This might come as a surprise, given that in 2018 he ran – unsuccessfully − for office as a Democrat.
“Now, more than ever, they trust me, because they saw I called it right,” he said. “You have to wake them up somehow,” he added.Īlthough the whistle is now well and truly blown on Covid-19, Dr Feigl-Ding will continue tweeting, as many followers are hard-core Trump supporters who distrust mainstream media warnings. “I don’t regret the core message.” When, in January, relatives in Shanghai were warning of a killer disease in Wuhan, his Twitter reach was so limited, he said, that “whispering” or using the sometimes “pedantic” or “couched” language of academics was not an option.
He pointed to Michael Burry, the hedge fund manager and physician profiled in the film The Big Short, who saw the 2008 financial crash coming owing to an obsessive interrogation of the underlying numbers.Īfter the World Health Organisation declined to declare Covid-19 a public health emergency on 23 January, Dr Feigl-Ding started tweeting his alarm − “blowing the whistle”, as he put it.īefore Covid-19 took hold globally, he took flak for his tone (the author of one critical article has since acknowledged that more alarm back in January would have been a good thing, Dr Feigl-Ding pointed out). “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD,” he tweeted at the end of January, warning that the new coronavirus had a “thermonuclear pandemic level” of infectiousness (the paper he referenced was not peer-reviewed, it later revised its infection estimate down, and Dr Feigl-Ding has since deleted the tweet).īut with the outbreak now a full-blown pandemic, he feels vindicated, with journalists now asking why he wasn't listened to. Such inter-academic tension broke into the open on 20 March when Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard University who has emerged as one of the most trusted voices on the outbreak, called fellow Harvard epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding a “charlatan exploiting a tenuous connection for self-promotion”.ĭr Feigl-Ding, whose Twitter following has rocketed from about 2,000 in mid-January to approaching 140,000 now (a slightly greater reach, at the time of writing, than Professor Lipsitch), delivers a daily stream of coronavirus tweets – largely stark warnings about the pandemic’s severity. Once-obscure academic experts have been thrust into the limelight by the coronavirus pandemic, appearing alongside world leaders such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson at critical press conferences, amassing armies of Twitter followers and popping up as talking heads on TV.īut such sudden arrivals on the international stage can beg a number of questions: which academics count as experts on the pandemic? Should they “stay in their lane” of expertise, or is it OK to swerve out of it to warn society about coronavirus?
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