Sorry Makulec, Twitter is a public media, not your private chatroom

Here* is the story:

Then a stranger went through her old tweets and found confirmation that she had happily gotten vaccinated while pregnant. This person created an image showing her tweet about vaccination next to her tweet about losing her baby. “Safe … and effective” the person wrote, implying a connection. The image spread across the internet. This is despite the fact that her baby’s death had nothing to do with vaccinations.

If you have a twitter account that strangers can follow, obviously you have a twitter account where strangers can go through your old tweets.

You consider it a fact that your baby's death had nothing to do with vaccinations, that stranger didn't.

“I did not expect the moment of my deepest grief and pain to be weaponized against pregnant women and vaccines that could protect them from the worst consequences of Covid-19,” Makulec wrote in a guest essay this week about the experience.

The deal about sharing a thing in public is, other people can weaponise it. I don't agree it is "against pregnant women" since the guy certainly did not think vaccines "could protect them from the worst consequences of Covid-19."

Vaccination is somewhat of a lottery (most diseases, wouldn't say that about rabies vaccine for someone bitten**), and going public is something of a lottery. You chose both lotteries. The latter one allowed someone else to speculate you had lost on the former one.

Makulec does not say this solely as a victim of misinformation and Covid-related online bullying, but as an active opponent of it. She is a public health professional who works in data visualization. She spends her time thinking about how to present Covid-19 information in a clear way.

You have one agenda, the guy who quoted your public statements had another one. And his using your statements for that other agenda does NOT constitute bullying, whether he does it online or in print or in any other way.

“In a time filled with unknowns, people seek explanations for why terrible things happen and also to assure themselves that one person’s tragedy couldn’t happen to them,” writes Makulec. “But to do so with cruel disregard for the truth, as was done to my family, is an unacceptable new norm that’s reinforced when people demand and share information without thinking about it critically.”

The guy precisely did think critically about two of your stories. Thinking critically and thinking as you would like people to think, coincides in you and your likeminded friends, not in everyone.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Robert Bellarmine***
13.V.2022

* Quoted from the free preview on New York Times. I claim fair use for these quotes.
** Since after a certain time without vaccine lethality is 100 %.
*** It is also Our Lady at the Martyrs:

Romae Dedicatio Ecclesiae sanctae Mariae ad Martyres, quam beatus Bonifatius Papa Quartus, expurgato deorum omnium veteri fano, quod Pantheon vocabatur, in honorem beatae semper Virginis Mariae et omnium Martyrum dedicavit, tempore Phocae Imperatoris. Ipsius vero Dedicationis annuam solemnitatem postmodum Summus Pontifex Gregorius item Quartus ab universa Ecclesia, et in honorem quidem omnium Sanctorum, Kalendis Novembris agendam esse constituit.

After the Risorgimento, the building was given back to pagan worship by a Jewish mayor of Rome, Nathan, who didn't like Bernini's additions to the Church./HGL

PS, I think I see some Jews who are not like that, God bless them!/HGL