COVID-era physician harassment: 18% of doctors had private info shared online during the pandemic

What's happening

Physician harassment is older than COVID. What changed during the pandemic was the volume and the systemic nature of it. Doctors who appeared on television, wrote op-eds, or used social media to advocate for masks, vaccines, or other public-health measures became targets of sustained online harassment. A meaningful share of them got doxxed.

The empirical work caught up in 2023.

The most cited study is Royan et al., Physician and Biomedical Scientist Harassment on Social Media During the COVID-19 Pandemic, surveyed by researchers at the University of Chicago. The study surveyed 358 physicians and biomedical scientists. The findings:

• 111 respondents (31%) reported being sexually harassed online.
• 66 respondents (18%) reported their private information had been shared online (i.e., doxxed).
• A larger majority reported some form of online harassment short of doxxing.

The 18% number is the one to anchor on. Roughly one in five of the surveyed physicians and biomedical scientists had their private information published online during the COVID period. That is a systemic pattern, not a series of one-off events.

MedPage Today, in a June 2023 essay titled "From Doxxing to Doctor Death Threats," walked through the lived experience of physicians who had been targeted. The piece documented credible threats, not just harassment. Physicians who had advocated publicly for COVID measures received not only online attacks but threats to their families and their workplaces.

UIC Today, also in June 2023, covered the academic confirmation of the systemic pattern. The piece framed the harassment as a soared-during-the-pandemic phenomenon that did not subside as the public-health emergency wound down.

The pipeline that powered it

The COVID-era doxxing of physicians used the same broker pipeline that powers every doxxing campaign. The specifics vary by case. The structure does not.

A physician makes a public appearance, writes an op-ed, posts on social media, or appears in a media interview. The appearance carries the physician's name, professional affiliation, and often the city of practice. A hostile actor takes that name and runs it through a commercial people-search site like Spokeo, Whitepages, BeenVerified, or TruePeopleSearch. Twenty dollars buys a home address, a phone number, a list of relatives, and a prior-address history. The address gets posted to a Telegram channel, a 4chan thread, a Twitter reply, or a Facebook group.

That is the entire mechanism. No insider source. No technical skill. The broker pipeline does the work.

The COVID period intensified this not because the pipeline changed but because the pool of physicians making public statements expanded dramatically. Doctors who had previously kept a low public profile became visible advocates. The threat surface expanded with the visibility.

Why it matters now

The pandemic-era harassment infrastructure did not get dismantled when the public-health emergency ended.

The Telegram channels and Facebook groups that compiled doxxing dossiers on physicians during 2020 and 2021 are still operating. The accounts that ran the most aggressive harassment are still active. The broker pages that fed them have not changed materially. The pipeline that produced 18% doxxing among the UChicago survey population in 2023 is still running.

Reporting through 2024 and 2025 has documented continued harassment of physicians who advocate on contested public-health topics. The NYC Health Department has reportedly been seeking outside security firms in 2025 to support staff facing online threats. The pattern persists. The volume varies with the news cycle.

For physicians and biomedical scientists, the practical implication is that the COVID-era doxxing wave was not a discrete event. It was the moment when an existing pipeline scaled up against a new and larger target population. The defensive posture has to assume continued exposure.

Why first responders should care too

This site's primary audience is sworn officers and first responders. The COVID-era physician harassment matters here for two reasons.

First, the threat pipeline is identical. The same broker pages that put a physician's home address into a doxxer's hands put an officer's home address into the same hands. The defensive playbook is the same. The lessons are interchangeable.

Second, the institutional response from health systems is a useful comparison point. Hospital systems have started building privacy programs for high-visibility staff. Some run internal broker-opt-out reviews. Some contract with vendors. The health-system response is uneven but instructive. Police agencies, fire departments, and EMS services that want to support similar protections for their personnel have a model to draw from.

What the empirical record shows and what it does not

Worth being precise about the UChicago numbers and the broader context.

The 358-respondent survey is a meaningful sample but it is not a national prevalence estimate. The respondents were physicians and biomedical scientists who chose to take the survey. The 18% doxxing rate represents that population. The true rate across all U.S. physicians during the COVID period could be higher or lower.

The MedPage Today coverage and the UIC Today summary describe the lived experience and the academic framing. They do not establish a causal chain from any specific online statement to any specific doxxing event.

The systemic point holds even with these caveats. The COVID period produced a documented surge in physician harassment, including the publication of private information, and the infrastructure that produced the surge is still in place.

A note on naming. Several physicians have spoken publicly about their experiences with COVID-era harassment campaigns. Verified primary-source documentation of specific home-address doxxing for individual named physicians is harder to come by than the broader harassment record. We treat physicians who faced sustained harassment campaigns during this period as part of the documented systemic pattern without claiming specific doxxing events for individuals where primary sources do not establish them. The 18% UChicago number carries the page.

What a physician or biomedical scientist should do

Five things, in order.

First, assume your home address is on broker pages now. The default state of any U.S. resident's residential address in 2026 is "indexed across commercial people-search sites." Verify with searches on Spokeo, Whitepages, BeenVerified, and TruePeopleSearch on your own name.

Second, run a full broker opt-out. We file across commercial broker sites and re-check biweekly. See our broker-removal coverage. The work takes meaningful effort the first time and modest effort to maintain. The maintenance matters because most broker pages re-list within 60 to 90 days.

Third, separate your work and personal email. A name attached to a hospital email address is fine. A name attached to a Gmail address that has appeared in a data breach (which is most Gmail addresses) is a faster path to a doxxing campaign. The Have I Been Pwned project tracks breach exposure for any email.

Fourth, review your hospital's photo and bio policy. Department-website photos with full names in captions are high-value input for harassment campaigns. Many academic medical centers have updated their policies to allow opt-out from public photo display. Use the opt-out if it exists. Push for it if it does not.

Fifth, do the same review for your spouse, adult children, and any household member who appears in property records or who has a public professional presence. The relative-list field on a Spokeo page is the connector between your name and your family's exposure.

What to watch

A few markers worth tracking through 2026 and 2027.

Federal regulatory action on data brokers. The CFPB rule proposed in December 2024 and covered in our CFPB rule trend would tighten broker accuracy and access requirements if finalized. Status remains pending.

Hospital-system policies. The largest academic medical centers have started internal broker-opt-out programs. The pattern is spreading. Watch for system-level announcements in 2026.

Public-health-staff protections. NYC Health Department has been reported as exploring outside security firms in 2025. State and city public-health departments are likely to follow. The model is closer to the corporate executive-protection playbook than to the police-officer model.

Litigation. Courts have not produced a clear federal precedent on whether broker pages that sell residential addresses to doxxers face civil liability for downstream harm. A few suits are pending. None has settled in a way that establishes the rule.

For more on the broker side of this chain, see our broker-removal coverage. For the physician audience hub, see /healthcare/physicians. For the public-health audience hub, see /healthcare/public-health.