It’s hard not to get frustrated with social media, especially when you’re firmly grounded in reality.

Not your preferred reality, where everything that could possibly upset you is hidden from sight, but actual reality, where the full spectrum is out there to please you, challenge your beliefs, and anger you when necessary.

Social media’s tendency to amplify the reality-challenged is one reason I usually do a social-media fast on Saturdays to clear my head. That doesn’t mean I don’t slip every once in a while (such as on April 1 when I was worried about friends who hadn’t yet checked in after the tornado that hit central Arkansas), or spend waaaay too long on a Friday night heading down a research rabbit hole because of something I saw on social media.

Yes, I research. And often just for fun. I’m weird.

This past Friday night, it started with a Quora question in my email: “Why did Joe Biden finally fire Anthony Fauci? Was it the failed vaccines or the Wuhan leak of his lab?”

Oy. Where to start on this one …

First of all, Fauci, 82, retired at the end of the last year; he wasn’t fired. He began his long career at the National Institutes of Health in 1968 (before I was even born!!) as a clinical associate at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) after completing his internship and residency as a medical doctor at Cornell Medical Center. He was appointed chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation in 1980, and four years later became the director of NIAID. As such, he advised every president since Ronald Reagan on public health matters. Over the years, he’s led research into HIV/AIDS, Zika and Ebola, as well as developed effective therapies for formerly fatal inflammatory and immune-system diseases such as Wegener’s granulomatosis and pioneered the field of human immunoregulation. In all that time, he never had to have security … until the Trump administration and its constant downplaying of covid for the MAGA faithful despite Fauci’s efforts to inform.

I’d say he’s more than earned his retirement. Plus, the vaccines weren’t failed (they’ve saved millions, and kept many, including me, from experiencing the worst symptoms if we did get sick, which is how vaccines work; he also didn’t make the vaccines, private companies did), and the Wuhan lab wasn’t “his” (the lab did get a few hundred thousand in U.S. funding from NIH, but not from Fauci). And remember, we still don’t know everything about the virus’ origins, thanks to China’s hostility toward sharing information.

In the course of reading responses to the Quora question, I happened upon an answer that began with “Kary Mullis thinks [F]auci is a complete and total douchebag.” Aside from the redundancy and the unimaginative insult, this particular response, citing multiple claims of things that didn’t happen, read like that of someone who lived in an alternate universe.

Into the rabbit hole I went.

Mullis died in August 2019, before covid-19 hit, so his comments about Fauci had absolutely nothing to do with covid; they were instead about HIV and AIDS. Thousands needlessly died because of people (like South African President Thabo Mbeki) who paid attention to Mullis’ claim that poverty (or other things, depending on the day and his mood), not HIV, was the cause of AIDS.

Social-media users point to Mullis as having invented PCR (hence credible) and saying that PCR tests couldn’t be used for medical diagnosis (as they have been with covid). But they were actually quoting John Lauritsen, the author of a 1996 article about HIV and AIDs, and removing the context clarifying how PCR identifies substances, according to a Reuters fact check.

Mullis won the 1993 Nobel in chemistry (not medicine, you’ll note; he has no background in the areas of virology and epidemiology, a fact that’s kind of important since he’s commenting on an area in which he has no expertise) for his PCR work in the mid-1980s (a good argument can be made that at least two other names should have been added to the citation because it was a parallel team that proved his hypothesis; he was only able to produce ambiguous results), but by that time, he had long since quit the company for which PCR was developed. Coby McDonald of California magazine reported in December 2019 that Mullis quit in 1986, “moved to La Jolla, took up surfing, and largely turned his back on science.”

Colleagues had described him as difficult to work with and his work as sloppy (he had little knowledge of molecular biology, which was what the work entailed), and he was constantly causing drama of one sort or another (for one thing, though he was married, he was a serial cheater, sometimes with colleagues in the lab). To top all that off, he had been manufacturing and taking psychedelic drugs since at least his college days at Berkeley (so, good chemist, terrible biologist).

In 1995, he was brought on as an expert witness for the O.J. Simpson defense team, but by that time his eccentricities were well-known. “He’d become a vociferous critic of widely accepted scientific ideas” reported McDonald, “ridiculing the notions that CFCs caused the ozone hole, that humans caused climate change, and that HIV caused AIDS. Mainstream scientists were corrupt, he claimed, attracting funding for their research by spreading paranoia.” When prosecutors signaled that they would cite his contrarian views and his drug use to undermine his credibility, as well as take measures to ensure he wasn’t high when he testified, the defense chose not to risk putting him on the stand.

Hey, I didn’t even get into his claims of a glowing talking raccoon or the alien abduction that supposedly followed. But yeah, this guy’s credibility was pretty much shot, at least since 1985 and the raccoon story (which he detailed in his autobiography; you can read a relevant excerpt here and marvel at the soul who actually watched that entire two-hour interview where he talked about Fauci and HIV/AIDS with talk-radio host Gary Null, who is just as fond of medical conspiracy theories and pseudoscience as Mullis was).

The lesson here is that credibility of the source and context matter. Facts and the scientific method mean something, and while we might not like something we find out, we’re not about to construct an alternate reality to avoid it. If everything you read and hear lines up with your beliefs, you might be living in some imaginary construct where every issue is binary and you’re on the “winning side” (there’s no winning side; life is not a game).

Reality bites, but we have to get back to sharing the same one if we want the American experiment to survive much longer.

And in that reality, there are chocolate and cuddly kitties to ease your stress.

TOTALLY worth it.