PROFILE: Tracy Beth Høeg, Special Assistant to FDA Commissioner
Trump's Latest Handpicked Saboteur Corrupts the FDA
The United States of America has started a dark new chapter in its depraved self-inflicted demolition of public health. Thanks to new Food & Drug Administration Director Marty Makary, (Science-Based Medicine) we now have a viral advocate operating as a "Special Assistant" in the FDA leadership, who personally profited from fearmongering about the pediatric COVID-19 vaccine.
Her name? Tracy Beth Høeg.
Tracy has been rewarded for her loyalty to pestilence and is a serious liability when you consider her willful ineptitude. Read from Tracy Beth Høeg's own website, advertising herself as a private sports physician:
"Dr. Hoeg has a special interest in harnessing the body's ability to heal itself through exercise and movement as well as by stimulating the body's ability to heal itself through orthobiologic medicine such as platelet rich plasma, proliferative therapy such as dextrose as well as bone marrow aspirate concentrate."
While these are a lot of $5 words that certainly sound impressive to the uninformed, this is largely pseudoscientific garbage. Putting a quack like this at the Food & Drug Administration will only compromise the institution's ability to keep children safe from contaminated food and harmful substances. As medical doctor and frequent debunker of common myths about fentanyl Dr. Ryan Marino explains,
"...Tracy Hoeg sells 'platelet rich plasma injections' (aka she takes your own blood & injects it back into your joints that have their own blood supply) for cash based on an RCT of 45 patients. She is not a serious person & is just an antivaxxer & conspiracy theorist."
Keep this in the back of your mind as we review Tracy's record on COVID-19 in extensive detail. If you don’t want to dredge through years of direct quotes, Walker Bragman at Important Context has done quite an impressive summary:
You will find that Høeg’s own words completely disqualify her from any professional role in the entirety of the medical or scientific fields, largely sourced from her Twitter account "@TracyBethHoeg":
2020
December 17, 2020: In response to the headline, "King of Sweden blasts 'failed' Covid strategy in rare royal rebuke," Tracy responds, "Historic, very emotional speech by the king of Sweden. Wish you all spoke Swedish so you could hear the way he says they failed and so many have suffered...Herd immunity strategy 10x more deadly."
Mere weeks later, Tracy would go on to wildly change her tune & become a fangirl of Swedish State Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell.
2021
March 2021: "Children have not been found to be superspreaders and since there is high over dispersion of this disease schools have not been found to be centers for super spreading events or large amounts of disease spread. "CIDRAP: “More than 70% of US household COVID spread started with a child” - awh, whoops.
April 2, 2021: "...there appears to be no need to vaccinate children to reach herd immunity (as anticipated)." Anticipated by whom? The SARS-CoV-2 virus? This is a completely unprecedented vision when looking back at the history of infectious disease pandemics.
May 26, 2021: "Children should return to their normal lives this summer and in the upcoming school year, without masks and regardless of their vaccination status...vaccinating adults indirectly protects children." This statement is jaw-droppingly, impressively wrong, and completely out of line with the entire history of public health and vaccines. I actually had to ask multiple experts to try and wrap my head around how you could possibly come to this conclusion; it's absolutely obscene.
August 5, 2021: "I wonder if the recent RSV surge is resulting in some infant RSV cases being labeled COVID." Assuming pediatricians were too stupid to diagnose their own patients, Tracy decided she would infer their incompetency to her loyal anti-vax social media audience. Digital navel-gazing does not treat children hospitalized by infectious diseases. This helped not a single pediatrician tasked with the responsibility of keeping kids alive.
Alright, we need to take a mild detour for a moment. Tracy Beth Høeg will go on to publish a number of “scientific papers” that are anything but. How do we evaluate these? Let’s learn the basics from epidemiologist Ellie Murray over at E is for Epi:
Got it? Cool! Let’s keep it rockin’ and rolling.
August 30, 2021: Tracy slaps her name on a pre-print titled: "SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccination-Associated Myocarditis in Children Ages 12-17: A Stratified National Database Analysis," fearmongering about the COVID-19 vaccine using the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). This disinformation would spread like wildfire across the web. Never heard of VAERS? Great, we'll tell you all about it.
VAERS has it's uses but is incredibly limited in what it can and cannot show about potential vaccine side-effects, because anyone can file a report saying anything. If you filed a VAERS report claiming the MMR vaccine caused increased flatulence? That would be considered a valid VAERS report. The VAERS website states explicitly: "a report to VAERS does not mean that a vaccine caused an adverse event."
What Tracy and her gaggle of virus lovers fail to tell their audience is that an incredible amount of resources & manpower is dedicated to ensuring that vaccines are safe - especially for children - hence the overwhelming consensus in support for pediatric vaccines from real-world doctors and scientists. Tracy and her cohorts, on the other hand, couldn't care less about the negative impacts of SARS-CoV-2 on children, and dedicate a lot of energy to denying them.
Oh, and co-author Allison Krug destroyed her own career in epidemiology only to fall for an incredibly expensive, multi-thousands upon thousands of dollars life-coaching certification scam. Read for yourself!
2022
January 15, 2022: Tracy and her ilk, including Monica Gandhi, Lucy McBride, and Scott Balsitis launch "The Urgency of Normal," an "advocacy toolkit for parents," insisting that all COVID-19 mitigations for children in any form be abandoned, and falsely compared pediatric COVID-19 to the flu. It's worth noting that Scott is a major fan of white nationalist neo-Nazi creep Christopher Rufo. As the old adage goes: if you have a Nazi sitting at a table of a dozen people, then you have a table of a dozen Nazis. Medical doctor Tyler Black would do a vicious shredding of their "advocacy toolkit," in an absolutely ruthless teardown:
"All of your slides on mental health were critically analyzed and many of them false. One of them a straight mis-citation that would amount to academic misconduct in peer reviewed work."
Oof. That’s gotta sting. If you want a deeper dive on the connections of the “Urgency of Normal,” check out the handy visualization below put together by Adrian Egli.
February 8, 2022: "...the virus was less deadly to children than flu and pneumonia, heart disease, car crashes or guns." This was an objectively false statement in 2020, and it's even worse to hear it again years later, just days after the worst month for pediatric COVID-19 deaths on record. Where have we heard this before? Ah yes, Tracy’s friend and new National Institute of Health Director, Jay Bhattacharya!
Should the FDA and the NIH be staffed by inept frauds who struggle with the mysticism of Arabian numerals?
I'll let Dr. Jonathan Howard speak on this, from his book We Want Them Infected:
"It's revealing that doctors who argued that COVID is equivalent to the flu for children never felt confident enough to actually share the raw numbers of children killed by each virus. None of them wrote an essay titled 'COVID Killed 1593 Kids, the Flu 106: Here's Why the Flu is Worse and Why Kids Shouldn't be Vaccinated Against COVID."
March 8, 2022: "The argument for vaccinating children for that for that for the societal benefit is not what it used to be. We need to look at children who have already been infected...at least 58% of children, it's probably more by now. Especially for healthy children, we don't know if they've benefitted from being vaccinated on top of already having infection."
This is pitifully hilarious but also radically dangerous. Replacing lifesaving pediatric vaccines with a deadly & disabling virus inevitably results in child-sized coffins getting filled. Tracy doesn't give a damn. Now she has a major role at the institution responsible for keeping the food and medicines your child ingests safe. Since she's not a pediatrician, Tracy also did not "look at children who have already been infected," many of which developed serious long-term health issues caused by COVID-19.
Instead, Tracy would do her best to deny these heartbreaking tragedies.
July 5, 2022: Tracy writes an opinion editorial in Tablet magazine that is especially depraved: "The CDC is breaking trust in childhood vaccination: With its unscientific push to vaccinate all infants and toddlers against COVID," - mind you, they lobbied to infect all of these children well before a vaccine would ever be available, ignorant of the virus' impacts on pediatric health & development - "the agency will harm vaccine uptake for more significant diseases."
This is depraved fraud. The arguments that Tracy and her ilk have used to fearmonger about the COVID-19 vaccine whilst downplaying the harms of the virus are centuries old and will continue to be repeated in future pandemics. It's especially distressing that Tracy seems to have a willful amnesia about the centuries-long history of vaccines and infectious diseases - in truth, demonizing the COVID-19 vaccine in kids only leads parents to believe that other viruses are harmless to children, and should not be vaccinated against. Now two kids are dead of measles in Texas.
This makes Tracy woefully inept to serve at the Food and Drug Administration.
December 5, 2022: Further fearmongering about the COVID-19 vaccine, Tracy publishes a new "extended essay" alongside Marty Makary, Stefan Baral, Vinay Prasad, Allison Krug, and Kevin Bardosh titled "COVID-19 vaccine boosters for young adults: a risk benefit assessment and ethical analysis of mandate policies at universities." These predictions would not come to pass, and this legion of young men who had their lives upended by COVID-19 boosters never managed to materialize. However, the countless Americans developing serious health problems after repeated COVID-19 infections continues to grow. Tracy simply does not care about the latter.
December 13 2022: Tracy joins a "Public Health Integrity Committee" under Florida governor Ron DeSantis (who professed that enslaved Black men “benefited” from their violent exploitation) alongside Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, Bret Weinstein, Joeseph Fraiman, and a few other social media anti-vax grifters. They manage to get absolutely everything wrong & Floridians pay a heavy cost as a result. It's worth noting that when he ran for President in 2024, Ron DeSantis' embrace of the Great Barrington Declaration mythology failed to drive an imagined silent majority of Republican primary voters to the polls.
Oddly enough, people don't like getting sick. Wowzers!
2023
January 8 2023: "Schools in California are required to have a COVID-19 testing plan...I have been getting notifications all weekend to covid test my son in SCUSD district...No benefit to kids. $$$ to testing companies." One has to worry for Tracy's son, who may develop serious health complications as a result of the virus that his mother has profited from championing as a benevolent friend of children - as many have already. Would his mother be humble enough to admit fault and get him the care that he needs, contradicting Tracy's social media brand? Doubtful.
More importantly, keeping a child infectious with COVID-19 from infecting their classmates, teachers, and families of both keeps the classroom outbreak free and allows education to proceed uninterrupted. Tracy did not want CA schools open and children receiving an education - she wanted children too sick to learn anything, teachers disabled by COVID-19, and education disrupted. Tracy's work at the FDA will only put American children at further risk from other harms alongside COVID-19.
This tweet is incredibly revealing of Tracy's worldview, similar to economist Emily Oster: because she was personally inconvenienced by COVID-19 mitigations, she blames the mitigations used to combat the virus and its many well documented harms instead of the virus itself. Tracy's expectation is that working class Americans should be happy to have their lives upended by COVID-19 so she can continue with uninterrupted luxury and comfort in beautiful California as a wealthy physician. You are a mere serf in her eyes, not a fellow citizen.
January 29th, 2023: In what is possibly the most morally depraved and exploitative tweet of the entire COVID-19 pandemic, Tracy posts a photo of her own young son on a skiing trip, stating: "My 11-year-old son really said it best...'why should I get vaccinated for a disease that is not a risk to me'? He said that when he was 10 and really got to the crux of the issue that it didn't matter if he got covid. If you understood the Sorg et al study, you know he is right."
First of all, who in their right mind thinks that a 10-year-old child is qualified to evaluate vaccines and infectious diseases? Secondly, I vaguely remember being 10 years old - My biggest passions in life were making "pew pew" noises while playing with Mobile Suit Gundam action figures, and how the Nintendo 64 was the ultimate videogame console ever made. Thirdly, and it's so disgraceful that anti-vaccine creeps keep doing this, but how dare you exploit your own child as a damn prop for your pro-pestilence propaganda?
February 3rd 2023: Tracy completely misrepresents a Nordic myocarditis study to falsely claim that the COVID-19 vaccines were causing much more myocarditis than the COVID-19 virus, knowing that her partisan social media audience will not critically evaluate if her claims are supported by the paper she's citing. This flagrant dishonesty is especially depraved, unprofessional, and disqualifying from working at the FDA. As one critic pointed out to Tracy, "It's obvious how you start with the conclusion and work backwards."
February 5th 2023: Tracy mocks the "Swiss Cheese" model of layered mitigations to prevent COVID-19 transmission. "If you have no evidence something works, why on [earth] include it in your prevention study?" There are mountains of evidence, but because Tracy is a "Evidence-Based Medicine" zealot, they are all wildly inferior and dismissed because of a single paper from two authors who wanted to let COVID-19 burn through millions of unvaccinated people in 2020, and were directly advising governments to let this happen.
Anti-vaxxers like Tracy and RFK Jr. insist they are practicing "evidence-based medicine," when in truth, "EBM" now stands for "Entirely Bullshit Misinformation."
February 6th, 2023: Tracy joins another fake institution, the "Norfolk Group," which produced a worthless 80 page "report" demanding Congress to interrogate public health officials, doctors, and scientists with heavily biased "questions."
February 9th, 2023: Tracy repeats another boring old myth about COVID-19, saying "Sweden did just as well as neighboring countries though they -Kept primary schools open -Kept indoor & outdoor sport open -Didn't have mandatory masks -Didn't have COVID passports -Didn't vax healthy kids [under 12]" This is, again, a complete and utter fiction which pretends loudmouth abrasive cranks on social media like "FatEmperor" should be dictating public health policy, and when things don't work out? Just pretend these problems aren't happening. Clever!
March 13th, 2023: Florida's Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo, tweets: "Today's discussion during our first Public Health Integrity Committee has confirmed what we have known in Florida: masking is not supported by good data and is not effective for preventing transmission, and bivalent boosters may cause more harm than good." Neither of these statements are true, and Tracy was proud to put her name and face to these obscene fictions.
March 14th, 2023: "Why is evidence of efficacy from RCTs expected before we recommend medications but school/business closures, masks& other NPIs were not only recommended but mandated w/o such evidence? ...this is a dangerous irrational double standard."
Professor Jose-Luis Jimenez, a chemist and engineer at the University of Colorado Boulder, responded, stating: "There is no double standard. There are better ways to get evidence for NPIs (e.g. masks), and we use those ways. For medications we are stuck with RCTs, a poor and cumbersome system to get evidence, prone to confounders, but the only one available in that case."
Should the FDA be employing people who have to have basic scientific concepts explained to them on a regular basis like this?
In the replies to Tracy's initial tweet, one mother responds, "Go away! You are a fraud! You told my husband not to vaccinate my kid and you are not our doctor. You mesaged him privately on Twitter. You should lose your medical license for it." Should the FDA be consulting a sports physician who personally intrudes upon the relationship concerned parents have with their pediatrician in order to fearmonger about a safe and effective vaccine? This is highly unethical, as well as just plain wrong. "Tracy Hoeg DMd my husband in June 2021 and told him to hang in there and refuse the shot...She harmed my family and she's not our doctor."
Giving Tracy a major role at the FDA is simply another major scandal just waiting to happen, with innocent children inevitably paying the price for her antics.
March 23rd, 2023: "Next week I'll be testifying in DC on consequences of school closures. Do you have studies/statistics/stories you think should be shared? I hope we can bring the extent of the harms to light & understand why they occurred in spite of so many opposing early knowing harms>benefits." Tracy would go on to commit perjury before Congress, but it's worth pointing out how especially perverse this is. The demand for widespread COVID-19 outbreaks in schools, with sick children coughing over each other and puking up their guts, too ill to actually learn anything, is utterly obscene. As New York elementary school teacher Sarah Allen explains,
The number of NYC teachers I know who have or have had long-lasting COVID Issues continues to rise. The risk of Long COVID grows with subsequent infections. It’s been a very long time since NYC schools did anything to prevent COVID spread.
These waves of COVID-19 disrupted education and got a lot of students and teachers very sick - with far too many still suffering long-term health issues as a result. The expectation that teachers not only risk throwing their health away as a job requirement but also serve as a nurse looking after constantly sick schoolchildren, for such a miserably low salary, is complete obscenity. What Tracy Beth Høeg has done with her pro-viral advocacy is utterly sadistic, and part of a larger indefensible agenda.
That same day, Tracy published an open access, non-peer-reviewed paper alongside UCSF's Vinay Prasad and failed web designer Kelley Krohnert on SSRN that is especially depraved, titled, "Statistical and Numerical Errors Made by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention During the COVID-19 Pandemic" - this is a mere 18 pages long, yet used to call for the burning of the CDC offices in Atlanta.
Prasad tweets, "The errors are damning. Basic counts of dead kids, causes of childhood death. Unacceptable incompetence," which is incredibly dishonest and dramatic framing. He continues, "Half a million people and counting are aware of CDCs errors. I encourage everyone to download a copy and read the table. This is amazing stuff. CDC should be dismantled if it cannot accurately report the number of kids dead from covid. This is a basic competence and CDC failed."
Gee whiz, what if someone did actually read the paper and evaluate its contents critically? Ah wait, that’s the job of the PAI, isn’t it? Mwah?
First off, there's a lot of alleging and claiming that typos are proof of a horrible fearmongering conspiracy - a years old conspiracy theory that COVID-19 deaths are being wildly overcounted. Secondly, a central role of the CDC is producing a massive stream of data and numbers at an impressive frequency. It's inevitable that some errors will occur - Prasad and Tracy are not operating in good faith. Thirdly, Prasad and Tracy show their own pitiful ignorance about death reporting in America. These two don't even realize that not only are they accusing the CDC of inflating pediatric COVID-19 deaths, but also 50 separate state health departments of imagining pediatric COVID-19 deaths. This is all impotent sensationalism, fire and fury, all bark with zero real bite. This paper would not stand up to peer review and is the equivalent of a random blogpost from the conspiracy theory sewers of the Internet.
March 28th, 2023: Tracy Beth Høeg lies before Congress, claiming "We've had evidence prior to the pandemic that masks were largely ineffective at preventing community transmission of influenza and other upper respiratory viruses, and we did not obtain any new high-quality evidence during COVID-19 that masks are an effective mitigation strategy...a Cochrane review of randomized studies, has not found evidence that masks are effective. It wasn't science-based...We should have by default kept our schools open, but instead, we required non-evidence-based mitigation strategies as a prerequisite for getting our children back into school." This is outright criminal dishonesty on Tracy's part here that has been debunked time and time again.
This "gold-standard" Cochrane review is an utterly incompetent piece of propaganda with countless flaws, but because it supports Tracy's narrative, she's more than happy to endorse a pitifully worthless scientific paper because it has the legitimacy of the Cochrane name behind it. The EBM zealots are much more interested in lazily producing intricate fictions than having a healthy respect for the many scientific fields outside of clinical medicine. Launching indefensible personal attacks against scientists and doctors they falsely paint as inferior to elevate themselves, these dedicated fraudsters are in need of a serious reckoning.
May 5th, 2023: In response to a Scientific American article debunking Tracy's beloved "Cochrane review of masks," she writes: "If 'masks work' vs covid, why don't the authors cite real life evidence? The cite N95 particle filtration but can that be equated to infection prevention? Can people not be infected through their eyes? Are there not holes on the sides of most masks?" This is pitifully hilarious, as Tracy is just regurgitating garbage she read on social media because the facts don't align with her narrative. Let's answer Tracy's questions one by one:
Yes, the authors cite "real life evidence." As an EBM zealot, what Tracy is doing is constructing an impossible standard designed to ensure that her critics can never prove her wrong. It's a game to her; not serious scientific inquiry.
Yes, N95 particle filtration can be equated to infection prevention.
While some people have gotten infected through their eyes, the overwhelming majority of COVID-19 comes from people inhaling SARS-CoV-2 contaminated aerosols through their nose and mouth.
Tracy also assumes that most human beings lack a pair of hands, to press the respirator against their face and ensure a quality seal for the filter.
All Tracy Beth Høeg is doing is broadcasting her own ignorance to the world. It's pathetic and should be openly mocked and ridiculed; not rewarded with a senior position at the FDA.
May 6th, 2023: "Strikes me as UNscientific to start with the assumption masks work rather than asks for good evidence it's true. They compare masks to life jackets but come on....we can see with our own eyes life jackets keep people afloat. What is it exactly we can see masks doing?" This is just two steps removed from germ-theory denialism: that viruses aren't real because we can't see them with our naked eye. It speaks to an incredibly arrogant ignorance on Tracy's part, that is immediately debunked with a basic inquiry onto the science of PPE engineering.
Don’t take our word for it - learn for yourself!
Frankly, it's incredibly distressing that someone this obnoxiously immature is now part of the FDA. No mature adult states "I can't see it, so it's not real," like playing peekaboo with an infant whose tiny brain hasn't developed object permanence yet.
June 3rd, 2023: Tracy tweets out: "Just published Korean nationwide study reports 8 cases of 'sudden cardiac death (SCD) attributable to VRM [vaccine-related myocarditis] proved by an autopsy' All developed<1 week post mRNA vax>" which was immediately thrashed by medical doctor John Hess:
"Such a bad faith argument. They did an autopsy on EVERY death related to vaccination. EIGHT deaths. Population of Korea 6 times smaller than USA. That equals 48 USA deaths. In the USA under age 50 there have been 74,313 deaths. Tell me Tracy which number is bigger 48 or 74,000."
Do you truly believe that the Food and Drug Administration's decisions should be influenced by someone who so frequently struggles with basic integers?
June 19th, 2023: "Thought we sometimes disagree, I like RFK, Jr. Let me know what I got wrong." How about absolutely everything? A depraved misogynist who drove his own wife to suicide after she discovered his "little black book" of affairs, rating each woman 1-5 stars based on their sexual performance? If this is the sort of man that Tracy "likes," then I fear for Tracy's son, that he will be taught to model himself after horrific creeps like Joe Rogan and RFK Jr. This is not healthy, constructive masculinity - but instead childish, bratty immaturity being celebrated.
July 11th, 2023: "Is [CDC Morbidity & Mortality Watch Report] a reliable journal for informing health policy? In a new paper Alyson Haslam [Vinay Prasad] & I analyze 77 MMWR reports pertaining to masks. Our results were concerning. >75% concluded masks were effective w/only 30% testing masks. 0 were RCTs." First of all, medRxiv is a preprint server, so these "results" have not been peer reviewed. Second of all, masks are designed by engineers, who do not use RCTs in their scientific field for a number of reasons. This is propaganda, not science.
September 26th, 2023: Tracy, alongside Vinay Prasad and Shamez Ladhani, published yet another open-access, non-peer reviewed paper, titled "How methodological pitfalls have created widespread misunderstanding about long COVID" - an umbrella term for a range of long-term health complications caused by a significant percentage of SARS-CoV-2 infections. It’s just wrong, and frankly cruel.
October 21st, 2023: "Cool to have the 'hottest' UCSF covid publication in the last 28 years in terms of Altmetric score w/our [BMJ Evidence Based Medicine] paper re flaws in Long Covid research methodology. Witten w [Vinay Prasad] and [Shamez Ladhani]." This is a pattern of behavior that you will see time and time again from those who insist on singing the praises of COVID-19 as harmless and benevolent on social media - they relish the spotlight and media attention. Who cares if the paper is factually accurate? It got a bunch of views from uneducated anti-vaccine cranks who don't treat patients thanks to exploiting social media, and that's all that matters in the eyes of people like Tracy. It's trashy, disgraceful misconduct.
November 27th, 2023: "Writing a related article about masking kids & came to realize this school in Maryland that's requiring some kids to wear N95s (now in 2023) was so worried about the media attention, they moved recess indoors [facepalm emoji] Why is kids' overall well-being always an afterthought to this neurotic safetyism?" This term, "safetyism," has been spewed time and time again since 2020, accusing those that didn't want to suffer repeated COVID-19 outcomes of being "neurotic," against a tidal wave of overwhelming evidence showing the virus' capacity for harm.
December 8th, 2023: "Our systematic review of child mask mandates, finding no good evidence they work, has the highest altmetric score ever for the journal ADC_BMJ yet total crickets from US mainstream media. They Believe in Science but can't cover *that* type of science, apparently." As we all know, just because a single scientific paper is very popular on social media doesn't mean that it's claims are automatically true. Unless you’re part of FDA leadership, of course.
2024
February 18th, 2024: "The majority of parents were right to trust their intuition that we didn't & don't have good evidence the net benefits of vaccinating 5-11 year old for covid outweighed the harms." This is not only dishonest but morally depraved now that thousands of parents had to bury a child thanks to COVID-19, overwhelmingly because they were unvaccinated. Parents did not simply "trust their intuition," they were fed a steady stream of anti-vax propaganda that Tracy herself was happy to produce. Many children also wound up disabled by the virus she profited from insisting was harmless.
February 23rd, 2024: Tracy Beth Høeg speaks at the Stanford Faculty Club on behalf of the "Heterodox Academy" as part of a "COVID Summit." Also a part of this speaker list was Stephen Pinker, a close associate of the now dead billionaire pedophile rapist Jeffrey Epstein. Quite concerning!
Stanford seems obsessed with producing pro-COVID content. Just look at another conference they hosted later that year which we reviewed:
March 5th 2024: Tracy Beth Hoeg makes an appearance on the podcast The Illusion of Consensus, which regularly features Kevin Bass - who was expelled for sexual misconduct from his university. Why does Tracy keep associating with so many of these slimeballs?
The Illusion of Consensus also features Rav Arora, who responded to one of their critics - a doctor who actually treated patients dying of COVID-19 - with: "Stop being a fuckling pussy and have a conversation. Or STFU" followed by a laughing & crying emoji. This show was hosted by your new NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, and the episode titled: "Tracy Beth Høeg Reveals Her Job At UC Davis Over Polarizing Vaccine Myocarditis Research" It wasn't “polarizing” - she was simply wrong. Tracy was kicked out for being an incompetent fraud. That's how jobs in the real world are supposed to function.
July 1st, 2024: "I'm curious where the good evidence is that the benefits of the school closures and lockdowns outweighed the harms in the US and worldwide. Also why is Scott Atlas being accused of not having appropriate expertise?"
First of all, Scott Atlas is a loudmouthed radiologist without a background in infectious diseases, treated zero COVID-19 patients, and became a cheerleader for the virus infecting children in early 2020 - well before a vaccine or understanding of the virus was readily available - then denying the many harms this caused. Secondly, of the thousands of American children that were killed by COVID-19 (of which Tracy argues aren't real) they were overwhelmingly unvaccinated. Mitigations that bought enough time for getting these kids the protection of a vaccinated save lives.
October 8th, 2024: Tracy Beth Høeg is the lead on yet another open-access, non-peer reviewed paper titled "School Mask Mandates and COVID-19: The Challenge of Using Difference-inDifferences Analysis of Observational Data to Estimate the Effectiveness of a Public Health Intervention," alongside UK Health Security Agency consultant Shamez Ladhani (who wanted to block pediatric COVID-19 deaths from being reported in the media) and UCSF's Vinay Prasad.
Vinay tweets, "Just OUT. Game over for masking kids. Led by [Tracy Beth Høeg]. We show NEJM kid masking paper fails to replicate. People should be retracted if NEJM has any scruples. Read the paper. Masking kids prob doesn't work and we don't know bc no RCTs." None of the authors involved have any experience in the development and evaluation of PPE.
October 12th, 2024: "This is incredible & so sad to see. It's not just that multiple California counties are reinstating health care masks mandates, but Santa Clara Co will require children as young as 2 to mask while hospitalized [facepalm emoji]. Who beliefs this is good 'health care'?" This statement is years after well documented studies that unmitigated SARS-CoV-2 transmission in hospitals leads to serious health complications in patients, including death.
December 8th, 2024: "...there are no vaccine mandates in Scandinavia (at least not to my knowledge). I feel this is consistent with basic medical ethics. Also trust is a 2 way street between public health & individuals. And this makes me think of one of my favorite Ayn Rand quotes: 'The smallest minority on earth in the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.'"
First of all, if Tracy had her way throughout history, then the iron lung manufacturing industry would still be active thanks to unvaccinated children being disabled by polio. Secondly, this is an incredibly dishonest portrayal of Ayn Rand's writing. Here's another quote of Rand’s that Tracy failed to share:
"The next question in regard to quarantine is somewhat different, because in the state of, sense of a quarantine, if someone has a contagious disease, against which there is no inoculation, then the government will have the right to require quarantine. What is the principle here? It's to protect people who are not ill, to protect the people who, to prevent the people who are ill from passing on their illness to others."
December 9th, 2024: "I had such a fantastic last day in Florida visiting with [Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo] & family...Floridians are fortunate to have Dr. Ladapo as surgeon general. I am lucky to have him as a friend and colleague."
Well, it's funny you say that Tracy, because Ladapo has been ousted as falsifying study results to forward his agenda of fearmongering about the COVID-19 vaccine. This endorsement puts the entire body of work Tracy has produced into question.
From medical doctor Kristen Panthagani in April 2023:
"You may recall Florida's vaccine analysis which claimed that mRNA vaccines are associated with increased risk of cardiac death in young men. This week, TB_Times published earlier, unpublished drafts of that analysis. Those earlier drafts tell a dramatically different story"
This is the sort of unprofessional, dishonest misconduct that Tracy Beth Høeg thinks "Floridians are fortunate to have." How can we be certain that Tracy didn't practice this same misbehavior in her own publishing? This discredits every single publication and institution she's attached her name to.
This is who is now part of the senior staff at the Food and Drug Administration, responsible for ensuring the safety of the foods your child consumes, and the medicine used to treat them when they fall ill.
2025
April 04th, 2025: Tracy joins the FDA and is immediately tasked with evaluating the safety and effectiveness of the latest Novavax COVID-19 booster vaccine, which does not use mRNA technology. Tracy made a name for herself on social media by attacking vaccines with fraudulent data, while being totally unqualified to do so.
It's safe to assume at this point that the FDA is now a compromised and rogue organization that poses a serious threat to the nation’s health. Demand her resignation before we see Tracy repeat the same atrocious, completely indefensible behavior we’ve seen for years from Høeg.
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