There appears to be a Greek chorus of people piling on this lady this morning. I'll encourage folks to consider that she is a victim of a misguided movement.
Saturday morning storytime. (thread) https://twitter.com/borzou/status/1276882879318982656

The last few months have watched the story I've been obsessed with for close to a decade go mainstream. There is a large and growing population of Americans who have utterly rejected consensus scientific opinion as magnetic north.

The entrances to this group have been seen as separate, I think, by most observers. There are diet cranks, anti-vaxxers, woo medicine advocates, preppers, crypto folks, 9/11 truthers.... These groups are coalescing around the COVID crisis, and their numbers are substantial.

If you doubt me on this, and think I am overreacting, I'll encourage you to look into the number of QAnon believers that won primaries this election cycle. Depending on how you define followers, as many as 20 have been linked to the bizarre movement. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/qanon-nothing-can-stop-what-is-coming/610567/

I remember the moment that I was first aware that something was seriously wrong. In my nutrition class, I was contrasting ADA-style carb counting diets with the emerging pop diet books around low carb strategies c. 2012.

I had a student start shouting about how she couldn't believe that her nutrition teacher was stuck in the 1970s and wasn't teaching that cholesterol didn't matter and that very low carb diets cured diabetes.
This is at a time when the biggest clinical trial was under 20 people.

I tried the usual professor strategy of deescalation - "there is a pilot trial on this, results are interesting. Still some important unknowns about cardio risk, etc." This ended up escalating. I was met by conspiracy about big pharma, government, Monsanto, etc.

Student screamed at me for another minute, and I ended class. She followed me down the hall, cornered me, and shouted in my face (spittle!) for 5 or 10 minutes.
I'm a fit guy, can take care of myself (Michigan bravado), but this was still quite unsettling. Pure rage.

This person was removed from my class, was allowed to earn credit through self-study, and now is seeing patients at a clinic not far from where I work. My guess is that there are hundreds if not thousands like her across the country.
Some of them are in the @AAPSonline

These hardcore denialist physicians (and writers, podcasters, PhDs, etc) have worked to weaponize a group of disaffected US residents, creating a sleeper cell of radicalized anti-science zealots waiting for their moment. The vaccine protests last year were the trial run.

Put yourself in this TJ lady's shoes for a minute. She has been convinced that COVID is a conspiracy, that the masks the people around her are wearing are causing disease, and that mass media is 100% untrustworthy. Do you think she has many friends? Family? Is she happy?

We have a full blown crisis, and I don't claim I know what to do about it.
I do, though, think that our pointing and laughing at the pawns in this chess game totes makes the problem worse, not better. If you are posting under #karensgonewild, I'll encourage you to reconsider.

If everyone that was getting a chuckle out of mocking a marginalized person spent that time trying to get social media to have better policy about misinformation and to deplatform the drivers of this movement, we'd make more progress. /end