People who are highly credentialed academically tend to have their views given a great deal of weight because of the perception that they are generally smart and knowledgeable. While it is true that their training gives them some specific technical and analytical skills, it does not make them general experts. But the deference with which their views are treated can go to their heads and result in them pontificating on matters in which they do not have any real expertise but just enough knowledge to speak with confidence. This seems more likely to happen when the topics are those that have high visibility and broad, multidisciplinary elements. Academics who have strong views on it can be tempted to throw their hats into the debate even if they are not really that knowledgeable.

This seems to be the case with RFK Jr’s appointment of Retsef Levi to review the safety of Covid-19 vaccines. Levi’s academic background is in operations research, which is a niche theoretical field that applies very advanced mathematics and statistics to complex systems. Much of the work involves simulations and modeling and its practitioners look for real-world situations to which to apply them. Since the systems can vary considerably, sometimes you will find the operations researchers housed in business and management schools (as is the case with Levi at MIT) and sometimes in engineering schools (as is the case at Princeton University).

Where things can get sticky is when these researchers apply their expertise in areas of great public importance and interest for which they do not have deep contextual knowledge or expertise but do have very strong views. Climate change is one such area, public health policy another. In the case of of Levi, although he has no medical, epidemiological, or immunological training, experience, or background, he seems to be a strong vaccine skeptic, writing on Twitter in 2023 that “the evidence is mounting and indisputable that mRNA vaccines cause serious harm including death, especially among young people” even though experts in the area have strongly challenged that view.

Naturally this is just the kind of person that would get the attention of vaccine skeptic RFK Jr, who likes to pick credentialed people who have the same prejudices that he has, and he has appointed such people to scientific advisory panels. Such panels traditionally consisted of a wide variety of people so that evidence can be carefully evaluated before recommendations are made. But RFK Jr’s policy is to fire the existing panel members and replace them mostly with people who share his views, thus pretty much guaranteeing the outcomes he desires.

An emergency-room doctor, critics of COVID-19 vaccines and an obstetrician who advises a supplement company are among the advisers handpicked by vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the head of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to provide advice on vaccines to the federal government.

Kennedy announced his new roster for the influential Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) on 11 June [2025] — just two days after he fired all 17 of its previous members and accused the ACIP of “malevolent malpractice”. The ACIP advises US public-health officials as to who should receive approved vaccines, and when. Those recommendations are then often used to guide whether public and private health-insurance programmes will pay for the shots.
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Several of the new ACIP members have expressed public support for vaccines. But a number of them have also expressed scepticism; one serves on the board of an anti-vaccination organization, and a second has been a prominent sceptic of the COVID-19 vaccines on social media.
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“This is a disaster for public health,” says Adam Ratner, a paediatric infectious diseases physician in New York City. “It has the potential to set us back decades.” The HHS did not respond to a request for comment before publication.

Levi seems to be one of those academics who has overstepped his expertise.

Retsef Levi, an operations management professor, is a member of the US health department’s vaccine advisory committee (ACIP) which is meeting later this month and – many experts fear – could seek to rollback recommendations on who should receive Covid-19 vaccines.

Levi, who holds Israeli and American citizenship, has claimed that Covid-19 vaccines are the “most failing medical product in the history of medical products”, despite a body of research that has shown they are safe and effective. A modeling study published in 2022 in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet estimated that Covid-19 vaccines saved nearly 20 million lives in the first year they were available.

He holds a coveted seat on ACIP, which was once considered the “international gold standard for vaccine decision-making” but has faced criticism after Kennedy fired 17 of the group’s voting members – including doctors, immunologists and epidemiologists – and replaced them with individuals who have been criticized for undermining public trust in the safety and efficacy of many vaccines, without any basis in fact.

A Guardian review of Levi’s record found that more than a dozen experts have criticized research papers he has authored on the topic for being misleading. Some experts also said they believed Levi, who is not a physician or vaccine expert and now heads ACIP’s special immunizations work group on the Covid-19 vaccines, approaches the topic with a pre-determined agenda, instead of a spirit of true scientific inquiry.

That is of course the entire approach of the Trump administration, to put cheerleaders for their positions into positions that require impartiality.

Vaccine skepticism has already had serious effects during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Dr Jake Scott, an infectious diseases specialist and clinical associate professor at Stanford University School of Medicine who is a nationally-recognized vaccine expert, said he fears ACIP will use data that has not been peer-reviewed or publicly released – like an unsubstantiated allegation by a former FDA official that at least 10 children died from Covid vaccination – to justify restrictions on vaccine recommendations, even in cases when real-world data does not merit the limits.

“What concerns me is not that someone is reviewing the data, but that the person who is reviewing it has said mRNA vaccines should be removed from the market,” he said. “The question becomes, is this a genuine scientific inquiry or a review with a pre-determined decision?”

Dr Scott said he was concerned not just as a vaccine research expert, but as a doctor who was on the front lines of the pandemic. He said he had lost more than 100 patients – people in nursing homes and others who were vulnerable – and then saw the “dramatic change” that occurred once vaccines were introduced. After that, he witnessed a sharp drop-off in Covid-19 associated deaths.

“In 2021 the vast majority – nearly all – of my patients who I lost to Covid had chosen to be unvaccinated, and that was tragic in its own way. Many were younger. I lost parents who had relatively young kids, who would not have died had they been vaccinated.”

Dr Scott added: “There is so much misinformation about Covid vaccines in general, so many extreme fringe theories that continue to fuel doubt and mistrust in vaccines, in public health, and in doctors. It is heartbreaking and mind blowing and hard to put into words how high the stakes are.”

RFK Jr’s policies are going to to cause further serious harm to public health. We are already seeing some effects when it comes to the rise in measles cases. Measles had been thought to be eradicated because the vaccine has an incredibly successful record for safety and efficacy. But as a result of vaccine skepticism spread by cranks like RFK Jr and others, this year the US risks losing its status as a measles-free country, a distinction it has held for 25 years.

It has been a full year since one of the worst measles outbreaks in recent U.S. history began ripping through West Texas. The highly infectious disease has continued to burn across multiple U.S. states, Mexico and Canada since Texas reported an outbreak in children in January 2025. The U.S. had been virtually free of the disease for more than a quarter-century thanks to highly effective and safe vaccines, but now experts say we’re on track to losing that status if officials determine measles has spread continuously for a year.

“The U.S. is in the throes of the deadliest measles outbreak it has seen in decades,” says Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University. “Losing measles elimination status is an official acknowledgement that the country is on the wrong path.”
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Measles requires very high levels of population immunity to squelch transmission; at least 95 percent of people in a community must have immunity from prior infection or vaccination. And national vaccination efforts played a central role in raising those population immunity levels in the U.S., says Orenstein, a professor emeritus at Emory University, who has worked on measles elimination for decades. The recommended two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine is 97 percent effective at preventing disease, generally for life. “This intervention can stop and break the chains of transmission,” he says.

But as bad as this is, the worst consequences of this vendetta against vaccines waged by RFK Jr and his allies like Levi will be seen years down the road.