Katie O’Neal is fine with being called a farmer’s daughter.
She refers to herself as such, even though she is a farmer herself now. Her father, Ted Smith, grew rice and soy beans in a tiny Cajun town in southern Louisiana. Now, his second of four daughters culls a 56-acre property nestled between a bayou named Elbow and a river named Mississippi off a road named River.
Katie and her husband, Bud, have five cows, 25 chickens, an orchard of fruit trees, a blossoming garden and a few pesky wild foxes that have literally found the hen house (don’t worry, Katie’s on the case). Their farming tools, three tractors among them, are strewn within a giant red barn situated behind a palatial brick home. Around a swimming pool and outdoor kitchen, two dogs, three cats and three children lounge on the cool patio.
There’s a pond, too, filled with brim and bass, an herb garden, dozens of pecan trees and a sad-looking rosemary bush that Katie trimmed too much for Bud’s liking. “He’s mad about it,” she says with a laugh. O’Neal’s home is a serene respite from her day job as one of the United States’s leading infectious disease doctors and chief medical officer of a metropolitan hospital in Baton Rouge.
For some, Katie O’Neal has a far more important distinction. During the first pandemic in a century, she was one of the country’s most vocal proponents of the COVID-19 vaccine and safeguards around the virus.
Her stance was at times attacked by people who chose to believe in conspiracy theories over scientific data. To some of her own acquaintances and neighbors, O’Neal was a villain, someone who restricted freedom, perpetuated lies and fear. But what those detractors might not have realized was that she also privately fought for what many of them yearned for: the return of college football.
In the summer of 2020, she was the unofficial chair of the SEC’s COVID-19 task force and commissioner Greg Sankey’s top medical adviser, maneuvering the conference through countless landmines and preaching patience when other leagues bailed on having a season. In doing so, some might say she saved college football and prevented a domino effect of decisions that may have cratered the sport for years.
Almost two years since that summer, O'Neal has been hired as the SEC's chief medical adviser. She now cracks open the barn door on the past two years of her life.
“I never knew the SEC decision would carry so much weight,” she says. “Was it the right thing to do, play football? Everybody questions decisions. I question my own. Sometimes we are wrong. We were lucky.”
Bud, also a physician, interjects: “You weren’t lucky. You were right.”
