Tori Espensen

the more i try not to be mad, the madder i get lol

I bought a bottle of champagne that can be stored vertically without deteriorating, but I would love to not have to test how long that applies

me falling back: haha, heck yes!

me springing forward: well this sucks!

A lot of people care more about being right than being effective.

Let me know how that works out

Roll that beautiful bean footage

As a neuroscientist, I have long said that the least interesting question in neuroscience is consciousness. Turns out it's the most obnoxious too

I listed four resources and you responded in less than three minutes to say they weren't what you asked for. That not enough time to read the resources and determine that they didn't contain the information you were looking for, which leads me to believe that this request wasn't made in good faith.

Here are some consensus statements/summaries:

Am Assoc of Pediatrics- Talking with Vaccine Hesitant Parents
WHO- How to Talk About Vaccines
National Academies- Communication Strategies for Promoting COVID-19 Vaccine Acceptance
Council of Canadian Academies- Health Product Risk Communication

Smh and he didn't even protect the Hawaii-UMass game

Friday night entertainment: poured a glass of wine and sitting on my balcony eavesdropping on the party two doors down. Two drunk bros are currently debating the difference between love and lust.

It's noticeable to me that every public health practitioner/doctor/historian of medicine/health communicator was aligned in this convo, and the pushback was from people without that orientation. Much like the people they are determined to denigrate, their fear and rage trumps research and experience

Every time HBO changes the name of its streaming service

Hate when that happens

In one study (O'Leary 2024) while more than 20% of parents surveyed identified as hesitant about childhood shots, only 1-3% refuse all vaccines and have fixed attitudes. Lumping all of those people together and rejecting them in the same way is a disservice to public health

It's important to differentiate between the antivax influencers who intentionally spread disinformation, and the people who are vulnerable to that disinfo because they fall in other parts of a vaccine hesitancy spectrum. A relative minority of people are hardcore, unmutable antivax

Me, 37 years old on a Friday night, giving the roast potatoes a spritz of olive oil before putting them back in the oven: "🎶🎶Errybody in the club getting crispy🎶🎶"

It's not lost on me that many people can't understand why people wouldn't follow the science of vaccines while simultaneously being unwilling to follow the science of vaccine communication best practices.

I really don't think I should have to verify that I am human to look at the Cheesecake Factory menu online. Dogs and robots should be able to look at 57 types of cheesecakes too.

Presumably making this matchup permanent was what Trump's meeting about college athletics was about?

Being right is different than being effective!

If you don't leave space for the fact that people are humans with human emotions and human inconsistencies and human risk assessment skills and human need to feel control and human decision-making algorithms, you're not helping anyone

Yes! People conflating antivax agents who intentionally spread vaccine disinformation with parents who are vulnerable and exploited by that disinfo and ascribing the same motivations to both groups, reading "we need to have empathy" for the second as needing to accept the former

The need to label people "bad people" or "bad parents" is also counterproductive. People can make bad choices without being bad people. People can unintentionally cause harm without being bad people. Labeling fundamental nature instead of vulnerability and systems isn't going to move the needle

Research shows that vaccine hesitancy is a spectrum that ranges from some vaxes but not all, to all vaxes on a delayed schedule, to all vaxes on schedule, but unsure if it was the right decision. Relatively few vaccine-hesitant people are committed antivaxxers. So how we approach people matters

Literally public health communication relies on meeting people where they are to attempt to bridge the information gap. Beating them over the head screeching that they’re “dumb/wrong” furthers that gap. Come on people!!

It's not lost on me that many people can't understand why people wouldn't follow the science of vaccines while simultaneously being unwilling to follow the science of vaccine communication best practices.

While it can feel good to approach the situation that way, it's not what research shows is an effective way of communicating, building trust, or engendering belief and behavior change. If we want people to follow the science on vaccines, we should also follow the science on how to communicate

Yep. Few people are full-on antivaxxers. Vaccine hesitancy is a spectrum that ranges from some vaxes but not all, to all vaxes on a delayed schedule, to all vaxes on schedule, but unsure about it. Which is why the goal of antivax leaders is to exploit that uneasiness to push people more extreme

It's essentially a cult in the tactics they use and the way that they prey on vulnerable people at vulnerable points in their lives, and bringing people out of it requires similar approaches, time, and effort to cult deprogramming , including providing other types of support, outlets, and systems

antivaxx leaders/grifters prey on parents & kids 👇

I'm not saying that no one should judge if they go on a speaking tour about how they still wouldn't vaccinate, I'm saying that it is a completely human reaction in the immediate aftermath of a child's death
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