Eric Feigl-Ding | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Eric Liang Ding (1983-03-28)March 28, 1983 (age 42) |
| Education | Johns Hopkins University (BA) Harvard University (ScD,ScD) Boston University (DNF) |
| Awards | Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship (2008) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Public health Epidemiology Nutrition Health policy |
| Institutions | New England Complex Systems Institute Federation of American Scientists Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Harvard Medical School Brigham & Women's Hospital |
| Thesis | Sex steroid hormones and type 2 diabetes risk (2007) |
| Website | necsi |
Eric Liang Feigl-Ding (Chinese:丁亮;né Ding, born March 28, 1983) is an Americanpublic health scientist who is currently an epidemiologist and Chief of COVID Task Force at theNew England Complex Systems Institute.[1] He was formerly a faculty member and researcher atHarvard Medical School andHarvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is also the Chief Health Economist for Microclinic International, and co-founder of the World Health Network.[2] His research and advocacy have primarily focused onobesity,nutrition,cancer prevention, andbiosecurity.
In January 2020, Feigl-Ding sounded an early alarm aboutCOVID-19 and called forpreparedness. His call for pandemic alarmwent viral onTwitter and was amplified by media outlets.[3][4][5] During theCOVID-19 pandemic, Feigl-Ding's Twitter posts on the matter were popular.[3][6][7][5] His tweets on the pandemic have been criticized by other scientists as alarmist, misleading, and inaccurate.[8][9][10][11]
Feigl-Ding was born inShanghai, and his family emigrated to the United States when he was five years old.[12] He was raised in South Dakota[13] and Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, where he graduated from Shippensburg Area Senior High School[14] and is an alumnus of thePennsylvania Governor's Schools of Excellence.[15]
In 2004, he completed his undergraduate studies atJohns Hopkins University with honors in public health.[1] He completed his dualDoctor of Science doctoral program in epidemiology and doctoral program in nutrition fromHarvard University in 2007.[1] He attendedBoston UniversitySchool of Medicine, but did not complete theM.D. program.[16][17] Feigl-Ding was awarded aPaul and Daisy Soros Fellowship[18] for his graduate studies.[17]
Feigl-Ding's work focuses on epidemiology,health economics, and nutrition. He is the Chief of the COVID Risk Task Force at theNew England Complex Systems Institute. He was a Senior Fellow at theFederation of American Scientists. He was a researcher at theHarvard Medical School, and at theHarvard 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 ofMajor League Baseball regarding the relationship between obesity and mortality in athletes.[20] He has also developed and led public health programs forBell County, Kentucky,[21] theDanish Ministry of Health,[22] and as a report chairman for theEuropean Commission.[23]
In 2006, while completing his doctorate at Harvard, Feigl-Ding co-authored a study onCOX-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 was one of over 3,000 researchers who participated in theGlobal Burden of Disease Study, funded by theBill & Melinda Gates Foundation.[27][18]
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On January 25, 2020, Feigl-Ding went viral[4] onTwitter after expressing his worries about the2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak virus'basic reproduction number (R0) of up to 3.8.[3] He compared the virus pandemic potential to the1918 influenza pandemic[3] which has an estimatedR0 of 1.8 and which killed ~50 million people out of 2 billion, and called forWHO andCDC to preemptively declarepublic health emergency and monitor aggressively the situation.[3] With the thread going viral, his appeals were criticized by someepidemiologist 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 otherepidemiologist peers, such as his former Harvard adviserSimin Liu, aHarvard School of Public Health andBrown University School of Public Health professor of epidemiology.[28] While Feigl-Ding deleted his earliest tweets,[3] the rapid development of the epidemic, firstin China in January, thenin Europe in February–March andin the United States in March, together with more studies onthe 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.[29] An earlierAtlantic article[8] byAlexis Madrigal was self-admitted by Madrigal to be due for a re-assessment[28] after his realization of the pandemic and reading of the assessment byDavid 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.".[28]New York Magazine editorDavid 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 holdsdoctorates in both epidemiology and nutrition, with his professional experience innutritional epidemiology and epidemiology ofchronic disease. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, his research work and expertise primarily focused on the health effects of diet and exercise,[4][30][10] he also lacked academic publication ininfectious disease epidemiology, the subfield of epidemiology most relevant to viral outbreaks andCOVID-19.[31] Because of this, Feigl-Ding has been criticized for misrepresenting his qualifications to offer media commentary on theCOVID-19 pandemic.[4][30][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.[30]
Feigl-Ding's rapid rise to prominence as a TV and media commentator and expert during theCOVID-19 pandemic, despite his lack of academic activity in infectious diseases, has led to much criticism and controversy.[32][30] He received early criticism for offering public warnings on theCOVID-19 pandemic as well as praise fromDavid Wallace-Wells,[3] editor-at-large atNew York Magazine. A January 2020 article published byThe 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."[28] While Feigl-Ding admits he has made mistakes, one of his supporters, Ali Nouri, the president of theFederation of American Scientists (FAS), a scientific think tank dedicated to science communication,[33] attributed some of the criticism of Feigl-Ding down to stylistic differences in information dissemination.[30][10]
His tweets during the pandemic have also at times been criticized by other scientists as alarmist, misleading, and inaccurate.[10][11][9]
Feigl-Ding was a candidate in the 2018Democraticprimary forPennsylvania's 10th congressional district.[34][35] On February 27, 2018, Feigl-Ding announced his candidacy in the Democratic primary forPennsylvania's 10th congressional district.[17] He campaigned on a progressive platform advocating for science,universal healthcare, and public health.[17]During the run up to the election, Feigl-Ding did not take corporate PAC money.[35] He received 18% of the vote to George Scott's 36% in a 4-person primary.[34]
Feigl-Ding's graduate studies were supported by thePaul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans (2008).[18] He was recognized byCraigslist founderCraig Newmark as one of “16 People and Organizations Changing the World in 2012”.[36] He was invited to join the Global Shapers program of theWorld Economic Forum,[5] and joined in February 2013.[37] He received theCUGH's Global Health Project of the Year Prize in 2014,[38] and theAmerican Heart Association's Scott Grundy Excellence Award in 2015.[39] He was named in 2018 as aWeb of Science 'Highly Cited Researcher', among the top 1% most cited scientists worldwide, and among the 186 top cited scientists at Harvard University.[40][41]
In early 2020, for example, he took on Eric Feigl-Ding, a nutritional epidemiologist then at Harvard Chan who amassed a huge following with what many scientists felt were alarmist tweets....Feigl-Ding rang the alarm many times—he is "very, very concerned" about every new variant, Bergstrom says, and "will tweet about how it's gonna come kill us all"—but turned out to be right on some things. "It's misinformation if you present these things as certainties and don't adequately reflect the degree of uncertainty that we have," Bergstrom says.
But as Feigl-Ding's influence has grown, so have the voices of his critics, many of them fellow scientists who have expressed ongoing concern over his tweets, which they say are often unnecessarily alarmist, misleading, or sometimes just plain wrong.
Yet Feigl-Ding's followers rapidly grew, from around 2,000 to now more than 109,000, as they voraciously consumed Feigl-Ding's often misleading, inaccurate or exaggerated tweets.
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