… was published in the Atlanta Journal Constitution on March 19th but is a story you, like me, probably missed. It is about Dr. Eva Lee.
Eva Lee’s work on modeling mass disease outbreaks is so well-known that the United States, China and Singapore have sought her help in fighting COVID-19. At the same time, her employer, Georgia Tech, has banished her from campus and locked her out of her university email account.
Lee is a brilliant computer modeler. When Grady Memorial Hospital called on her a decade ago for help with an alarming rate of infections related to open-heart surgeries, she built a program that cut the rate to zero within 12 months.
Lee, 55, is also an admitted felon, although her attorney questions the prosecution of her. In December she pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to falsifying the membership certificate behind a $40,000 National Science Foundation grant and then lying about it to investigators.
Her predicament appears to stem from taking shortcuts while filling out the certificate — shortcuts she’s now paying a severe price for. Georgia Tech suspended her almost a year ago from a professorship she has held since 1999.
The reason this story is now becoming well known is that she was prominently referenced in this just published NY Times article:
The ‘Red Dawn’ Emails: 8 Key Exchanges on the Faltering Response to the Coronavirus — Experts inside and outside the government identified the threat early on and sought to raise alarms even as President Trump was moving slowly. Read some of what they had to say among themselves at critical moments.
Dr. Eva Lee, a researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology who has frequently worked with the federal government to create infectious disease projections, helped the Red Dawn group do modeling, based on the virus spread on the cruise ship. (Dr. Lee is facing sentencing on federal charges that she falsified the membership certificate behind a $40,000 National Science Foundation grant for unrelated research.)
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The concern these medical experts had been raising in late January and early February turned to alarm by the third week in February. That was when they effectively concluded that the United States had already lost the fight to contain the virus, and that it needed to switch to mitigation. One critical element in that shift was the realization that many people in the country were likely already infected and capable of spreading the virus, but not showing any symptoms. Here Dr. Lee discusses this conclusion with Dr. Robert Kadlec, the head of the virus response effort at the Department of Health and Human Services and a key White House adviser.
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The way I see it is that Dr. Lee made a decision to do something she knew was unethical but did it for a higher purpose to suit the situation, added which at the time had nothing to do with Covid-19 research.
Last year, the NSF’s inspector general began investigating the matter. This included an April 10, 2019, interview with Lee in which she told an agent that an unidentified “assistant” voted on behalf of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta for it to participate in the 2016 program. That was not true, which Lee later admitted to the agent.
During that same interview, in her defense, Lee told the agents, “This is about patients. I don’t care if nobody gives me money,” according to court records.
While this research had nothing to do with Covid-19, put into philosophical terms it is an example of situation ethics:
Situational ethics or situation ethics takes into account the particular context of an act when evaluating it ethically, rather than judging it according to absolute moral standards. With the intent to have a fair basis for judgments or action, one looks to personal ideals of what is appropriate to guide them, rather than an unchanging universal code of conduct, such as Biblical law under divine command theory or the Kantian categorical imperative.[1] Proponents of situational approaches to ethics include existentialist philosophers Sartre, de Beauvoir, Jaspers, and Heidegger.[2] (WIKIPEDIA)
What she did was wrong one one level but she did it for what she believed was the greater good. Now she faces punishment for it, although the real punishment for this dedicated scientist from what I can tell by reading about her is not being able to participate in the research effort to conquer Covid-19.
One of the ironies of this case, which doesn’t have to be explained, is that under a plea agreement, the U.S. Attorney’s Office is recommending Lee serve a sentence of eight months of home confinement. The ultimate decision will be made by the U.S. District Judge.