Others say that Feigl-Ding himself has been known to privately message his critics-a tack that some found unwelcome.įor his part, though, Feigl-Ding says many of his critics’ disagreements with him have come down to a difference in style. Some complain that Feigl-Ding’s army of followers can be hateful when other scientists publicly disagree with his tweets.
But as his influence has grown, and as the pandemic enters a much more worrying phase, critics have continued to debate whether Feigl-Ding, for all his enthusiasms, is doing more harm than good.
Such critiques of Feigl-Ding’s particular brand of COVID-19 commentary are by no means new, and previous articles-in The Atlanticas far back as January, for example, New York Magazine’s Intelligencer in March, the Chronicle of Higher Education in April, and in The Daily Beast in May - have explored questions about his expertise in epidemiology (his focus prior to COVID-19 was on nutrition) and whether his approach to public health communication is appropriate or alarmist. “He tweets something sensational and out of context, buries any caveats further down-thread, and watches the clicks and roll in.” To Angela Rasmussen, a Columbia University virologist, this represents a pattern. It wasn’t until the sixth tweet in the thread that Feigl-Ding mentioned the important detail that the “worrisome” mutation doesn’t appear to make people sicker, though it could make the virus more contagious. In another, Feigl-Ding appeared to summarize a Washington Post piece on a coronavirus mutation, but omitted crucial phrases-including the fact that just one of the five mentioned studies was peer-reviewed. In a thread about the first study of a COVID-19 outbreak on an airplane, for example, Feigl-Ding failed to mention the important caveat that researchers suspected all but one case occurred before people got on the airplane. Hu profiles Feigl-Ding for Undark, asking whether he’s the town crier the internet needs or just another purveyor of disinformation:Įven when his public exclamations are technically accurate, Feigl-Ding’s critics suggest that they too often invite misinterpretations. Perhaps you’ve read some of his viral tweets - the most famous ones begin with phrases like “BLOODY HELL” and “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD.” In less than a year, his following has grown from 2,000 to more than 250,000 Twitter users. No one embodies them more fully than scientist Eric Feigl-Ding, a Twitter sensation for his urgent threads about the coronavirus pandemic. How should scientists balance the need to raise the alarm about a health threat with the complexity and methodical pace of research required to understand that threat? How do you weigh potential harm done versus good achieved when deciding what to tell a frightened public? These aren’t new questions, but in 2020, they’ve come into sharp focus.
0 kommentar(er)
