Eric Feigl-Ding

Feigl-Ding's work focuses on epidemiology, health economics, and nutrition. He is the Chief of the COVID Risk Task Force at the New England Complex Systems Institute. He was a Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists. He was a researcher at the Harvard Medical School, and at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.[1]

Feigl-Ding is also the Chief Health Economist at Microclinic International,[19] as co-principal investigator of several intervention programs for obesity and diabetes prevention in the US and abroad. He developed a 130-year cohort study of Major League Baseball regarding the relationship between obesity and mortality in athletes.[20] He has also developed and led public health programs for Bell County, Kentucky,[21] the Danish Ministry of Health,[22] and as a report chairman for the European Commission.[23]

In 2006, while completing his doctorate at Harvard, Feigl-Ding co-authored a study on COX-2 inhibitors that confirmed serious risks specifically associated with the drug, Vioxx, which Merck had withdrawn from the market two years earlier, in 2004, and which argued that Merck should have known about the risks.[5][24][25][26] He participated in the Global Burden of Disease Study, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.[27][18]

He founded Toxin Alert, as a public alert tool to warn communities about drinking water contaminations to prevent future lead poisonings like the Flint Water Crisis.[28][29]

On January 20, 2020, Feigl-Ding went viral[4] on Twitter after expressing his worries about the 2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak virus' basic reproduction number (R₀) of up to 3.8.[3] He compared the virus pandemic potential to the 1918 influenza pandemic[3] which has an estimated R₀ of 1.8 and which killed ~50 million people out of 2 billion, and called for WHO and CDC to preemptively declare public health emergency and monitor aggressively the situation.[3] With the thread going viral, his appeals were criticized by some epidemiologist peers as alarmist and based on anecdotal data,[3] by some journalists as misleading and misinforming the public,[8] while defended by other journalists,[3] and other epidemiologist peers, such as his former Harvard adviser Simin Liu, a Harvard School of Public Health and Brown University School of Public Health professor of epidemiology.[30] While Feigl-Ding deleted his earliest tweets,[3] the rapid development of the epidemic, first in China in January, then in Europe in February–March and in the United States in March, together with more studies on the virus, turned his perceptions into that of an early messenger,[3][7] and he was invited as a commentator on the pandemic by news media.[31] An earlier Atlantic article[8] by Alexis Madrigal was self-admitted by Madrigal to be due for a re-assessment[30] after his realization of the pandemic and reading of the assessment by David Wallace-Wells.[3] Madrigal admitted that his earlier "...piece made sense on Planet A, where a pandemic was not bearing down on us, but not on Planet B, where we all now live. It was right in the particulars and wrong on the big picture."[30]. New York Magazine editor David Wallace-Wells's article that convinced Madrigal to change his assessment concluded that "a Feigl-Ding level of alarm, enacted into public-health policy at the right time, could have prevented the entire global pandemic crisis, and kept COVID-19 a regional health story in just one country of the world."[3]

Feigl-Ding holds doctorates in both epidemiology and nutrition, with his professional experience in nutritional epidemiology and epidemiology of chronic disease. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, his research work and expertise primarily focused on the health effects of diet and exercise,[4][32][10] he also lacked academic publication in infectious disease epidemiology, the subfield of epidemiology most relevant to viral outbreaks and COVID-19.[33] Because of this, Feigl-Ding has been criticized for misrepresenting his qualifications to offer media commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic.[4][32][10] Feigl-Ding has said he is not sub-specialized in infectious diseases and claims to have never misrepresented himself as an infectious disease epidemiologist.[32]

Feigl-Ding's rapid rise to prominence as a TV and media commentator and expert during the COVID-19 pandemic, despite his lack of academic activity in infectious diseases, has led to much criticism and controversy.[34][32] He received early criticism for offering public warnings on the COVID-19 pandemic as well as praise from David Wallace-Wells,[3] editor-at-large at New York Magazine. A January 2020 article published by The Atlantic covered the early controversy of Feigl-Ding's social media presence.[8] On March 26, Alexis Madrigal, its author, re-assessed his piece and stated that "it was right in the particulars and wrong on the big picture."[30] While Feigl-Ding admits he has made mistakes, one of his supporters, Ali Nouri, the president of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a scientific think tank dedicated to science communication,[35] attributed some of the criticism of Feigl-Ding down to stylistic differences in information dissemination.[32][10]

His tweets during the pandemic have also at times been criticized by other scientists as alarmist, misleading, or inaccurate.[10][11][9]