There are other ways to communicate with fellow scientists that aren’t a public facing news outlet. There are journals, bulletins, email lists. This was press released by a comms department.
-
-
-
Replying to @DanielleFong
I have an MSc in science communication and I used to work in a comms department, I’m 98% sure that’s how it went down. It’s not as egregious as other examples of small/preprint/speculative studies hitting the headlines but it’s part of a concerning pattern.
2 replies 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @Sorrelish
looks like real work but i'm super annoyed that it's hard to find the actual study. OTOH given the madness that is getting through to the government or anybody & the insanity that is people YOLOing through this pandemic I don't think they're wrong for attempting a press release
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @DanielleFong
That’s the point - there is no study for anyone to read yet. That’s what a preprint is. It’s still in peer review and hasn’t been published. Peer review could still find major flaws but it’s too late because the headline is already out there.
2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @Sorrelish @DanielleFong
It may well be correct but that still doesn’t tell us anything useful - it hasn’t been proven in patients and they haven’t studied whether covid can pass the blood-brain barrier which is quite a major caveat. But it’s a scary headline that will get a bunch of coverage.
2 replies 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @Sorrelish @DanielleFong
If it is correct it achieves very little, if it’s incorrect it could seriously harm public trust in the science and the research process. Given that people are very paranoid, you can’t afford to squander that trust. We need people to act based on science.
2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @Sorrelish @DanielleFong
If they don’t believe the science, persuasion will be much harder. Getting people to wear masks, get tests and eventually get vaccines gets harder every time some new science has to be walked back.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @Sorrelish
but science is a messy process! our communications are an absolute mess, it's true, as is our media, that shut down and made fun of so much of the inital alarm. everyone was told "don't cause panic" back then too -- what actually happened was people didn't pay attention!
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @DanielleFong
You don’t deal with the problem ‘science is messy’ by dispensing with the exact processes designed to make it less messy. You don’t go ‘this car is out of control, better remove the brake pedal!’
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
you may be misunderstanding me. the reality of science is that it's messy, period. the process for shielding others from the messiness of science can't be allowed to interfere with the essential messiness of science. that's why we need things like sci-hub and medrxiv / biorxiv
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.
