A quick thread on the McNeil thing.

A few years back, McNeil wrote a book called Zika: the Emerging Epidemic, which I read and reviewed for Quarterly Review of Biology in April 2018.

I was absolutely shocked with how he talked about race, and about women - both in the abstract, and in his specific interactions.

A couple spicy tweets got some conversation going in my Twitter circles, but that was it. Since then, whenever folks talk about his various odd takes, I've always thrown this example out - and folks are often surprised to see it. (I don't think the book was widely read )

In the review I wrote, I tried to be honest, but didn't think I could safely be as critical as I wanted to be - I decided to let the examples speak for themselves. And I think they really, really paint a picture of this guy's brain:

All of this has been in plain view and public record. And I think increasingly we're about to see that other people's Don McNeil stories speak for themself too. https://twitter.com/medfraud_pmh/status/1354970125313708041

The guy has a lot to say, in fact. https://twitter.com/KendraWrites/status/1354953501114322951

I'm reupping all this because, well, when I've brought this up, it's mostly gotten traction with either (1) other younger journalists or (2) female academics in infectious disease work. A lot of people have just... not cared. And that, too, is not particularly notable.

What is notable, though, is that disease journalism is a small field, with a small number of senior people - journalists who've "been around since [outbreak]" who make or break scientists' careers through lavish praise. And a lot of them are well known to be friends with McNeil.

I've been thinking a lot about what @KendraWrites says about racism in newsrooms - how these aren't isolated incidents, how these problems are known years in advance (or from 10 minutes in a room with the people in question), about the systemic nature of the problem.

McNeil is not the only disease journalist whose work has racism threaded through it. Racism in science journalism trickles through to science, trickles through to who succeeds, trickles through to how we approach problems like pandemic preparedness.

It's part of one ecosystem: how we talk about China and wildlife trade is how we talk about abortion in Latin America, is how we talk about "explorers" and "oracles", how we keep known Problems in science by way of the known Problems who sing their praises in press

And the current system - one that feels good when one of us wins the lottery and gets our face on the cover of WIRED, or whatever depressing lionization, so people don't challenge it because ~maybe it'll be me~ - fucking sucks. It's not just McNeil.