Med boss learns lesson about “liking” too much

When Thomas Jefferson University President Mark Tykocinski “liked” some controversial tweets, he “should have known better,” Jefferson CEO Joseph G. Cacchione wrote in an email to the Jefferson community, and reported by the Inquirer, which published the “likes” a couple of days earlier.

He should have known better than to put anything on a forum that was open to inspection by common scolds, led by the Inquirer’s Scarlet Letter morality squad.

What did Tykocinski “like”? Some tweets that questioned the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccine. He also “liked” one other that made reference to what’s called “gender affirmation” surgery as “child mutilation.” A single tweet about a complicated subject on which there are a variety of opinions. 

Tykocinski is hardly some right-wing quack. A Yale-trained molecular immunologist, he didn’t rise to head the school without academic merit, and vaccines fall within his specialty.

His biggest problem was that his Twitter account identified him with Jefferson, although I’m pretty sure the morality squad would have caught up with him even if he hadn’t. This smacks of an inside-Jefferson cancel culture.

Specifically, the Inquirer pored through hundreds of “likes” on his Twitter account, and reported that he “liked” some tweets by Alex Berenson, whom the Inquirer identified merely as “the pandemic’s wrongest man,” using the Leftist The Atlantic magazine’s description.

They might have said that Berenson is himself a Yale alumnus, a former The New York Times reporter who covered many big stories, and published lots of contrarian information about virus vaccinations. 

It is said that much of what Berenson said was wrong. I have no way of knowing if Tykocinski “liked” tweets that were clearly wrong, partially right, or fully right.

Keep in mind that during the pandemic the CDC kept changing its mind about the virus and protection from it. The science was a moving target.

I have read the positive and I have read the negative. Just Monday I got a booster, my fifth shot. I did the research and I decided to go with the predominance of science. 

In an email to the Inquirer, Tykocinski said he apologized to the Jefferson community and said he used “like” to bookmark certain tweets for later investigation, and was not endorsing a viewpoint by “liking” it.

“I regret my lack of understanding of how ‘liking’ a tweet is an implied endorsement,” he said.

OK, he’s 70, but he didn’t know “like” is a thumb’s up?

He added that he and his family are fully vaccinated.

Really, that doesn’t matter.

What should matter is Tykocinski himself did not tweet anything contrary to accepted science.

So far, Tykocinski has not been fired or demoted.

He shouldn’t be.

I’m a little amazed that a nothing burger like this winds up on Page One. Probably because it coincides with the progressive beliefs of the editors. 

When the pandemic struck, it showed how little we know.

We were told that masks were ineffective, and then they were effective, and then ineffective again. We were told schools needed to be closed, then opened, then closed. 

There was a lot of misinformation, often a result of a lack of knowledge.

What I know about knowledge is that it expands as more people put an oar in the water. More voices, not fewer.

The remedy for bad facts is good facts, not to suppress “bad” facts. Remember that even without Twitter Galileo was accused of being a heretic, and was punished for publishing “bad” facts that went against the scientific consensus.

But Galileo was right.