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Tracy Beth Høeg, M.D., Ph.D., an epidemiologist and sports physician, said her decision to follow the data during the COVID-19 pandemic came at a steep professional price.
Her research challenged policies on school closures, masking and COVID-19 vaccines. She said the fallout included losing her position at the University of California, Davis, being dropped from an NPR interview and being fired from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Høeg said her experience exposed the unwillingness of universities, media and public health institutions to adapt when research conflicted with their accepted narratives.
In an interview this week with investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker on “The DisInformation Chronicle,” Høeg said institutions too often treated the accepted narrative as settled and then dismissed or attacked people who questioned it.
That approach did more than distort the public discussion about COVID-19, Høeg said. It also created a scientific and institutional culture that could affect how other medical questions are handled long after the pandemic.
For Høeg, the solution is simple: Scientists should follow the evidence wherever it leads.
“It’s a core belief of mine that you have to be objective when you’re doing scientific studies,” she said. “Otherwise, you just shouldn’t do them. It’s pointless if you’re not willing to be objective.”
‘I … didn’t realize the jeopardy that I was putting myself in’
During the pandemic, Høeg published 30 to 40 papers on COVID-19 transmission, masking, youth sports, vaccine risk-benefit, pregnancy, long COVID, visitor restrictions and testing.
Some of her research challenged widely accepted claims.
One study found little evidence of COVID-19 transmission among children in Wisconsin schools, which was consistent with data from Europe. Another examined myocarditis risk in boys after their second Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine dose and found the risks outweighed the benefits in boys who didn’t have underlying health conditions.
Høeg said she didn’t initially understand the professional risks she was taking by challenging the prevailing narrative.
“There was sort of a hesitancy to do this sort of research because I think people were afraid for their careers,” she said. “I actually was blessed with having recently moved from Denmark and didn’t realize the jeopardy that I was putting myself in by doing these sorts of studies.”
At the time, Høeg was conducting research at the University of California, Davis.
She said the university received calls, including from Nature magazine, complaining about her studies on pandemic policies. Eventually, the university asked her not to use her affiliation with the school.
Høeg said the university refused to renew her voluntary position in 2022, after the European Journal of Clinical Investigation published her study on myocarditis risks in boys who received the COVID-19 vaccine.
NPR also dropped an interview with Høeg for “All Things Considered” after she raised concerns about masking children during outdoor sports.
In a pre-interview discussion with NPR, she told the outlet, “We don’t have evidence that these masks work to prevent transmission. … Bottom line is, we shouldn’t be doing these unproven things to children that are harmful.”
Soon after, NPR told Høeg she was no longer needed for the interview.
“It does say a lot about our universities and institutions because it’s like they had been brainwashed to an extent to believe what the media was saying rather than actually look at the data,” Høeg said.
‘They repeated the same wording … even when the data didn’t back it up’
In 2022, Høeg and her colleagues conducted a follow-up analysis of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study on school mask mandates.
Høeg said their analysis used a larger dataset and a longer time period and reached the opposite conclusion about the relationship between mask mandates and COVID-19 transmission among children.
The team’s submission to the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) was rejected. Høeg said reviewers described the submission as “rife with polemics.”
“Well, maybe it’s polarizing if you disagree with it,” Høeg said.
The rejection unearthed an underlying problem at the CDC, according to Høeg.
“They have a scientific agenda,” she said. “And so as soon as you have a scientific agenda, science has been thrown out the window. Science doesn’t have an agenda other than to find the truth.”
A 2024 analysis by Høeg and colleagues examined 77 mask studies published in the MMWR beginning in 2020. According to Høeg, 75% of the studies said masks were effective, while only 14% reported statistically significant results and none were randomized studies.
One finding especially stood out to her: She said 5% of the studies found masks were connected to higher infection rates, yet “they still concluded that masks worked.”
“They repeated the same wording over and over again in each of the studies, that ‘masks are necessary to decrease the spread’ and ‘masks are critical in controlling the case rates of COVID-19,’” she said. “They use the same sort of wording even when the data didn’t back it up at all.”
‘Why are we demonizing people for looking into this?’
Those concerns followed Høeg into the FDA in late 2025 when she was named acting director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER).
A leaked memo from then-FDA official Dr. Vinay Prasad said career staff had linked at least 10 child deaths to the COVID-19 vaccine between 2021 and 2024.
Høeg said she reviewed the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports and found that investigations involving medical records and autopsies had already been conducted.
“My question at the time was … why are these not being made public?” Høeg told Thacker.
Høeg said news leaked that she would present information about the deaths and their possible association with COVID-19 vaccines. She said the media response focused on portraying her as an “anti-vaxxer” rather than asking why the deaths had been investigated but not publicly disclosed.
“If we have these sorts of deaths happening in children due to medical products of any kind, why are we sitting on them for years?” she asked. “That’s the take-home I want people to have from this.”
She also questioned why people who investigate potential safety problems are attacked for trying to expose the dangers.
“Why are we demonizing people for looking into this? … Isn’t that what the public wants?” she asked.
‘The deep state really is a thing’
In May, just days after FDA Commissioner Marty Makary resigned, Høeg said she arrived at work to find media reports claiming she had resigned — something she said she knew nothing about.
FDA lawyers later asked her to resign, but she refused to sign the letter. She was subsequently locked out of the agency’s systems and escorted from the building.
Høeg said she never received a performance-based explanation for her termination. She also said the person identified as the author of her termination memo later denied writing or seeing it.
According to Høeg, agency lawyers told her the order came from “way above their pay grade.”
The experience changed how she viewed other departures from the agency. “It opened my eyes to the fact that maybe a number of the people who I thought had resigned really had not resigned,” she said.
“The deep state really is a thing,” she added.
‘Women who want to get pregnant … should be told about these risks’
For Høeg, the concerns she encountered during the COVID-19 era are not limited to COVID-19.
In 2025, she helped organize an FDA panel examining potential risks associated with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, during pregnancy.
The American Psychiatric Association criticized the panel for what it called “misinterpretation and unbalanced viewpoints.” Høeg said the media also portrayed any discussion of potential risks as “misinformation about SSRI use” and a signal that depression wasn’t being taken seriously.
According to Høeg, the panel discussed risks already addressed in FDA labeling and scientific research, including miscarriage, premature birth, postpartum hemorrhage, congenital heart defects and neonatal adaptation syndrome.
“This should not be controversial that women who want to get pregnant and who are pregnant should be told about these risks,” she said.
She also warned about the lack of ongoing monitoring of drug safety.
“The FDA is not actively investigating the safety of these products in pregnancy or at all after the initial trials are done,” she said.
Høeg said the discussion should not be interpreted as an argument against treating depression. “I don’t think that any of this should be synonymous with not taking depression seriously,” she said. “That’s just nonsense.”
‘There’s just no reporting on this. … People have died taking this drug’
Høeg also discussed Tavneos, the Amgen-manufactured brand name for avacopan, a drug approved to treat a type of blood-vessel inflammation.
While at CDER, Høeg said she raised concerns that the pivotal clinical trial used to approve the drug had included manipulated data.
According to Høeg, at least eight deaths had been attributed to the drug because of liver injury.
The New England Journal of Medicine later retracted the paper detailing the trial, and European regulators withdrew the drug’s authorization. While the FDA has proposed withdrawing Tavneos’ approval, it remains available in the U.S.
Yet, the media barely covered it.
“There’s just no reporting on this,” Høeg said. “People have died taking this drug. … We asked for them to withdraw it from the market, and the media is just totally silent.”
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Thacker: ‘There was no real learning in the end. … If anything, we became dumber’
Høeg said it is troubling that some of the most disputed COVID-19 policies are still treated as settled questions.
“How is this still part of our collective conversation that people … are still saying school closures were necessary and mask mandates were necessary?” she asked.
Thacker said the failure to learn from those policies could have consequences during the next pandemic. People who developed a “false sense of safety from masks” during COVID-19 could mistakenly assume masks will protect them from a more dangerous virus in the future, he said.
Thacker also questioned whether the country understands anything about the COVID-19 vaccines. “There was no real learning in the end. … If anything, we became dumber,” he said.
Høeg said the problem stems from the widespread failure to reconsider policies when the evidence changed.
“Once the government decided this is what we have to do, they just kept digging in, even though the data didn’t support it,” she said.
“This is why I keep doing these interviews, because it’s important for people to know the truth.”
Watch Høeg on ‘The DisInformation Chronicle’ podcast here:
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