Eric Feigl-Ding isn’t shy about all-caps declarations. “VIRUS REACTIVATION!” the epidemiologist tweeted not long ago. “This is bad.” He’s fond of words like “wowzers,” “oof,” and “whoa.” He’s liberal with emojis too, sprinkling in plenty of yellow warning signs, red alarm lights, and crying faces. While other scientists adopt a sedate, explanatory tone, Feigl-Ding often reaches for the exclamation point.
How did Feigl-Ding become a go-to expert on the coronavirus? It’s largely thanks to a tweet he sent on January 25.
The amped-up style has won him a sizable audience and led to multiple TV appearances as a coronavirus expert. In recent days, he’s popped up on CNN talking to Anderson Cooper about death tallies and on ABC News explaining the dangers of resurgence. Feigl-Ding, who is a visiting scientist in Harvard’s nutrition department, promotes himself as a source for unvarnished truth about the virus: “The sugar coated facts? Goto [sic] other outlets for those,” he has tweeted. “I’m just sharing all the verified facts.”
In the last few weeks, as the pandemic has remade our lives and dominated the national conversation, we’ve increasingly turned to the scientists — often epidemiologists and virologists — who can help us understand the enormous challenges we face. Many of those scientists have found themselves besieged with interview requests and flooded with messages on social media, even as they attempt to gather data and crunch numbers. It’s long been a joke among epidemiologists that they get confused with dermatologists (the “epi” is not short for “epidermis”). One side effect of the virus has been to drastically raise the discipline’s profile.
It’s certainly raised Feigl-Ding’s. Before the coronavirus outbreak, he had a couple of thousand followers on Twitter; now he has more than 165,000, outpacing nearly all infectious-disease experts. But along the way he has garnered harsh criticism from some fellow epidemiologists for opining about issues on which, they say, he knows very little. “Everyone is very frustrated with him and regretting that we didn’t band together to discredit him,” said one epidemiologist. Another called him a “guy with zero background” in infectious-disease research who is “spouting a bunch of half-truths.”
Several epidemiologists who were interviewed for this article spoke on the condition that their names not be used. (“I’m not really looking for backlash,” one wrote in a message. “I don’t have 100k followers like him.”) But one of the nation’s most prominent infectious-disease researchers, Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard and director of the university’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, has made no secret of his disdain for Feigl-Ding’s virus-related commentary, repeatedly calling him out as an unqualified publicity-seeker.
In a tweet on March 19, Lipsitch referred to Feigl-Ding as a “charlatan exploiting a tenuous connection for self-promotion.” In that thread, he characterized Feigl-Ding’s analysis of the coronavirus as “80% repeating conventional wisdom, 20% promoting wacko pseudoscience, and 100% derivative.” He went on to say that Feigl-Ding “gets something spectacularly wrong sufficiently often that you should find other parts of the firehose of info to drink from.”
Regarding that “tenuous connection,” Feigl-Ding, who received his doctorate in epidemiology and nutrition from Harvard in 2007, has a temporary, unpaid visiting-scientist appointment in the nutrition department, not the epidemiology department. Such appointments are generally for one year. A source at Harvard with knowledge of the situation said Feigl-Ding had “been asked many times to stop promoting himself as having specialized knowledge.” (A university spokesman declined to comment on Feigl-Ding’s status.)
A scan of his academic articles shows that much of Feigl-Ding’s research has focused on the health effects of diet and exercise. His most recent listed paper, published last year, was on wearable devices that track physical activity. He has been a co-author of journal articles on Type 2 diabetes, childhood obesity, and red meat and the risk of cancer, among many other related topics. It’s an entirely respectable publication record, with articles appearing in high-profile journals like The New England Journal of Medicine, but it’s not a record that would suggest a scholarly interest in pandemics, viruses, or respiratory diseases.
The Power of Twitter
So how did Feigl-Ding become a go-to expert on the coronavirus? It’s largely thanks to a tweet he sent on January 25: “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD — the new coronavirus is a 3.8!!!” he wrote. “How bad is that reproductive R0 value? It is thermonuclear pandemic level bad — never seen an actual virality coefficient outside of Twitter in my entire career. I’m not exaggerating …”
Feigl-Ding was not the first scientist to raise concerns about the virus. The day before his tweet, W. Ian Lipkin, an epidemiologist at Columbia University and director of its Center for Infection and Immunity, who is also known as the “virus hunter,” told NPR that he believed “the outbreak is going to be much larger” than it was at the time and that “we need to move very quickly if we’re going to contain this virus.” It had been a source of concern for many infectious-disease epidemiologists since initial reports about the illness started to appear, in late December.
But Feigl-Ding’s holy-mother-of-god tweet struck a chord. It was retweeted thousands of times, and a number of commenters have expressed gratitude to Feigl-Ding for bringing the prospect of a pandemic to their attention. He quickly turned into a source for those who were anxious about the virus back when, to many in the United States at least, the danger felt remote and theoretical.
As infectious-disease epidemiologists and virologists have pointed out, however, there were problems with that tweet and the accompanying thread. For starters, there was the issue of the R0 (pronounced “R naught”), the number that indicates how many new cases are likely to result from a single infection. A host of well-known diseases — including chicken pox, measles, and polio — have higher R0s. Also, in the same thread, he compared the R0 of the new coronavirus to the R0 of SARS-CoV-1, the virus that led to a global outbreak in 2003. That R0 was 0.49, he wrote, and so this new virus was more transmissible “by almost 8 fold!”
Not true. The R0 of SARS-CoV-1 is estimated to be around three (for the record, a disease with an R0 of less than one tends to fizzle out because a diminishing number of people contract it). Feigl-Ding blamed the mistake on misreading a “paper detail.” He also later explained that he’s “not an infectious disease/virologist” and deleted his most popular tweet. He wasn’t wrong to be worried, as we now know. But that all-caps warning seemed to be based, in part, on a significant error.
There have been other missteps along the way. He had to delete a series of tweets about a since-retracted paper that claimed to identify genetic similarities between the coronavirus and HIV. He tweeted recently about a Swedish clinical trial that was halted (such stoppages are “rare & big deal bad signs,” he wrote), but it turns out there was no trial; instead, some hospitals in Sweden had ceased using the drug hydroxychloroquine after patients suffered ill effects. He clarified another tweet that seemed to equate reactivation of the virus with reinfection.
The issue of whether to wear masks has become particularly contentious, and official advice has shifted since the outbreak began. Feigl-Ding’s advice on that topic has been contradictory. On March 11 he tweeted that masks are probably useless and that “N95 masks don’t help prevent” health-care workers from getting the flu, so a mask “probably doesn’t help” prevent Covid-19 either (which, if true, would make the campaign to get those masks to nurses and doctors pointless). The link he provided in support of that view was to a study suggesting that N95 masks are roughly the same as surgical masks when it comes to preventing transmission of the flu, not that they don’t help.
A few weeks later, on April 3, he embraced the #masks4all hashtag.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
In an interview, Feigl-Ding acknowledged that he had made mistakes and has sometimes failed to provide adequate context. But he countered that, considering the onslaught of updates about the virus, he wasn’t the only one who’s been forced to revise opinions or delete conclusions. “We all misread a detail or a Y axis or an X axis,” he said. “I feel like I’m pretty good at synthesizing what I read and trying to be able to translate it for the public.” He likened his role to that of others who speak about the virus, including CNN’s Sanjay Gupta and Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, neither of whom is an infectious-disease epidemiologist (both are physicians).
He also took issue with the criticism from colleagues, at Harvard and elsewhere, which he considers unfair, though he said he’d been reluctant to push back. “It’s pretty insane to make a claim that 20 percent is pseudoscience,” Feigl-Ding said, referring to Lipsitch’s comment about his Twitter feed. “I do not want to dignify all this pettiness in the middle of a pandemic.” In an attempt to explain himself, Feigl-Ding said that he had texted Lipsitch but that the director of Harvard’s communicable-disease center had replied only: “Leave me alone.”
As for his scholarly background, Feigl-Ding said he hadn’t misrepresented himself. “I never said I was an expert in infectious diseases,” he said. “But I know a few things about epidemiology as a general epidemiologist.” He noted that in 2014 he helped develop an app, called “Germ Theory,” that was designed to track disease outbreaks, though it didn’t attract the investment needed to move beyond the prototype stage.
He also argued that the sometimes-excitable tone of his tweets serves a purpose. “A lot of my followers, unless you spoon-feed it to them, they won’t read it,” he said. And he has his defenders, including Ali Nouri, president of the Federation of American Scientists, where Feigl-Ding is a senior fellow. “I think some of the criticism has to do with his style rather than the substance,” said Nouri. “It’s not typically what scientists do, but it’s been working for Eric.”
Despite the criticism, Feigl-Ding continues to win new fans, including some powerful ones. Phil Murphy, the Democratic governor of New Jersey, tweeted that he had recently spoken on the phone with the “renowned epidemiologist” from Harvard and that “Eric’s guidance will help us utilize technology to #FlattenTheCurve and responsibly reopen New Jersey.”
Feigl-Ding retweeted the praise.
