HHS calls MIT professor ‘more than qualified’ for advisory panel and calls ‘attacks’ on him ‘politically motivated’

The MIT professor who has been appointed by Robert F Kennedy Jr to review the safety of Covid-19 vaccines has failed to meet basic scientific standards in his own research on the topic, according to more than a dozen scientists and public health experts.

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.

  • BillyClark@piefed.socialEnglish
    4·
    16 days ago

    That said, I’ll rather not ask someone to cut their hair because of the job position they uphold unless it is a public facing role.

    My point is more that he’s a charlatan. Here’s a paragraph from his Wikipedia:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retsef_Levi

    Levi is a critic of COVID-19 lockdowns and mRNA vaccines, and a COVID-19 vaccine skeptic. He has published papers on the mortality rates of COVID-19 vaccines. He wrote on Twitter in 2023 that “the evidence is mounting and indisputable that mRNA vaccines cause serious harm including death, especially among young people". On June 11, 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, announced that he appointed Levi as one of the members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). However, Levi did not have medical, epidemiological, or immunological training, experience, or background.

    If he’s going to be a charlatan, he can at least try to be a good charlatan and groom himself. It would be different if he was actually a subject matter expert.