was to "get a gun."

I don't think it's the worst advice, probably could have been delivered with more tact. Having the means of defense gives one agency and can be reassuring. Instead of lying awake hoping no one breaks in, you now focus on how you'd most effectively detect and stop someone breaking in - you're now a player instead of a victim. That said, responsible gun ownership requires knowledge and training, so probably not the best time to suggest gun ownership for the author.

dangerlibrary11• 5 years ago

I'd imagine that people living in areas more prone to gun violence are also more likely to arm themselves.

I'm all for skepticism, but at some point people's willingness to assume that peer reviewed research is flawed in _the most obvious possible way_ and that the researchers made no attempt whatsoever to correct for _the most obvious possible failure mode of their study_ borders on insane.

Do you really think that nobody thought of that before just now?

oceanghost3• 5 years ago

Your reasoning is flawed.

The average gun owner has not received a death threat.

worstestes2• 5 years ago

Do you have data to support this?

poo-yie6• 5 years ago

For starters, it would be a great first step to see the scientific community come out and denounce any and all gain-of-function research as immoral, unethical, irresponsible, and incredibly dangerous. After stating this publicly and repeatedly, then ADHERE to this position and REFUSE to be part of any efforts to conduct such research.

rscho3• 5 years ago

Oh yes, refuse. I'm sure no one will try to force you.

poo-yie6• 5 years ago

I don't disagree that there would be attempts to force them. Hopefully, the individual scientists would be able to maintain their ground and refuse to be part of it. There are many tragic examples in the history books of 'just following orders'.

over_the_raibow• 5 years ago

Then don t ask for respect or trust from the average Joe. No "trust the science" for you

iammisc4• 5 years ago

'scientists' are not a homogeneous group. Some are good, some are bad. The world would be better off with some dead, and better off with others living forever.

Few would wince for example, had someone wished an early death to mengele, while many would wish Einstein or Feynman were still around.

rscho3• 5 years ago

So we could build even bigger bombs?

waltbosz2• 5 years ago

I have found myself increasingly interested in understanding the reasons behind what motivates the people making these threats.

My interests aren't really in the threats per se, but rather, the hostility towards science.

Do they have poor critical thinking skills?

Why are they so angry about the scientists? Do they consider science some sort of a threat ?

Maybe there is a mental illness at play? Maybe not in the generally angry people, but at least in the minds of the people who actually make the threats. I suppose one may take anti-social action without being mentally ill, just immature.

Fundamentally, I'm curious about how their brains work. By what thought processes do they reach their conclusions?

Elte• 5 years ago

I don't think it's about reaching conclusions; I think people just don't like hearing bad news, much less bad news about things that they regularly participate in. We say "don't shoot the messenger" for a reason - it's just much simpler to shoot the messenger than to consider the message.

What I'm personally always worried about is to what extent I might be doing it myself. It stands to reason that these people themselves don't believe they're engaging in unacceptable behavior, after all.

simonh3• 5 years ago

A lot of these people have become convinced that there is a massive conspiracy of elites to deceive and control them. They're not necessarily anti-science as such, they simply believe anyone telling them things they don't want to hear is an enemy trying to cheat them.

TheOtherHobbes• 5 years ago

Multiple studies have shown they tend to narcissism and sociopathy. For example:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8035125/

They've also been farmed and radicalised by Q-like coordinated anti-vaxxing campaigns which use emotively loaded disinfo to legitimise violent beliefs.

The disinfo includes claims that the vaccine kills children (it doesn't) and causes lasting side effects (it doesn't.)

The combination of emotionally disordered people and lurid claims about a vaccine "threat" promotes violent outcomes.

News from the UK is that an MP was stabbed in his office today. The anti-vaxxers on Twitter seem delighted about this.

halfjoking2• 5 years ago

My bet is that the recent circulatory and heart disease excess deaths [1] are from the vaccine. The explanation in the article that it's from "people not seeing doctors" suddenly after 20 months into the pandemic doesn't make sense.

If you need an example of long term effects from the vaccine visit the vaccinelonghaulers subreddit. [2]

There are people advocating violence on both sides and we should condemn them both.

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/analysis-thousands-more-usual-dyi...

[2] https://reddit.com/r/vaccinelonghaulers/

native_samples4• 5 years ago

The Nordic countries have removed Moderna from circulation for younger people because it kills them more than COVID does. Are you going to claim all those governments are in the grip of "Q-like emotively loaded disinfo"?

Lasting side effects: of my girlfriend's friends, 4 of them still have periods that are disrupted or entirely missing months after the vaccine. As far as the establishment is concerned, that's impossible and never happens. Do Not Fear Because The Vaccine Is Perfectly Safe And Definitely Does Not Impact Fertility In Any Way, Citizen. Except it obviously does, and it must be happening at scale, because on the incredibly rare occasions a woman manages to get an article published on this in the news media they invariably seem to mention that it affected both them and many of their friends too.

Your belief that all these sorts of real events we can observe with our own eyes are "disinfo" is dystopian.

halfjoking2• 5 years ago

It's pretty simple - they see scientists as paid shills.

According to Stanford[1], out of 45 of the most influential clinical studies, only 44% were successfully replicated. So there is some truth that just because something is supported by evidence in a clinical study, it doesn't mean that it is factual.

Then these people see politicians using "the science" as an excuse for attacking their livelihood, shutting down their business, or putting their life in danger from what they see as an unsafe product. /r/HermanCainAward exists for similar reasons, those people see antivaxxers as putting their life in danger so their death has to be celebrated. Extremism on either side is a bad thing.

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/201218#not...

thomastjeffery3• 5 years ago

The validity of COVID-19 science is the driver for lockdowns and mask mandates, which have become a political wedge issue.

It's essentially the same as religious thinking: Jesus said that lusting after a woman is adultery, so I need to be upset with porn stars for ruining marriages. Tucker Carlson said that my right to go daydrinking without a mask is a core American value, so I need to be upset with doctors for recommending the bar be closed or have distancing/mask mandates in place, and thereby infringing on my liberty.

It's not about thoughtful conclusions, it's about dogma. If you show a Southern Baptist evidence that porn isn't detrimental to marriage, they will just start defending their religious beliefs. The same pattern is happening with anti-mask and anti-vaccine culture.

dqpb• 5 years ago

You can simply look at the prevalence of religion and faith-based thinking to see utterly confused everyone is.

When the majority population believes in omniscient cosmic puppeteers, how much logic can you really expect?

ksec2• 5 years ago

It is not just COVID, plenty of people ( myself included ) have received borderline death threat from Intel Fan Boys for merely pointing out AMD's roadmap and how they are going to win during an Intel 10nm fiasco. Or how TSMC will overtake Intel in 2020. There are a few popular Tech Site reporters ( not sure they want to be named ) got similar treatment.

Some people just cant accept they were wrong. You would not even question whether it is critical thinking, you should be wondering if they are thinking at all. They are basically Sparrows in Game of Thrones, or fanatics.

arbitrage• 5 years ago

Likely narcissistic rage, brought on by being told they are wrong to hold the beliefs they have been tricked into identifying with by populists.

They see and hear a scientist telling them that they are wrong, and the culturally instilled fragile narcissistic ego -- which overwhelmingly correlates with being white & male -- can't tolerate that injury. They lash out to hurt the person that is threatening their narrative of reality.

dahart• 5 years ago

This is a good and very important question for us to ask and investigate right now. However, I would start by assuming that people have good critical thinking skills and avoid suspecting or suggesting mental illness is involved. There are enough smart people being hostile towards science that this needs to be taken seriously. And it’s also important to recognize that all of us as humans are susceptible to having strong beliefs that aren’t true.

In the media and politics, there has been a concerted attack on public trust in science, and it’s working. When science is telling us things we don’t want to hear, things that are hard to change, sometimes people with agendas try to undermine the message in hopes that we don’t affect the economy or have to undertake any costly actions. That effort seems to get getting stronger, and of course when the President participates and publicly calls scientists names, it certainly doesn’t help.

There are quite a few good articles and podcasts covering stories of smart people who went down the Qanon rabbit hole, I think that’d be a great place to start exploring.

native_samples4• 5 years ago

You're conflating "hostility towards science", which doesn't really make sense as a concept and isn't actually widespread at all (unless you count New Age woo type stuff), with "hostility towards specific scientific institutions and their staff" which can make sense for the same reason hostility to any institution or social arrangement can make sense.

Sometimes when you find yourself thinking, maybe lots of people around me are just really, really stupid, it helps to look at analogous situations from other times or places. Do things look different then?

Consider the example of Lysenkoism. It was a strain of thought in the USSR in the 1930s mostly related to biology and agriculture, presented as scientific. And in some ways it was - he made apparently scientific sounding claims about experiments he (claimed he) did around selective breeding, cross breeding of plants etc. But it wasn't actually true and crop yields declined. Unfortunately for ordinary Russians, Lysenkoism became the official biology of the state and all opposition was suppressed. Any scientists who opposed it were censored and "cancelled" (jailed). In its place the media published stories claiming it had led to great harvests in Siberia, and that anyone who opposed it was guilty of "mysticism, obscurantism and backwardness".

Would it have been right for a Russian who knew the truth to threaten Lysenko? Perhaps it's not worth discussing - that would lead to "was it ethical to try and assassinate Hitler" type territory. But at the very least a rejection of it would have been understandable and rational, even though at the time - to someone in the grip of state propaganda - attacks on Lysenko would have seemed like irrational attacks on science itself.

Now you're going to be tempted to argue that people who attacked Soviet biologists and people who attack "COVID scientists" are totally different because obviously COVID science is True, and Soviet agronomy was Not True and therefore there's nothing to learn from it. But we are in the same situation today that the Russians were. Although western media isn't technically state controlled, it might as well be. The media is controlled by people who are extremely loyal to the prevailing state ideology and narrative, to the point that the absurd extremes of media propaganda routinely become memes (let's go brandon!). From within the system it can be hard to tell who is really right, and you should think twice then three times before assuming that you're the one who's got it all figured out.

ksec2• 5 years ago

Ok this is not what I expected. I thought the headline was Scientist sending a message to destroy COVID. And COVID is attacking Scientists on an intellectual level.

I didn't expect, quote

Dozens of researchers tell Nature they have received death threats, or threats of physical or sexual violence.

This is disturbing. I am wondering if these reaction are more mixed with political reaction rather than the refusal of science. And interestingly, they are mostly twitter and not Facebook. But currently Facebook gets all the blame.

oceanghost3• 5 years ago

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.”

- Karl Rove

sto_hristo2• 5 years ago

People think that scientists go out on TV to scare them. They think that if the scientists tell them what they want to hear instead of what the reality of the situation actually is, Reality will bend over and do as people want and expect from it. But Reality doesn't do that and people just can't understand this. It's just common stupidity.

tonfreed2• 5 years ago

Part of the problem is that these people don't like being treated like idiots, and we've now got governments all over the west talking down to them and denying them the right to earn a livelihood, and a bunch of inner city midwits with useless degrees very openly calling for their exclusion from society or even genocide in some corners of Twitter.

There is a very loud lack of respect from all sides of the equation.

sto_hristo2• 5 years ago

I don't like to be treated like the next ordinary person. I want to be treated like the royalty i wish i am. So get on with it?

Remove the people with the "useless degrees" and you'd be left with shamans, witch doctors and a pathetic existence that can be ended on a whim by any civilization that kept its own people with the "useless degrees." That is what happened to natives in the Americas when the European touched their shores. Their demise was trivial. Not even with modern WMDs can you wipe off whole populations across whole continents that easy.

So if these people don't like to be treated idiots, they better stop acting like idiots.

rspoerri• 5 years ago

Why is this downvoted?

‘I hope you die’: how the Covid pandemic unleashed attacks on scientists

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