Do you think that all the MAGA vaccine denial and mask vitriol is basically harmless? Hell, let 'em do whatever they want to their own bodies and then vent about it on Facebook. There's one group that would disagree:
A new survey of physicians and biomedical scientists in the U.S. found that nearly two-thirds experienced harassment on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic. Pro-vaccine messages were a common target of online vitriol. So were posts that endorsed the use of face masks or promoted public health in general
....The harassment came in many forms. In addition to violent threats, the doctors and scientists said, their medical practices were slammed with bogus patient reviews, their attackers campaigned to get them fired, their personal information was shared online, and their faces were pasted onto photos of porn models.
Nearly two-thirds of all physicians reported being harassed over COVID-19 advice. Here's a brief sample of some of the comments from the survey:
Fucking hell.
It would be interesting to see the breakdown of which platforms were the worst (a quick scan did not reveal any except a general social media désignation).
I'm betting the bird app is the worst offender.
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My wife is an ER doctor. Her life was a living hell during peak Covid. For what its worth, (at least in northern CA) Covid confrontations were not limited to just the MAGA crew.
Rather, on more than one occasion, she was accused of not taking Covid seriously enough. Given how gowned up she was, that also seems crazy...
Probably stems from the fundamental misunderstanding most citizens have regarding medicine. I'm sick, this sucks, I pay you, you take away the sucks, and I go home.
No one should be surprised by this. Anyone who paid any attention to the behavior of anti-vaxxers before this would know what to expect.
I know someone who lost a child unexpectedly, and who started working to raise research funding and awareness about it. Guess what? She was inundated with abusive, hateful garbage from anti-vaxxers, who pile on just about any and every dead child story to claim it was due to vaccines.
The paranoid, conspiracy crowd is extremely nasty. You see the same with the Alex Jones "crisis actor" crowd, the incel/men's rights crowd, and the Trump-won crowd. They feel fully justified in sending all kinds of hate and abuse.
Conservatives spend their lives wearing their mirrored shades the wrong way around.
Elsewhere there are articles about the end of the internet's social media era, with the decline of Twitter as we know it and the failure of competitors to thrive. Maybe that's not such a bad thing, in light of what we see here.
Like +25.
It’s the same group of basic nutters that are responsible for this and pretty much most of what’s wrong in this country today. Obama’s presidency seems to have liberated them from the social pressures that constrained them. Now, they’re out, proud and “taking the country back”.
And there doesn’t seem to be a way to hit back at them. They’re filled with shamelessness. We need to find a way for decent people to force these monsters back into the closet.
I'd say putting an appropriate number in prison would be a start. If there isn't a crime defined for spreading life threatening lies, maybe it's time legislatures passed one. And definitely, threatening people's lives should be prosecutable, even if the nutters don't show up at the front door waving their little Ay-Kays.
that's just it Mitch
decent people don't force anyone back into a closet.
What decent people are doing is cutting these nutters out of their lives. They can live wild and free in their own damaged little worlds, they aren't welcome in mine. Thankfully, many are picking up stakes are moving to Idaho, Montana, Texas and Florida where they can exercise their freedom to be jerks without interference from the rest of us.
They generally move to pro-death states like those mentioned.
For those of us engaged in direct pt care of covid pts it was probably higher. It was very rewarding to have the family of a pt whose life you were saving threatening you.
Steve