Beloved by the media, "blue checked" by Twitter as a COVID expert, the man is a fraud
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“Doktor’ Ding-a-Ling’s latest COVID Panic Porn can be seen here, but this story is the more important:
The Impersonator: Eric Feigl-Ding
How a nutritionist turned politician became a "COVID-19 expert."
If you’re on social media and you follow news related to the coronavirus pandemic, chances are you’ve stumbled upon some panicked pandemic posts coming from a man named Eric Feigl-Ding, a nutritionist and longtime democrat political operative who has succeeded in impersonating a medical professional and is generating a cult following in the process.
With one hysterical tweet after another, Feigl-Ding went from having a small social media following to accumulating a massive army of influence. Feigl-Ding’s consistent elevation of fear and panic, doom and gloom, and his relentless themes of chaos and destruction related to a virus with a 99.8% recovery rate has brought his accounts millions of clicks and views, and hundreds of thousands of new followers.
And he did it all without having a clue what he’s talking about.
The ‘Charlatan’
At the beginning of 2020, Feigl-Ding was an unpaid, visiting scientist in Harvard’s nutrition department. His academic research centered entirely around nutrition, diet, and exercise. If Eric Feigl-Ding was interested in pandemics and the study of viruses, his research and academic credentials did not reflect that.
When the coronavirus pandemic began to make waves in the media, everything changed. Feigl-Ding, an aspiring politician, appeared to see an opening to influence the masses and build up his brand.
Feigl-Ding’s rise to coronavirus stardom began with this since-deleted tweet falsely describing the coronavirus as “the most virulent virus epidemic the world has ever seen.”
Twitter, for reasons unknown, decided to credential him as a “COVID-19 health expert,” which further elevates his supposed legitimacy as an “expert” on the pandemic.
In mid-March, Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard, described him as “a charlatan exploiting a tenuous connection for self-promotion.”
The Association of Health Care Journalists also took notice, reporting that he has “precisely zero experience in infectious diseases.”
An unnamed source at Harvard told The Chronicle on Higher Education in April that Feigl-Ding has “been asked many times to stop promoting himself as having specialized knowledge.”
In recent months, Feigl-Ding updated his profile to show that he is no longer associated with Harvard. The reasons for his departure have not been made public.
In order to sell his purported expertise on COVID-19, Feigl-Ding has repeatedly misrepresented his credentials. As seen in this screenshot from 2019, prior to the pandemic, Ding clarified that he was a PhD nutritionist, and not a medical doctor. He has since removed the PhD label from his account.
May 8, 2019 (wayback archive):
Feigl-Ding has continued to muddy the waters surrounding his credentials, taking it to new heights in a new political advertisement. He recently appeared in a pro-Biden Super PAC (funded by Silicon Valley billionaires) ad about the coronavirus pandemic. It features “Dr” Feigl-Ding in a lab coat with tie ensemble that is associated with the attire worn by a medical doctor, not a PhD academic with a background in nutrition research.
“Joe Biden has a plan,” Feigl-Ding says in the ad. “He listens to medical experts. Joe Biden will do what needs to be done so we can live a healthy, normal life again.”
Many reporters were falsely led to believe that Feigl-Ding was one of the medical doctors featured in the ad spot.
Icing on the cake for this fraud was the disclosure that at the same time he was all over the media shrieking about the danger of reopening schools, he’d enrolled his own son in a school in Austria, for in-person schooling.
