RFK Jr.’s vaccine adviser under scrutiny ahead of key vaccine meeting

In just over a year, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has dramatically reshaped vaccines at the federal level, which has drawn considerable controversy given his lack of a medical background and his long history of attacking vaccines and pushing pseudoscience. But he hasn’t done it alone. Ahead of a key meeting on the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, attention is being drawn to Retsef Levi, a top adviser who has published misleading vaccine research. Public health advocates and researchers are calling him out for pushing anti-vaccine agendas in his publications and in his role at HHS.

Kennedy appointed Levi to the top position of a task force leading COVID vaccine recommendation in July 2025. Levi is not a medical doctor, instead his background is in mathematics and operations research and he also served as an intelligence officer of the elite Israeli Intelligence Corps. Levi’s appointment was part of a broader overhaul of the advisory committee on immunization practices (ACIP) in which Kennedy removed all 17 members of ACIP, replacing them with allies like Levi who called COVID vaccines “the most failing medical product in the history of medical products.”

ACIP is set to meet on March 18 and 19 to discuss COVID vaccine injuries and long COVID, according to the meeting agenda. They are likely to recommend further changes to the childhood immunization schedule.

Levi’s ACIP biography specifically mentions published works that linked mRNA COVID-19 vaccines to “risks of cardiovascular disease, mortality, and adverse pregnancy outcomes.” Now, that research is back under scrutiny by critics, who question the methodology, validity and implications of the papers.

When COVID first began spreading in 2020, Jessica Malaty Rivera began posting on social media, using her background as  an infectious disease epidemiologist and science communicator to make information around the virus more understandable. She documented both her family’s personal journey with getting the COVID vaccine and high-level scientific information about the vaccine.

“One of the things that I did very regularly on my social media was when they would have these milestones, these clinical readouts, I would go over the data and I would explain the safety profiles and efficacy profiles,” she told Salon.

Rivera recalls when groups like ACIP were niche spaces that only fell onto the radar of people within the vaccine research space: “It was very insider, and then as the administration politicized this agency by cutting them all out, firing all 17 of them without cause, and the whole world kind of tuned in.”

“Retsef Levi has absolutely no business being on this committee. He is a mathematician. He is not somebody who understands the science of vaccinology, immunology, infectious diseases, epidemiology, harm reduction, etc.,” Rivera said. “He has repeatedly throughout the last several years been a contrarian that goes against scientific consensus making unfounded claims about the safety profile of vaccines.”

A 2022 study in Scientific Reports co-authored by Levi focuses on emergency cardiac events in COVID vaccinated adults under-40 in Israel, where he holds dual citizenship. The study found that emergency medicine calls for myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscles, increased among vaccinated 16 to 39 year olds — however the risk of myocarditis is significantly higher in unvaccinated adults with COVID. The implications of the study were that the vaccine may cause emergency cardiac events though the variables were not actually proven to have a cause and effect relationship. The paper also contained meaningful data errors that required correction, weakening the conclusions that can be drawn from the analysis.

Nevertheless, some media at the time ran with it, with publications like the Epoch Times reporting that COVID vaccines increase risk of cardiac arrest. As Salon has reported before, there are extremely rare cases in which vaccines can harm the heart, but these side effects are far less common than the actual damage the SARS-CoV-2 virus does to the heart and other organs, including the brain.

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“Myocarditis induced by the COVID-19 virus is much more acute, much more dangerous, and doesn’t resolve as easily as vaccine-induced myocarditis,” Rivera said. “We’re not denying the fact that myocarditis can happen, but they absolutely exaggerated that finding, and then also incorrectly implied the worst outcomes to the vaccinated group — and really it’s the unvaccinated group that had the worst outcomes with myocarditis.”

It’s not just Rivera that took issue with this study — even the Israeli Ministry of Health questioned the research. “We took it very seriously at the Ministry of Health. We invited him [Levi] to a meeting to thoroughly look at the research,” Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, the former head of Israel’s public health services, told The Guardian. “At the meeting it was clear that he was not familiar with the way the data is collected and potential wrong interpretations. What was more troubling: he didn’t seem to care.”

An independent “scientific sleuth,” Lonni Besançon, also found significant issues in Levi’s work. An assistant professor in data visualization at Linköping University in Sweden, Besançon began investigating COVID-related research after noticing hundreds of papers were published as peer reviewed only a day after being submitted. Peer review is a process in which other researchers evaluate the papers for accuracy and likely replicability, but it can be a tedious process. During the pandemic, when doctors and medical experts needed to get info out to the public quickly, the peer review process was regularly eschewed and studies were hosted on preprint servers. That hastiness isn’t so necessary anymore, now that the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for COVID isn’t as novel as it once was.

Levi’s work came on Besançon’s radar after anti-vaccine proponents online used his study to justify their claims. He and a team of medical researchers did an evaluation of the study, they found various problems ranging from issues with the dataset to incorrect statistical analysis. “The methods were not appropriate, not epidemiologically accurate and appropriate for what they wanted to do,” he told Salon.

“ I think this is pretty much the case of a paper motivated by an ideology rather than by actual robust method, which is problematic,” Besançon said. He explained that language emphasizing causation over correlation and other results biases is a problem in scientific research at-large, but in his opinion, this is an egregious example.

“ If a paper raised some doubts about the potential for cardiac arrest after the vaccine based on some data, that’s fine. It’s very important to have papers looking at this in the most unbiased way possible,” he said. “But five years down the line, we know we have data and none of these things are true.”

Other COVID vaccine related studies from Levi have been criticized for their lack of peer review. A July 2025 article co-authored by Levi hosts a disclaimer from the publisher: “This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.” The preprint claims the Pfizer vaccine carries a higher mortality risk than Moderna.

“You’ll notice this a lot — these papers are either published not in peer review journals or in predatory journals that have a pay-to-play model where they don’t have any kind of scientific standards that you would have to meet,” Rivera said. “Him leading the COVID-19 working group is another slap in the face.”

In a statement emailed to Salon, Levi defended his record, listing his experience working with clinicians, regulators, and industry experts on developing models and tools in manufacturing systems of biologics, drug safety and other areas.

“My record, expertise and experience speak for themselves – and all directly relevant to ACIP’s responsibility to assess vaccine safety and effectiveness. At ACIP, the COVID-19 immunization workgroup I chair follows a rigorous, evidence-based process, engaging highly accomplished experts with diverse perspectives, conducting substantive debates, and making materials and analyses publicly available through the CDC to ensure transparency,” Levi said. “The mentioned criticism of my research has been addressed through formal peer-review processes, with retraction requests denied by the journal. My papers are factual, balanced, rigorous, and accurately contextualize the findings.”

ACIP did not immediately respond to Salon’s request for comment.

As ACIP’s first meeting of 2026 approaches, Rivera fears continued reduction of vaccine recommendations. “What they’re doing is coming in with a sledgehammer, with a specific agenda of downgrading recommendations to shared clinical decision making — an intentionally confusing term to make people perceive the vaccine schedule as an a la carte menu,” she said.

As of Jan. 7, 2025, ACIP defines shared clinical decision making as “individually based and informed by a decision process between the health care provider and the patient or parent/guardian.” A year later, a survey published by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center found most Americans still don’t understand what shared clinical decision making is.

Around 1 in 5 survey respondents, 22 percent, agreed that the phrase means “taking the vaccine may not be a good idea for everyone but would benefit some.” Even more respondents, roughly 2 in 5, said shared clinical decision making means “it’s up to an individual whether to consult with their health care provider before taking a vaccine about whether it would be a good idea.”

Rivera said the overhaul at ACIP feels like a “revenge tour” with figures like Levi leading the charge to “punish the scientific standards” for vaccine recommendation.

“ACIP’s role is to provide evidence-based guidance on the use of vaccines to protect the public from vaccine-preventable diseases — not to elevate misleading claims that undermine confidence in safe, effective vaccines,” Series Marotta, deputy CEO at the advocacy organization Vaccinate Your Family, said in a statement to Salon.

“COVID-19 vaccines have saved millions of lives, and any discussion of vaccine safety must be grounded in rigorous methodology, transparency and a balanced assessment of risks and benefits,” Marotta said.

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