Some high-profile examples of harassment have been well documented. A survey by Nature of more than 300 scientists who have given media interviews about COVID-19 - many of whom had also commented about the pandemic on social media - has found wide experience of harassment or abuse 15% said they had received death threats (see ‘Negative impacts’). Kuppalli’s experience during the pandemic is not uncommon. The police officer who visited Kuppalli after a second death-threat call suggested she should get herself a gun. The threatening e-mails, calls and online comments continued. She called the police, but didn’t hear that they took any action. “It made me very anxious, nervous and upset,” says Kuppalli, who now works at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland. But the phone call was a scary escalation. Kuppalli, who had just moved from California to the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, had been dealing with online abuse for months after she’d given high-profile media interviews on COVID-19, and had recently testified to a US congressional committee on how to hold safe elections during the pandemic. Infectious-diseases physician Krutika Kuppalli had been in her new job for barely a week in September 2020, when someone phoned her at home and threatened to kill her. Credit: US House of Representatives’ Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Public-health researcher Tara Kirk Sell (centre) experienced online and e-mail attacks after talking about COVID-19 in the media.
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