The FDA Goes Fringe: What You Need to Know About the Agency’s New Hire
Tracy Beth Høeg has been a far-right favorite for her COVID contrarianism.
Written by Walker Bragman Published: 4/5/25
The Department of Health and Human Services is rapidly becoming a haven for fringe medical voices.
In what’s been called a “bloodbath,” massive cuts hit the department this week with layoff and reassignment notices going out to thousands of employees—from those in leadership to administration to research. The changes are part of a seismic reorganization led by HHS Secretary and prominent anti-vaccine activist Robert Kennedy Jr.
The secretary has since said that perhaps 20 percent of the firings could have been errors, but the trend is clear: As longtime public health veterans are forced out, HHS is welcoming fringe figures into key positions.
This week Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon with a history of making controversial medical claims including about COVID-19 and mRNA vaccines, took over as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. Makary also helped push out the agency’s top vaccine official, while bringing in new blood—another contrarian doctor to serve as his special assistant: the Ayn Rand-quoting Tracy Beth Høeg.
Announcing Høeg’s involvement as a special assistant to the commissioner, Principal Deputy Commissioner Dr. Sara Brenner described Høeg as having “extensive experience working in vaccine science and epidemiology.” Høeg is a sports medicine physician and research on infectious diseases and vaccines is strikingly absent from her biography at Northern California Orthopedic Associates, where she has worked since 2020.
Although she earned a PhD in epidemiology in 2015 from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, Høeg’s limited publications prior to the pandemic were largely focused on ophthalmology and endurance athletics. Her first COVID-related publication on PubMed, from January 2021, was a study of transmission in schools in Wood County, Wisconsin.
Høeg concluded that mask-wearing “likely contributed to low levels of observed disease transmission.” Despite her own findings, she would go on to write against masking in future papers that have been widely rebuffed by the epidemiology community.
Høeg’s induction into the new regime is unsurprising. She fits in well with the current crop of contrarian public health leadership and is a longtime ally of Makary’s. The pair published a paper together and have co-authored opinion pieces. Like her new boss, Høeg has promoted “natural immunity.” She also branded individuals supportive of COVID mitigation measures “Covidian,” a term favored by Trump’s new National Institutes of Health director, economist Jay Bhattacharya.
Along with Makary and Bhattacharya, Høeg has allied herself with anti-vaxxers like Kennedy, whom she calls a “friend,” and Alex Berenson. She’s also made many dubious remarks about vaccines—particularly COVID jabs, casting doubt on both their safety and the need to use them.
During a post-election podcast appearance, Høeg said she hoped to see the incoming administration craft a “revised framework for testing, approving and regulating new vaccines,” and end “unnecessary” inoculations. She also said she wants open discourse about vaccines, weighing their “pros and cons.”
Unlike her new boss, who was a successful author before the pandemic, Høeg was a relative unknown in private practice. But her work attacking COVID mitigation efforts, while criticized by her peers in academia, found an audience in MAGA-world. At the time, far-right groups were working to muddy the science around COVID to weaken political support for pandemic mitigation measures like business and school closures.
Høeg found new allies and her star quickly rose.
Her first taste of the spotlight came with a September 2021 pre-print she authored on vaccines, using unverified data from the Vaccine Adverse Effect Reporting System. The paper suggested COVID shots were harmful to young boys and was called out for methodological issues and a potential conflict-of-interest with one of the authors affiliated with the group Rational Ground, which opposed COVID mitigation efforts including vaccine mandates. Nevertheless, the study went viral.
Several months later, in 2022, Høeg was part of a group of doctors behind the error-ridden Urgency of Normal toolkit, which purported to give parents the facts they needed to challenge COVID mitigation measures in their children’s schools. Another member of Urgency of Normal was Dr. Vinay Prasad, yet another fringe medical voice recently amplified by the Trump White House. Høeg and Prasad have published together.
In July that year, Høeg was lauded by the anti-vaccine Brownstone Institute for conducting “The Best Mask Study Yet.” The paper languished for years, unable to find a home, but was finally published this February in the medical journal of the RealClear Foundation’s new Academy of Public Health, which counts both Bhattacharya and Makary on its editorial board.
The day after the Brownstone article about her study, Høeg called the group’s founder, Jeffrey Tucker, an anti-vaxxer and advocate for child labor and youth tobacco-use, “a good friend of mine.” Tucker also has ties to Makary and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya. One of the departments that has seen cuts at FDA is the Center for Tobacco Products, which regulates the manufacture, marketing, and distribution of tobacco products.
In November 2022, Høeg was one of several contrarian physicians to sue California over its now-defunct misinformation law that empowered the state medical board to revoke the licenses of doctors who spread COVID misinformation. Representing her pro bono was the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a right-wing lawfare group linked to Charles Koch, and dedicated to dismantling the administrative state.
The following month, Høeg became part of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ so-called Public Health Integrity Committee, along with Bhattacharya. The group described itself as “a committee of expert researchers charged with assessing federal decisions, recommendations, and guidance related to public health and health care.” Its main job, however, was finding a justification to defy the Biden administration’s efforts to control the spread of COVID, like vaccine mandates.
Høeg went on to work in DeSantis’s health department under his controversial Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, a former member of the pro-Trump physician group America’s Frontline Doctors that pushed hydroxychloroquine as COVID treatment despite evidence indicating it is not effective against the disease. Ladapo is best known for discouraging the use of mRNA vaccines. In April 2023, he was revealed to have altered findings of a study on COVID vaccine safety to show harms to young men. Høeg defended him.
Next, she was recruited along with Bhattacharya and Makary by Brownstone to be part of its Norfolk Group to craft a blueprint for congressional COVID inquiry meant to aid the incoming GOP-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (HSSCP). The 80-page document, released in early February 2023, started from the position that contrarian perspectives on COVID were correct and mitigations did more harm than good. Makary and Bhattacharya testified as experts for the Republicans at the first HSSCP hearing weeks later. Høeg’s appearance before the subcommittee followed in March of that year to discuss the impacts of school closures.
During her opening statement, Høeg cited her 2021 Wood County study to argue that the low transmission levels she observed in schools indicated that closures were never necessary. She neglected, however, to mention the high levels of mask compliance that her own paper credited for those low levels. Later, she attacked teachers unions and claimed closures fueled the mental health crisis in young people that was declared by the American Academy of Pediatrics. The AAP did not mention closures in its declaration, but it did note that “The pandemic has struck at the safety and stability of families,” explaining that “more than 140,000 children in the United States lost a primary and/or secondary caregiver, with youth of color disproportionately impacted.”
Although Høeg has previously expressed support for the Measles-Mumps-Rubella vaccine, which is widely seen as under threat from Kennedy’s HHS. Nevertheless, experts we spoke to expressed concern about her involvement with the critical public health agency.
Virologist and AJI science adviser Angela Rasmussen told Important Context that Høeg has “no relevant qualifications with regard to vaccinology,” noting that she has “repeatedly misrepresented safety and adverse events data to decrease public confidence in vaccination, particularly for children.” Rasmussen said she worried that Høeg was “going to target vaccines. Especially vaccines that are important for kids.”
Infectious disease epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera, meanwhile, worried about the impact of the administration’s Make America Health Again agenda, which she said Høeg was part of.
“One of the most concerning trends with each new MAHA nomination is the claim that there are a bunch of health mysteries (i.e.chronic diseases) that they will uniquely and heroically solve, either by relitigating established science or through massive budget and personnel cuts,” Rivera said. “Høeg is no different, as she’s called some vaccines ‘unnecessary’ and challenged the current framework for safety and efficacy testing.”
“All this does is further undermine vaccine confidence while wasting taxpayer dollars,” added Rivera, who is a member of the group Defend Public Health, which formed in response to the Trump administration’s public health plans. “It doesn’t make anyone in America healthier—in fact it will likely make America sicker from vaccine-preventable diseases.”
There is already evidence that Rasmussen and Rivera are right to be worried about the direction the FDA is moving. This week, the agency delayed the full licensure of Novavax's COVID-19 vaccine, which was supposed to happen on April 1, after the commissioner’s office got involved in an unusual move. Brenner has reportedly enlisted Hoeg to review the company’s application.
