[Mods: please don't merge this action alert with any other thread about Brian's article - thanks!]
Last week we all read journalist ME-patient Brian Vastag's brilliant, eloquent letter to Dr Collins of the NIH - "Dear Dr. Collins: I’m Disabled. Can the N.I.H. Spare a Few Dimes?" - and saw it get retweeted via his journalist connections to an audience of over 670,000.
Now it's been reprinted in The Washington Post! That's one of the US's biggest newspapers (circulation 470,000) and is read by the political movers and shakers in Washington (the US capital and seat of government).
We need to boost it by visiting the page to give it traffic, tweeting, Facebooking, and commenting online in support of it. And we need to tell people how they can help us. Let's get some action from them!
Here's what to do
(1) Visit the page!
(2) Share the article on Twitter and Facebook by clicking on the Twitter/Facebook icons at the top of the article. Here's the Washington Post's own tweet about the article, which you can retweet.
(3) ‘Favourite’ and retweet the tweets of the prominent journalists and others who have tweeted the link to Brian’s article.
(4) Tweet a message to Dr Collins @NIHDirector with a link to Brian’s Washington Post article and ask him to help ME patients.
(5) If you're in the US, tweet your congressperson (find them here).
(6) Put up high-quality comments on the article. Here's how to do it. [Edit: weblinks are allowed, apparently (just not mine
).]
Online comments can:
Last week we all read journalist ME-patient Brian Vastag's brilliant, eloquent letter to Dr Collins of the NIH - "Dear Dr. Collins: I’m Disabled. Can the N.I.H. Spare a Few Dimes?" - and saw it get retweeted via his journalist connections to an audience of over 670,000.
Now it's been reprinted in The Washington Post! That's one of the US's biggest newspapers (circulation 470,000) and is read by the political movers and shakers in Washington (the US capital and seat of government).
We need to boost it by visiting the page to give it traffic, tweeting, Facebooking, and commenting online in support of it. And we need to tell people how they can help us. Let's get some action from them!
Here's what to do
(1) Visit the page!
(2) Share the article on Twitter and Facebook by clicking on the Twitter/Facebook icons at the top of the article. Here's the Washington Post's own tweet about the article, which you can retweet.
(3) ‘Favourite’ and retweet the tweets of the prominent journalists and others who have tweeted the link to Brian’s article.
(4) Tweet a message to Dr Collins @NIHDirector with a link to Brian’s Washington Post article and ask him to help ME patients.
(5) If you're in the US, tweet your congressperson (find them here).
(6) Put up high-quality comments on the article. Here's how to do it. [Edit: weblinks are allowed, apparently (just not mine
).]Online comments can:
- back up the points that Brian makes;
- link to the #MEAction petition for funding equality;
- talk about the fantastic research that's ready to go by Dr Ian Lipkin's team at Columbia and Dr Ron Davis's Nobel-Laureate-stuffed group at END ME/CFS, as soon as they get the money;
- mention our fantastic biomedical research charities (particularly the major US ones with the big names such as the Microbe Discovery Project and END ME/CFS);
- talk about the need to replicate the Norwegian rituximab work;
- agree that it's ridiculous that ME/CFS is in the Office of Research on Women's Health and that it needs urgently to move into a more appropriate institution with a big budget;
- and so on.
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