Eric Feigl-Ding

Eric Liang Feigl-Ding (; , born March 28, 1983) is a Chinese-American public health scientist who is currently an epidemiologist and Chief of COVID Task Force at the New England Complex Systems Institute. He was formerly a faculty member and researcher at Harvard Medical School and Harvard 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. His research and advocacy have primarily focused on obesity, nutrition, cancer prevention, and biosecurity.

In January 2020, Feigl-Ding sounded an early alarm about COVID-19 and called for preparedness. His call for pandemic alarm went viral on Twitter and was amplified by media outlets. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Feigl-Ding's Twitter posts on the matter were popular. He was raised in South Dakota and Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, where he graduated from Shippensburg Area Senior High School and is an alumnus of the Pennsylvania Governor's Schools of Excellence.

In 2004, he completed his undergraduate studies at Johns Hopkins University with honors in public health. 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. He has also developed and led public health programs for Bell County, Kentucky, the Danish Ministry of Health, and as a report chairman for the European Commission.

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a study on COX-2 inhibitors that confirmed serious risks specifically associated with the drug, Vioxx, which Merck had withdrawn from the market two years earlier, in 2004, and which argued that Merck should have known about the risks. He was one of over 3,000 researchers who participated in the Global Burden of Disease Study, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Coronavirus preparedness advocacy On January 25, 2020, Feigl-Ding went viral He compared the virus pandemic potential to the 1918 influenza pandemic while defended by other journalists, While Feigl-Ding deleted his earliest tweets, An earlier Atlantic article Because of this, Feigl-Ding has been criticized for misrepresenting his qualifications to offer media commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic. He received early criticism for offering public warnings on the COVID-19 pandemic as well as praise from David Wallace-Wells, attributed some of the criticism of Feigl-Ding down to stylistic differences in information dissemination.

Political campaign

Feigl-Ding was a candidate in the 2018 Democratic primary for Pennsylvania's 10th congressional district. On February 27, 2018, Feigl-Ding announced his candidacy in the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania's 10th congressional district. He campaigned on a progressive platform advocating for science, universal healthcare, and public health. He was invited to join the Global Shapers program of the World Economic Forum, He received the CUGH's Global Health Project of the Year Prize in 2014, and the American Heart Association's Scott Grundy Excellence Award in 2015. He was named in 2018 as a Web of Science 'Highly Cited Researcher', among the top 1% most cited scientists worldwide, and among the 186 top cited scientists at Harvard University.

Personal life Eric Ding married health economist Andrea Feigl in the mid 2010s.