When critics disagree with me, I’m a Pharma Shill. When critics disagree with a woman, it gets sexual. [Terra Sigillata]
Case in point:
A few days ago, I sang the praises of last week's article in Wired magazine by Amy Wallace on pediatric infectious disease and immunology specialist, Dr Paul Offit, and the anti-vaccination movement in the US.
Wallace's article has been widely heralded by the scientific community but has evoked the wrath of several anti-vaccination groups and individual followers.
When the target is a man, their motives are questioned and their intellect maligned. But when the target is a woman, guess what happens? Here is a compiled thread from a series of tweets yesterday from Amy Wallace (@msamywallace)
I've been called stupid, greedy, a whore, a prostitute, and a "fking lib." I've been called the author of "heinous tripe."
J.B. Handley, the founder of Generation Rescue, the anti-vaccine group that actress Jenny McCarthy helps promote, sent an essay title" "Paul Offit Rapes (intellectually) Amy Wallace and Wired Magazine." In it, he implied that Offit had slipped me a date rape drug. "The roofie cocktails at Paul Offit's house must be damn good," he wrote. Later, he sent a revised version that omitted rape and replaced it with the image of me drinking Offit's Kool-aid. That one was later posted at the anti-vaccine blog Age of Autism. You can read that blog here
I've been told I'll think differently "if you live to grow up." I've been warned that "this article will haunt you for a long time." Just now, I got an email so sexually explicit that I can't paraphrase it here. Except to say it contained the c-word and a reference to dead fish.
Amy Wallace is a seasoned journalist with over 25 years of experience writing professionally for such publications as The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and Condé Nast. She has covered the highly-contentious and often backstabbing culture of the entertainment industry, topics as polarizing as the death penalty, and charged profiles such as that of an emotionally-terrorized woman who murdered her husband. Yet, she notes that she has never before "experienced such an avalanche of letters and emails."
Well, Ms. Wallace, you have committed the sin of 1) being a female professional and 2) questioning a vocal and vitriolic pseudoscience demographic.
And like every other woman science blogger I know, without exception, you are now the target of the type of electronic criticism of the lowest common denominator.
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