Enough with the condescending BS scientists

by Wesley Farrell

Festivus is upon us, which can only mean one thing: The Airing of Grievances.  And my fellow scientists, I have a lot of problems with you people.  I summarize them with a plea:  Stop being so insufferable.

This recent tweet from Pfizer is the main impetus for this post: 

Rather than provide clear and helpful advice, it is meant to poke fun at and denigrate those rubes who won’t blindly accept what they’re told.  After all, who are they to question the morals and motives of Pfizer, a company that as recently as the 1990s was doing a modern day Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment on African children?  I bet the person turning to Google with some questions even talks with an accent, drives a pickup truck, and doesn’t have the good sense to live in a coastal metropolitan area.  The nerve!   

Or maybe this message from our very own Food and Drug Administration:

Yes, that’s just what we need to do if we don’t want people to take Ivermectin – mock them publicly.  Hey FDA, just FYI, whether you like it or not people have the internet, and they can read.  They can see that Ivermectin has been a widely used medication in humans.  Messages like this do nothing to convince them not to take it.  But that’s not the point really, is it?  The point is to mock, humiliate, ostracize, and most of all signal to the rest of high-brow society that you’re better than others.  And you wonder why people tune you out to listen to Joe Rogan?  It’s simple.  He doesn’t openly despise the majority of Americans.  And when Sanjay Gupta questions him for taking horse paste and he replies, “I can afford people medicine, motherfucker,” it is way more convincing than whatever nonsense you put out.

Or any of the times folks would complain over the past few years about the constantly evolving, inconsistent messages on Covid restrictions and there would be a plethora of replies from scientists saying something along the lines of, “well, we are learning new things, it’s no big deal, that’s just how science works! Calm down, why dontcha?”  Yeah, that is how science works.  But it sure as hell doesn’t make the guy who needlessly lost his job feel much better about not being able to make his mortgage.  It doesn’t repair the damage of years of school closures on a generation of children, especially those already behind the 8-ball because they are starting off in poverty.  You may find this hard to believe, but some people’s experience of Covid was more difficult than having to do Zoom meetings instead of in-person ones, and having to order in as opposed to trying out that hip new tapas bar.

So I end this Airing of Grievances where I started.  Please, stop being like this.  Stop making it seem like all scientists are stuck up, holier-than-thou clowns.  We already have to deal with Neil DeGrasse Tyson giving us all a bad name.  Please stop making it harder than it already is.

Happy Festivus!