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Morgan McSweeney shouldn’t be a TikTok sensation.
The algorithms don’t reward lectures on the finer points of medical science. They don’t elevate fact-checkers over misinformation. And they generally don’t make stars out of earnest goofballs in button-downs and Clark Kent glasses.
But Dr. Noc, as he is known on TikTok and Instagram, has built an audience of more than 4 million followers anyway. With a style somewhere between a high school chemistry teacher and a youth minister, he has made a name for himself with silly dances and vaccine explainers.
“He’s sort of like a new Bill Nye,” said Sherry Pagoto, director of the University of Connecticut Center for mHealth and Social Media. “He threads the needle, to be credible but engaging and informative.”
McSweeney, 33, who has a doctorate in immunology and a day job in biotech, started posting short, sometimes awkward, science videos during the pandemic to beat lockdown boredom. He soon found a more serious niche answering questions about the coronavirus.
“I’m not a particularly good dancer, nor particularly funny,” he said. “But science I can interpret.”
McSweeney became mildly famous for debunking misinformation. Sometimes that meant taking a side on politically charged issues like COVID-19 isolation guidelines and vaccine efficacy.
Then in January, the day before the confirmation hearings for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. began, he made a conscious decision to push his feed in a political direction, criticizing White House health policy and targeting claims around vaccines, autism and raw milk.
Since then, his audience has grown steadily and now includes national politicians, who he said occasionally reach out to him. He has gone from politely fact-checking to accusing government scientists of lying.
It’s not a position he wanted to be in, he said, and he has no illusions that his posts will change minds in Washington. But science itself is on the line, he said.
“It almost feels like if you were a pilot and someone very influential tells you that it’s not possible to fly planes,” he said.
Attention to Detail
There are two types of Dr. Noc videos. One is standard TikTok fare: charmingly corny bits with McSweeney explaining where urine comes from or diving into the world of an ant.
And then there are the lectures.
In those, McSweeney will often walk through scientific papers, talking to viewers like they’re students in a seminar. He follows social media conventions like split screens and jump cuts. But the material can be demanding.
“The truth is boring and nuanced and takes a long time to say,” McSweeney told Neil deGrasse Tyson on the astronomer’s show “StarTalk.” He added: “So you have to figure out strategies in the first half a second, five seconds, to kind of make it entertaining.”
One day in late November, he sat down to write a script after putting his baby daughter to bed. He knew he wanted to discuss changes to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention webpage that had previously denied a link between vaccines and autism. The agency was now reexamining that conclusion.
“At first I didn’t think it was real,” McSweeney recalled. Could the CDC really be echoing what looked to him like vaccine misinformation?
He focused on a 2010 paper cited on the page, which suggested that newborns who got a hepatitis B vaccine in the first month were three times more likely to develop autism than those who didn’t. That night, he reminded himself to keep an open mind as he pulled up the study. It took just a couple of minutes to find what looked like a red flag — and his hook. His opening betrayed a deep-seated anger.
“They’re lying to us,” the resulting video began. “They’re lying about our health, they’re lying about our children.”
Then he went into professor mode, highlighting passages and pulling up a key data table. The sample included just 33 children with autism, he said, nine of whom had been vaccinated as newborns. That was too small a study to hang health policy on, he said.
For comparison, he pointed to a Danish study that upheld the safety of a wider group of childhood vaccines this year and included about 12,000 children who had autism out of 1.2 million children total.
The Department of Health and Human Services has defended the changes to the website, calling them part of a “a comprehensive assessment of the causes of autism.”
The video continued for six minutes — far longer than the standard creator rule of thumb. To date, it has been viewed more than 4 million times.
The Scientist and the Influencer
McSweeney says the secret to his communication style is playing it straight. He doesn’t act like a nerd on camera; he just is one — no bow tie necessary. The crisp, controlled Dr. Noc (the name is a deep-cut video game reference) may be a little more confident than the real-life Sweeney but is otherwise the same.
“He’s authentic,” said Dr. Shikha Jain, an associate professor at the University of Illinois Cancer Center and a digital media expert. “That authenticity, that showing that he’s a real human being, I think that resonates with people.”
The other lesson McSweeney has learned: Never mock your audience. Assume their fears are real, and take them seriously.
Early in his career, he says, he made a video poking fun at people who thought COVID vaccines magnetized the body, sticking things to his arm and mugging for the camera. But he saw in the comments that some viewers were insulted. They came to him for answers, not to feel stupid.
Of course, some of his commenters are more aggressive. Some call him a biotech shill or ominously say he will “pay the price” and “get what’s coming,” he said. The blowback was more intense during the pandemic, he added, but also easier to shrug off before he was a father.
McSweeney lives in North Carolina and works for a startup founded by one of his old professors that is developing therapies for respiratory infections. About half his income comes from social media, he said, reading ads for dog food or allergy medication.
It gives him a deep sense of pride that so many people look to him for health advice. But it also troubles him.
“I regularly advise people not to trust random lone people on Instagram.” He pauses, savoring the irony. “Like … me.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
