TORONTO -- If you’ve found yourself craving a stiff drink on a Monday morning during the coronavirus pandemic, you’re in good company.
Nobel prize-winning immunologist Peter Doherty provided some much-needed respite from the effects of ongoing isolation Monday after inadvertently asking his 26,000 followers for the opening hours of Dan Murphy’s, a liquor retailer in Australia.
Confusing Twitter for Google, Doherty tweeted a simple message: “Dan Murphy opening hours," he wrote just before noon local time.
But Doherty, the namesake of the Doherty Institute, which has been at the forefront of Australia’s response to the pandemic, didn’t shy away from the mistake. In fact, he appeared quite pleased to find the information he was looking for.
“Many thanks, just what I was trying to find out,” he said to a user who responded to the erroneous tweet with an image of the liquor retailer’s opening hours.
“Why bother with Google, where I was meaning to be, when there's so much help available via Twitter?”
Doherty even took time to joke around with users who poked fun at his error.
“If this is something to do with a clinical trial sign me up,” responded one user.
“Whole lot [safer] than bleach,” Doherty responded, poking fun at U.S. President Donald Trump’s suggestion of possibility injecting disinfectants to protect people from the novel coronavirus.
The Nobel laureate has been actively engaged in discussing developments related to the COVID-19 pandemic, recently penning an article highlighting the importance of vaccine research during World Immunisation Week.
The piece, Doherty admits, only resulted in 28 Twitter interactions. His booze-related tweet, on the other hand, earned him 1,100 new followers.
“Not sure what this means but, since inadvertently tweeting about Dan Murphy at lunchtime, I seemed to have picked up 1100 followers,” he wrote later Monday.
“The tweet I'd put up re the new piece I'd written on immunization for our website engendered 28 new tweets. Obviously, I've been on the wrong track for decades.”
