PROFILE: Emily Oster, Brown University Economist
From COVID-19 Cheerleader to MAHA Cheerleader
The history of American economic theory has long struggled with basic ethics. Milton Friedman argued against food safety regulations on the basis that if children died from eating contaminated food, then consumers can simply stop shopping from that brand, and they’ll go out of business. If a factory is poisoning the local drinking water supply, then people will simply stop doing business with them. The very idea of government regulation simply preventing such needless suffering is considered a grave violation of “economic freedom.”
As a Harvard graduate turned Brown University economist, Emily Oster is a proud student of this tradition. Rationalizing preventable deaths as “the cost of doing business,” a line now aped by senior CDC official Ralph Abraham in defense of unmitigated measles outbreaks. Oster quickly became very popular with conservative billionaires. Instead of identifying Oster as their political enemy, American liberals have embraced her as a household name with important insights.
Now in 2026, Oster has firmly established herself as a cheerleader for the “Make America Healthy Again” war against vaccines and the public’s health. This profile serves as a chronicle of Oster’s long history of wildly unethical misconduct and blatantly incorrect proclamations. Unless stated otherwise, quotes are taken from her Twitter account “ProfEmilyOster.
Pre-COVID Pandemic: The Birthplace of Osterism
On February 5th 2005, Emily Oster kicked off her Harvard grad student career by attacking Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen, claiming Hepatitis B caused women to give birth to boys, and was soon forced to redact her paper in shame after kicking off a media firestorm. What should have been a lesson in humility was soon forgotten.
In July 2005, Emily Oster writes in Forbes an attack on the “President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief,” or PEPFAR, which has saved millions of lives. She claimed that “treating HIV doesn’t pay…it isn’t economical.” Sorry if you were born in Africa and contracted HIV/AIDS, but this American economist has appointed herself the arbiter of whose lives have value and which are financially disposable - with these lifesaving drugs exceeding the “value of a statistical life” Really making the vile racist Milton Friedman proud! She would be rewarded with a TED Talk for this vile screed, only to be completely eviscerated in Asterisk Magazine by Justin Sandefur in 2024:
Economists got PEPFAR wrong analytically, not emotionally, and continue to make the same analytical mistakes in numerous domains.
In 2013, Emily Oster publishes Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong, in which she declares that letting pregnant women drink alcohol is a feminist issue - that the precautionary principle of public health is what’s truly keeping women down. Thinking she knows better than the overwhelming consensus of doctors, including obstetricians & gynecologists, this economist decides that pregnant mothers should just roll the dice on fetal alcohol syndrome.
These sorts of statements should have seen Oster quietly dismissed from any sort of serious policy debate. Instead, she would go on to experience professional success, writing parenting books such as 2022’s The Family Firm; arguing that you should manage your children’s growth & development like a “data-driven” business. This insistence on assigning a dollar value to every aspect of the human existence can easily lead you to rather questionable moral beliefs & unethical practices, as we will soon see in 2020.
2020: The Full Automated Osterism Opinion Editorial Factory
In the Spring of 2020, dozens of New York City educators died of COVID-19 in a matter of weeks, with many more winding up disabled by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This forced American schools to institute assorted “remote learning” programs in order to facilitate some form of education in the chaos of the Trump Administration’s willful mismanagement. It’s a simple matter: if educators are dying by the dozens, and kids are too sick to pay attention, then students aren’t learning a darned thing.
Brown University Economist Emily Oster decided that she magically knew better, and became a multi-millionaire as a tireless advocate on behalf of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In a February 2021 episode of the “People I Admire” podcast for Freakonomics, she explains her origin story as a mother who despised being asked to raise her own children in the midst of a national crisis:
“And like, to be totally frank, my children were at my house all the time and I was eager to dispense with them to an outside location. I just put up a Google form in my newsletter.” -Feb. 26, 2021 Freaknomics “People I Admire” Podcast
This is jaw-dropping for someone who claims to promote “data driven” parenting. This Brown University economist casually omits the fact that she has no way, nor interest, of verifying the accuracy of these Google Form responses. She has no way of knowing if some random shmuck in the Eastern European countryside is submitting fictional reports while pretending to be an Atlanta, GA based mother. Even if this Atlanta-based mother is real, Oster has no way of verifying if her Google form submission is accurate.
This makes the collected “data” unreliable at best, and utterly fraudulent at worst. By any academic or professional standard, you can’t present unverified survey responses as hard, scientific data. It is completely unethical to influence policymaking in a crisis with this sort of chicanery.
Journalists at America’s leading news outlets found themselves completely unable to ask a simple question: Just what does an economist know about managing an infectious disease pandemic? Perhaps the front-page real estate would be better spent asking scientific & medical experts who have worked in relevant fields prior to 2020, over the uninformed ramblings of an economist. When children started winding up hospitalized by COVID-19 in serious numbers, did the hospital assign an economist to care for these children in the ICU? No?
May 10th, 2020: Emily Oster publishes in the billionaire owned Washington Post “Opening Schools Might Be Safer Than You Think,” not even a month after the devastating headlines from New York City. Well, “might” doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in parents and teachers in the early months of a crisis.
July 7th, 2020: For Johns Hopkins Univeristy, Emily Oster appears in a video titled “COVID-19 explained.” She is not a medical doctor and can’t possibly know much of anything about a new SARS virus worth explaining.
July 28th, 2020: Oster publishes in the New York Times “What Will Schools Do When a Teacher Gets COVID-19?” Well, you don’t need to rattle your brain all that hard to make a relatively informed guess in June 2020: Some teachers will die, many more will develop chronic illness & become too disabled to work, and children’s education will be negatively impacted by widespread outbreaks. This ended up being exactly what happened, and Oster never apologized for making such an obvious error. Her only suggestion was to say that schools needed a “concrete plan.”
August 25th, 2020: Oster publishes in Washington Post another editorial (she’s really cranking these out, gee whiz) titled “How the Media Has Us Thinking All Wrong About the Coronavirus” in which she compares COVID-19 to…shark attacks. No, really.
September 23rd, 2020: Emily launches a “National COVID-19 School Response Dashboard” with funding from… numerous right-wing billionaires. In the past quarter century of American politics, have these people once shown genuine concern about the health and well-being of children?
Now ask yourself, should someone whose company promoted a genocide (Zuckerberg), or someone who harvests the blood of young people out of a delusional belief this will extend his lifespan, (Thiel) or someone whose oil dynasty is rendering the planet uninhabitable for future generations (Koch) be influencing policy decisions that impact the health of your child? Who all agree that public education should be abolished for their own personal profit? Through Emily Oster, they did.
October 09th, 2020: Oster publishes in The Atlantic another opinion editorial titled “School’s Aren’t Super Spreaders,” cited by Betsy DeVos and other conservative politicians. This editorial heavily relied upon her own poorly assembled “Dashboard” as a source, with massive gaps in data falsely claiming there were zero COVID-19 cases in numerous schools. At this point, Brown University should have terminated her employment for unprofessional and unethical misconduct in a crisis.
A year later, it would be revealed that hundreds of thousands of American parents were dying of COVID-19, many because their child brought the virus home from school. CIDRAP would later publish in 2023 that “More than 70% of US household COVID spread started with a child.” Oster never apologized for this obvious error.
October 10th, 2020: Brown University Dean of Public Health & Biden’s Second COVID-19 Czar Ashish K. Jha endorses Emily Oster with a tweet:
“I’ve been particularly squared by the work of the brilliant @ProfEmilyOster. She brings evidence, not bluster, to this topic. Its inspiring. She’s actually tracking data (!!). Yup, it’s not perfect. But its the best we have.”
Literally every sentence here is wrong. This is a university Dean of Public Health claiming a newsletter survey with no method to verify reports is somehow “data.” Liberal voters in 2020 were promised by the Biden campaign that his Administration would “follow the science,” not dictating policy based on fraudulent propaganda bankrolled by conservative billionaires. This was a grave betrayal that served up the nation on a silver platter to the anti-vaccine crusade against modern medicine.
2021: Screw Them Kids!
March 19th, 2021: In one of the worst opinion editorials of the COVID-19 pandemic, Oster publishes in The Atlantic “Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Like a Vaccinated Grandma,” which draws wide backlash from actual medical and scientific professionals. Only the genius of an American economist would reason that because most of the COVID-19 deaths were in older people, this somehow makes the deaths of unvaccinated children from COVID-19 somehow acceptable.
April 6th, 2021: Emily Oster decides to launch a “COVID Risk Calculator,” which is a total mess of a Google Spreadsheet that exists solely to minimize the impacts of COVID-19.
May 26th, 2021: On Twitter, Emily Oster endorses an opinion editorial in the Washington Post by fellow COVID-19 cheerleaders Lucy McBride, Monica Gandhi, Allison Krug, and Tracy Beth Hoeg titled “It’s time for children to finally get back to normal life,” saying “It’s time,” attacking mask mandates and other NPIs in schools, well before all kids could be vaccinated. Hundreds of American children would die of COVID-19 in 2021, with many more hospitalized or disabled by the virus. This useless opinion editorial, like so many others Oster published, offered no solace to the parents who had to watch their kids suffer and die.
July 17th, 2021: Cherry-picking a single study, Emily Oster tweets out:
“For parents worried about long COVID in kids, this study from Switzerland is reassuring. Low overall rates, and the long COVID symptoms as common in kids with no evidence of past infection.”
The study she cites has an incredibly small sample size and no control group. Long COVID is now the leading chronic illness in children.
September 15th, 2021: Oster launches a “COVID-19 School Data Hub” with another round of funding from numerous right-wing billionaires. This did nothing to keep schools open, teachers & students healthy, or anything through a brutal fall and winter for COVID-19. Oster couldn’t care less.
Emily Oster appears on the program of anti-vaccine scam artist Mehmet Oz to give her totally uninformed opinions about vaccinating children against COVID-19. Oz would later join the Trump Administration to spew a bunch of eugenicist garbage and try to privatize Medicare & Medicaid.
2022
January 04th, 2022: On the deadliest month for pediatric COVID-19 deaths recorded, Emily Oster tweets out this gem:
“Shutting down schools is a mistake...the risk of getting COVID may well be higher out of school than in.”
…May? For someone who claims to be an expert on child health & development, Oster is apparently completely ignorant about the state of American public schools: Overcrowded classrooms with poor ventilation, and it needs is one reckless parent (possibly a fan of Oster’s) to send their child sick with COVID-19 to school. The child then exhales SARS-CoV-2 into the shared air for several hours, which infects teachers and other children. This was figured out over 150 years ago when nurse Florence Nightingale published Notes on Hospitals, detailing how overcrowded, poorly ventilated wards made hospitals an incubator for infectious disease outbreaks. Hey, Flo only treated patients across Europe. What the heck could she know compared to an economist?
January 13th, 2022: Emily Oster puts out a series of tweets promoting her COVID School Data Hub, in which she claims:
“…the funders of this -- who played no role in the research or data creation beyond generous support -- including Arnold, Walton, Mercatus and Chan-Zuckerberg.”
You have to be an incredibly gullible person to think that all of these right-wing billionaires, united in destroying public education & teachers’ unions, only provide “generous support.”
January 21, 2022: Emily Oster goes on to CNN to whine about schools returning to remote learning as unmitigated COVID-19 outbreaks overwhelmed teachers’ ability to educate.
Februrary 2022: Oster publishes on her Substack “ParentData” a rant titled “Lots of Studies Are Bad: Problematic new work on masks and lockdowns is just the beginning,” as a growing mountain of scientific research exposed Oster’s ignorance about all things COVID-19. You can find a compilation of many of these studies here:
Of course, when you’ve got conservative billionaires lining your pockets, that’s going to take priority over your professional responsibilities as an academic to acknowledge error. As an economist, Oster not only imagines herself to be a scientist (economics is not a scientific field, sorry!) but also, that an economist rests above all other fields as the final arbiter of what is and is not “real” science. Because these studies invalidated her uninformed opinion, Oster publicly denounced them instead of asking herself if she might not be providing reliable or accurate information.
March 09th, 2022: Oster publishes in The Atlantic “Masking Policy Is Incredibly Irrational Right Now,” right after a brutal winter COVID-19 wave that saw schools and hospitals overwhelmed by COVID-19 outbreaks, with pediatric COVID-19 deaths surging to over 1,000. Here in New York City, students were shuffled into crowded gymnasiums to watch Marvel films, as there were no healthy teachers available to educate kids. Nationwide, sick teachers were replaced with police officers, National Guardsmen, and other unqualified schmucks unable to actually teach. Oster decided that the real problem was anyone trying to prevent this.
March 22nd, 2022: For Protean Mag, Justin Feldman and Abby Cartus dismantle Oster’s sham with an article titled: “Motivated Reasoning: Emily Oster’s COVID Narratives and the Attack on Public Education,” which connects both Oster’s sloppy mishandling of “data” to her right-wing billionaire backers & their crusade against public education & teachers’ unions.
May 5th, 2022: Knowing nothing about airplanes or aerosol transmission, Emily Oster appears on Washington Post Live to say the risk of COVID-19 infection on airplanes is “minimal.” One year later, a study finds that over 96% of flights had COVID-19.
October 31st, 2022: For The Atlantic, Oster publishes an opinion editorial titled “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty.” Conservatives, anti-vaccine quacks, and other cranks who spent years calling for public executions of doctors and scientists have a public meltdown over an article they clearly did not read. What Oster actually proposes is “amnesty” for parents and children who wanted to protect children from COVID-19 in any way. If we had all simply submitted to the virus in 2020, everything would be just swell now, and she forgives you. She also brags that she’s teaching a class on COVID-19 at Brown University, as if an “economist” is at all qualified to teach students anything about the matter.
2023
February 20th, 2023: Oster publishes on her Substack “ParentData” an editorial titled “COVID-19: Where to Go from Here?” which she instructs her followers to treat COVID-19 as merely another cold or flu, an anti-vax meme originating from 2020, because “COVID-19 specific policies...make getting COVID very disruptive.” At this point, there was already a mountain of medical research showing that COVID-19 caused much more harm than the cold or flu, including widespread disability. An article from that same week posted by the American Heart Association titled “Much has been learned about long COVID – and much remains to be learned” states:
"You can see patients that were completely healthy before having a COVID-19 infection and now are completely disabled," said Dr. Cyndya A. Shibao, an associate professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee.
Oster doesn’t think this is “disruptive” at all.
February 21st, 2023: On Twitter, Emily Oster Endorses a Bret Stephens Opinion-Editorial titled: “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing, Will Any Lessons Be Learned?” Bret Stephens is a New York Times pundit most notable for being a climate science dying cheerleader for slaughtering Muslim families, with such depraved rants like “20 Years On, I Don’t Regret Supporting the Iraq War,” in which America slaughtered, kidnapped, tortured and raped countless innocent people based on completely false pretenses. His pitiful rant cites the comically incompetent “Cochrane Review of Masks,” an embarrassing piece of propaganda. If this is the sort of junk that Oster is willing to endorse, then it calls her entire credibility into question.
May 11th, 2023: Emily Oster teams up with Michelle Obama to join the board of the “PLEZi Nutrition company,” as covered by Walker Bragman of Important Context. Clearly, being an advocate for pediatric COVID-19 had become quite financially lucrative for Oster. The experts Bragman quotes are quite devastating in their critiques, and it shows how little Oster truly cares about pediatric health.
October 17th, 2023: Oster appears on The Daily Show with zero pushback or inquiry as to her expertise, credentials, or dark-money billionaire funding. She tweets it out that this was an “incredibly fun” experience.
November 28th, 2023: Taking her victory lap as a newly crowned celebrity, liberal economist Justin Wolfers sees cause to celebrate: “Holy mole, economist Emily Oster has her own fashion line....I love this so much....Congratulations, @ProfEmilyOster!” for the brand M.M. Lafleur. Oster had become a celebrity thanks to her advocacy for a virus that has killed, orphaned, and disabled countless American children. Something is deeply unwell in American culture. When people pointed this out to Wolfers, he whined “I’m here to celebrate the success of my friends.”
2024: The Transition to MAHA Cheerleader Begins
November 13th, 2024: Emily Oster tweets her latest New York Times opinion editorial, claiming “There’s a better way to do public health messaging.” The “Guest Essay” is titled “There’s a Better Way to Talk About Fluoride, Vaccines and Raw Milk,” a lukewarm mental gymnastics display trying to eke out some sort of centrist “middle ground” between medical doctors and the ramblings of RFK Jr. attacking very basic public health interventions. At this point, I lay blame at the feet of the management of The New York Times:
This could have been a simple, short article that explained there’s zero nutritional benefit to unpasteurized milk, foodborne illness continues to kill Americans, the number of acceptable vaccine-preventable pediatric deaths is zero, and that fluoride in the drinking water supply is a harmless net-positive public health intervention. Instead, Oster brands unpasteurized milk consumption and refusing to vaccine your kids as “a reasonable choice.” Again, this is the person that Brown University’s Emily Oster is insisting we treat with kid gloves:
November 11th, 2024: Emily Oster and her fellow COVID Cheerleader ilk, including Leana Wen and Vinay Prasad, is utterly dismantled by UC San Diego’s Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra in a piece titled: “Influencer intellectuals,” in which he writes:
“They all sound like experts. They all write like experts. They are all treated as experts... But they all lack expertise, at least in the topics in which they publicly present themselves as reputable, authoritative, knowledgable experts.”
All of Emily Oster’s schtick for the past five years has been exploiting a pandemic and sabotaging the response to build a highly profitable brand on social media. It’s truly shameful and utterly repulsive misconduct.
2025
November 20th, 2025: Oster revises a previous ParentData editorial titled “Should You Be Concerned About COVID in Pregnancy?” in which she attacks studies showing negative long-term impacts of COVID-19 during pregnancy that completely invalidate her years of advocacy for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, whining about “scary headlines about short- and long-term impacts of COVID-19,” “pandic headlines about COVID in pregnancy,” and she proclaims “I do not believe the best data shows COVID-19 infection causes differences in neurodevelopment in children.” Medical research scientists are all incompetent frauds, and only this economist with zero medical or scientific credentials can decide what is true or not.
This seems like it should be obvious, but if you are pregnant or a parent, do not seek out medical advice from Substack economists.
December 13, 2025: Emily Oster shares a guest article on ParentData on Instagram, titled “Living With Long COVID: What having a chronic illness has taught me about navigating the health care system,” as if her years of disinformation minimizing the impact of COVID-19 was not a major contribution to the author’s ongoing struggles.
2026: Emily Oster, MAHA Cheerleader
January 8th, 2026: Oster publishes a new article to ParentData titled “What Changed in the Childhood Vaccine Schedule?” which, surprising nobody, is yet another lukewarm mental gymnastics display trying to eke out a centrist position between pediatricians and RFK Jr.’s war on behalf of all infectious disease:
“The vaccines removed from the schedule are generally those for diseases that are less common and usually less serious.”
This includes Hepatitis B, which can cause children to suffer a painful death from liver cancer. Instead of deferring to the outspoken pediatricians who will be left to clean up this mess, Oster decided that the man who drove his former wife to suicide, after she found a journal rating his affairs by the explicitness of sex acts performed, is a reasonable man to take seriously. One has to ask Oster the question: Why are you publicly simping for an abusive creep who considers you subhuman for the crime of being a woman? Do you really think this man cares about kids’ health?
Emily Oster, with all her economist genius, also does not suggest what number of vaccine-preventable deaths of American children she considers acceptable. The American parent needs to start asking themselves if this is truly someone who cares about the health and safety of your children, and why this woman is so insistent on defending a lecherous misogynistic creep. When is enough going to be enough, and we can finally stop pretending Oster has any credibility?
That same day, Emily Oster also publishes an editorial in The New York Times titled Kennedy Is Telling Americans How to Eat. It’s Not Crazy Advice. Two RFK Jr. defenses in one day, wow! One has to ask why the management of the New York Times wasted money on this uninformed screed, instead of simply assigning an intern to buzz out a few phone calls and e-mails asking actual nutritionists as to what an effective set of dietary guidelines would actually resemble. Sometimes, the most effective & important journalism is simply writing up basic facts.
January 28th, 2026: For the University of Pennsylvania, Emily Oster will be joining a “Virtual Q&A” on Zoom where she will speak about “How to Communicate About Science,” something she very clearly is incapable of doing with any honesty or reliability. I highly recommend you take this opportunity to ask her about the many years of getting basic scientific facts wrong in a public forum, refusing to acknowledge her long history of errors, and why she thinks legitimizing “Make America Healthy Again” eugenics is a worthwhile pursuit.
Closing Thoughts
“If infection exists, it is preventable. If it exists, it is the result of carelessness, or of ignorance...it has been highly injurious to civilization and humanity...and the immense tax which it has entailed upon commerce.” -Florence Nightengale, Notes on Hospitals, 1863
In 1863, the nurse Florence Nightingale publishes a seminal work on the importance of preventing the transmission of diseases in hospitals, including airborne viruses. These same principles could have been readily adapted to schools, especially with all the modern advances in science we’ve made. Over a hundred and fifty years later, the American economist Emily Oster raked in millions pretending her total ignorance was a useful contribution to a national crisis. How this university professor is unaware that her place of employment contains something called a “library,” in which tomes of knowledge on all manner of medical and scientific topics are loaned out, is quite extraordinary.
Emily Oster went from being a vocal advocate for SARS-CoV-2 to becoming a cheerleader for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s war on America’s health. The American liberal needs to take a hard look in the mirror and realize that they’ve been bamboozled by an unethical fraudster, bankrolled by their political enemies. Anointing herself the supreme authority on all matters of medical science from infectious diseases to vaccination, to pediatrics, to nutrition, she never acknowledged her constant, basic errors. It’s impossible to be an expert on all of these fields at once. She has zero credibility on these topics and is not reliable expert on serious matters of life & death.
If this is what is considered intellectualism in America, then we are in for a very rough road ahead. Our journalists need to do a better job of interrogating bold claims to verify their accuracy and putting their foot down when a supposed “expert” repeatedly blows their credibility on serious matters. If a crooked billionaire starts astroturfing certain voices which align with their policy demands, then those voices should be subjected to even greater scrutiny.
As this profile shows, Emily Oster did little more than produce a mountain of worthless opinion editorials & media appearances coming from a vast chasm of willful ignorance. This prevented zero COVID-19 deaths, stopped zero schools from shutting down due to outbreaks, and this disinformation stream contributed to a nationwide chronic illness crisis in Long COVID affecting millions. The only grade this Brown University professor has earned is an F.
Completely agree in the strongest possible terms. Oster is a damn academic economist who understands NOTHING about the pandemic and the larger, complex issues involved. Her opinions should be relegated to the dustbin of history. I have nothing but scorn and derision for Oster. Contrast that to Professor Deborah Lupton in Australia, a sociology professor, who is brilliant, wise and does stellar work. Her understanding of the social implications of the pandemic is sublime. She is very willing to work with experts in other fields crucial to pandemic management, being generous and thoughtful in interactions. An immense contrast.