JonTron Draws The Ire Of Social Media After Tweeting Critically About Animal Testing In Vaccine Development
Controversial YouTuber JonTron, best known for never finishing Sonic '06 on Game Grumps, releasing a half-dozen videos a year and once asserting that "wealthy blacks commit more crime than poor whites," has returned to social media's crosshairs after posting a series of tweets that appeared to criticize alleged animal testing done under Dr. Fauci.
As head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Fauci has come under scrutiny for allegedly funding studies done on beagles in Tunisia that saw the dogs' vocal cords removed and their heads force-fed to flies. There is some debate on if the allegations are true and confusion on whether the NIAID actually funded the study in question, which was testing vaccines for the disease Leishmania infantum, of which flies are a vector and dogs are a reservoir.
While Republicans and Democrats have called on Fauci to answer questions regarding the claims, right-leaning news organizations and politicians have been more vocal in trying to use the allegations to discredit Fauci, who has long drawn the ire of the American right for his expertise and guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This made JonTron's sarcastic "just trust the science, bro!" quip read like a potentially anti-COVID-vaccine statement, as even though the allegations against the NIAID have nothing to do with the development of COVID vaccines, JonTron's focus on Fauci resembles conservative anti-vax talking points. The most charitable reads on social media agreed with JonTron that the allegations are disturbing but have no bearing on whether or not vaccines are effective.
Many others were disappointed but not shocked that JonTron re-entered public consciousness with what appeared to be anti-vax tweets.
After several hours of trending on Twitter, JonTron attempted to back away from the anti-vax implications of his tweets and cast himself as a citizen "concerned" that public discourse has reached a "dangerous level" of "conformity."
Share Pin
HardcoreHunter
"Controversial YouTuber JonTron, best known for never finishing Sonic '06 on Game Grumps, releasing a half-dozen videos a year".
Gee I wonder if Adam doesn't like JonTron.
What Jon is saying here is right though. He's talking about conformity and ethics. The knee jerk reaction he received over this kind shows his point. People reacted to this as if they were self-righteous zealots condemning a heretic.
Phhase
Yeah, I wonder.
Revic
There's general conformity around points of view like "serial murder is bad." Sometimes there's conformity around an issue because it's that agonizingly obvious and there's that painfully little excuse for rejecting it. Conformity unto itself is not an inherent evil. If it isn't, then only reason to object to that unto itself is if you reject the underlying opinion supported by that conformity. Redirecting the apparent objection from that to the abstract concept of "conformity" is sleight of hand.
HardcoreHunter
You said a lot of words to pretty much say nothing. Saying something itself is not an inherent evil is meaningless. By that logic fascism is not an inherent evil as the leader only wants what they personally believe is best. Pasture injected a child with Rabies to test his vaccine on and lied to his family about what he was being treated for. There are reasons to question the ethics of the medical field even being pro-vax. Conformity when you know the ethics are wrong is how the slope slips to dystopia.
view the rest of this conversation →
LordofD:
Personally i too hate Animal Testing in general, but i can understand that such a thing has lead to some of the greatest medical advancements in recent history, stuff like Insulin, Anaesthesia and Penicillin may not exist now adays whitow Animal Testing, so until we find a more viable and "caring" alternative, i guess it is a necesary evil.
shogungari
Maybe, but hearing the phrase "We removed the dog's vocal chords so it wouldn't bark in pain as flies gnawed on its face" is pretty fucked up even for animal testing.
Panuru
Absolutely correct if the allegation is true, but the motivations of the "I'm worried about animals" investigators become clear when they go after no the researchers who did it nor the organization they worked for nor the organization that allegedly funded them, but one specific guy from the organization that allegedly funded them. And a guy who probably isn't the one to approve grants.
Timey16
I mean in the early stages you definitely don't want to test drugs on humans. You need to rule out the worst of the worst side effects first.
And that only works by testing it on living creatures OTHER than humans.
And often that includes "higher organisms" because just using rats has proven to be unreliable, like the Thalidomide scandal… which didn't affect rats at all. So it was let through. But it could be proven in court that this drug was at fault because it had the same deforming side effects on other animals, such as chicks.