Eric Feigl-Ding

Feigl-Ding's work focuses on nutrition, health economics, and epidemiology. He is 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][11]

Feigl-Ding is also the Chief Health Economist at Microclinic International,[14] 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.[15] He has also developed and led public health programs for Bell County, Kentucky,[16] the Danish Ministry of Health,[17] and as a report chairman for the European Commission.[18]

In 2006, while completing his doctorate at Harvard, Feigl-Ding became known as pharmaceutical industry whistleblower for a JAMA study he co-authored on COX-2 inhibitors.[19] The research confirmed serious risks specifically associated with the drug, VIOXX.[20] Given the data, Merck should have known of the serious health risks years before the drug was pulled off the market.[21][22]

He also developed a direct-to-science model for accelerating cancer research, and is advocate of crowdfunding for medical research.[23] His efforts, including the creation of the now-defunct Campaign for Cancer Prevention,[24][23] raised over $500,000 in public donations, and he led cancer prevention advocacy platforms totaling over 6 million members.[25]

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.[26][27][28][29]

On January 20, 2020, Feigl-Ding went viral[7] on Twitter after expressing his worries about the 2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak virus' basic reproduction number (R₀) of up to 3.8.[6] He compared the virus pandemic potential to the 1918 influenza pandemic[6] 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.[6] With the thread going viral, his appeals were criticized by his epidemiologist peers as alarmist and based on anecdotal data,[6] by journalists as misleading and misinforming the public,[30] and his announcements were reused to advance conspiracy theories about the virus.[31] While Feigl-Ding deleted the tweets,[31] 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,[6][32] and he was invited as a commentator on the pandemic by news media.[33][34]

Feigl-Ding's alert was used to hypothesize that such early reactiveness to weak signals, if it had occurred in the relevant governmental health leadership circles, could have prevented the pandemic.[6] Following Feigl-Ding's call and his raising of the alarm in January, better responses by government authorities could have led millions to have prepared earlier and better to the pandemic, upgrading their hygiene, such as hand-washing and implementing social distancing measures.[6] It was proposed that public policies and actions should be based on precautionary principles rather than waiting for incontestable and inarguable evidences or the tide of public pressure.[6] Feigl-Ding's early pandemic alert was compared to the warnings since the 1970s about human-induced global warming, which in the 1980s had sufficiently strong early signals to have started actively planning for and responding to, reducing the disasters and costs of global warming during the 2000s and 2010s.[6]

Feigl-Ding argued that the data alone were clear, for anyone with elementary engineering, statistical, or business analytical skills to see the pandemic potential early on.[7] It was hypothesized that social media constant noise made relevant alarms such as Feigl-Ding's inaudible,[6] while Feigl-Ding argued that media reliance on vetted experts on a given topic might reduce access to relevant early alarms.[7]