JF

18. But there are also a slew of vicious invectives. Attacks on my motives, my character, my intelligence. Calls for me to be reprimanded or fired by my university for my efforts (for what, I still don't understand). Ill wishes regarding my health. You name it.

19. I'm sure that 99% of these are motivated by what we call tribal epistemology, the idea that truth is determined not so much by the facts as by the way that a claim aligns with the story that a preferred leader is telling.

20. I try to shake these off, and turn to the day's science news. This gets hard with every consecutive 100-hour week. Every day, there are new scicomm crises blowing up, and the thing that kills me is that they are almost without exception MANUFACTURED with political intent.

21. And I guess this is the crux of the thread, though I didn't know it until I got here. (Twitter is an odd medium, writing stream-of-consciousness, unable to edit let alone restructure.) For me, this is the heartbreaking part. It turns out we're not all in this together.

i. A brief postscript. For some kinds of scientific communication, it wouldn't matter so much. I was an evolutionary biologist through the heyday of the Intelligent Design movement. Public education was at stake, but millions of lives were not on the line.

ii. What is so terrible about the politicization of this pandemic is this: what people believe impacts how they behave, and it impacts the ability of our governments to muster the political will to enact the measures we need to slow and ultimately stop the spread of the virus.

iii. And so the fight against misinformation is not merely a scientific communication issue. It's a vital public health necessity.

iv. In all the years of studying infectious disease and planning for this day, I never dreamed that when it came I'd be opposed by my own federal government, a non-trivial fraction of my fellow citizens, and as yet undetermined fraction of hostile foreign actors.