LSU’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center Just Gave Anti-Vax Hype a Home
Pennington's appointment of a notorious anti-vaxxer, Robert Malone, gives him a prestigious LSU title that the CDC now amplifies, while university officials spin the move as routine and harmless.
LSU’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center just made one of the most reckless hires in university history: bringing on the notorious anti-vaxxer Robert Malone as an adjunct “full professor.”
Malone isn’t just a quirky contrarian scientist. He’s one of the country’s most prominent anti-vaccine activists, a man whose claims about COVID vaccines have been debunked and denounced by medical experts, fact-checkers, and mainstream science reporters for years.
In August 2021, The Atlantic profiled Malone under the headline “The Vaccine Scientist Spreading Vaccine Misinformation,” and described how he leveraged his early work on mRNA into a brand as the supposed “inventor” of mRNA vaccines while working the anti-vax circuit.
Malone was suspended from Twitter in 2022 (since reinstated) under its COVID misinformation policy. And in his Joe Rogan podcast appearance a few weeks later, he pushed the bogus “mass formation psychosis” idea that public health officials had hypnotized the population into accepting vaccines, a claim that psychiatrists and psychologists have called unfounded nonsense.
FactCheck.org has documented how Malone has repeatedly misled the public about vaccine effectiveness and exaggerated the alleged harms of vaccines to children.
This is the person LSU has now chosen to make a professor at its flagship biomedical research center.
Pennington isn’t some random unit within the university system. It brands itself as “the world’s largest academic nutrition research center,” focused on obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other chronic illnesses.
And so, you’d expect Malone to gush about this new stature. And he did.
In his social media announcement, he wrote, “Very grateful to be able to announce that I just accepted an appointment as Professor, Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Louisiana State University.”
That’s not the only promotion Malone has received this year.
U.S. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier stacked the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices with a slew of vaccine skeptics and critics, including Malone.
The CDC’s roster now presents Malone as “Professor, Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Louisiana State University,” giving him the institutional credibility of LSU for his national vaccine disinformation campaign.
In its public remarks, the Pennington Center’s spokesperson comes a little closer than Malone to telling the truth about the announcement. “Over time, Pennington Biomedical has had adjunct appointments with hundreds of faculty from across the globe,” Pennington spokesperson Ernie Ballard told Piper Hutchinson of the Louisiana Illuminator. “These gratis (unpaid) appointments help facilitate research collaborations. Dr. Robert Malone’s adjunct appointment will focus on providing insights into the current federal landscape in Washington, D.C.”
Allow me to translate Ballard’s words into plain English: “LSU is simply using Malone’s stature within the wacko anti-vaccine community to mollify and win some favor with the reckless, anti-science weirdos who surround Gov. Jeff Landry.”
It’s just what a world-renowned research institute does, right?
Besides this embarrassing, blatant attempt to keep Landry off their backs, the most damaging result of this appointment is this: LSU’s name is being used to decontaminate the reputation of someone devoted to undermining public confidence in vaccines.
But LSU and Pennington are trying to have it both ways. Local coverage describes Malone as an unpaid adjunct. The “unpaid” language is doing a lot of work here. It’s clearly meant to reassure the public that this is a harmless, low-stakes affiliation.
But that’s not how some on the Pennington faculty view the appointment.
“This is a shame that our prestigious institution is now linked to a person like Dr. Malone,” said LSU Boyd Professor Eric Ravussin, who conducts diabetes and obesity research at Pennington.
If appointing an unpaid adjunct is so minor and meaningless, as LSU seems to suggest, why did Malone celebrate it as a “full professor” role and a major step in his work on obesity and chronic disease? Why is the CDC now touting that LSU title in Malone’s federal advisory committee bio?
If you want to maintain the respect of the scientific community, you shouldn’t describe someone as a routine adjunct hire while also allowing your name to be used as his credential in a national war on vaccines.
And LSU’s public posture on this so far has been aggressively incomplete. In everything that’s been reported, there’s no sign the university has squarely acknowledged the basic facts about Malone’s recent career:
that he has been repeatedly and publicly called out by mainstream scientists and fact-checkers for spreading false and misleading claims about COVID vaccines;
that he has become a hero in anti-vaccine and conspiracy-minded circles, not in spite of his rhetoric, but because of it;
and that his new LSU title is already being used to bolster that politics-driven crusade.
Leaving those details out while waving around words like “adjunct” and “unpaid” isn’t transparency; it’s misdirection.
This appointment does at least three kinds of damage:
It undermines Pennington’s scientific credibility.
Pennington’s mission depends on public trust in biomedical science, including clinical trials, epidemiology, and careful communication about risks and benefits. When you make a faculty appointment of someone whose brand is built on accusing mainstream vaccine science of mass hypnosis and Nazi-era evil, you’re telling the public that Pennington’s commitment to evidence is negotiable.
It says that LSU will roll with whatever anti-science tide is running.
Jeff Landry is already pushing the state’s higher education system toward culture-war stunts and away from serious research. RFK Jr. is rewriting federal vaccine policy in ways that alarm pediatricians and public health experts. Installing Malone at Pennington at this moment looks less like sober academic judgment and more like reckless capitulation to anti-science insanity.
It betrays LSU’s own students and other stakeholders, including patients at LSU Medical Center and students at its medical school.
Louisiana already has terrible vaccination rates and some of the worst health outcomes in the country. The last thing this state needs is a flagship research center helping to legitimize a man whose misinformation has fueled vaccine hesitancy and needless illness and death.
If LSU’s leaders were honest, they’d start by admitting who Malone is: a controversial figure whose recent work has repeatedly conflicted with the consensus of mainstream medical science and who has been widely criticized for promoting vaccine misinformation.
They’d explain why, despite that track record, they believe he brings something so uniquely valuable to Pennington’s research on obesity and chronic disease that it justifies the reputational damage and the confusion it will cause in a state already saturated with health misinformation.
They’d also answer these questions honestly:
Will Malone be involved in messaging to the public about vaccines or infectious diseases?
Will he supervise graduate students or trainees?
Will the Pennington faculty be free to publicly rebut his claims without fear of political retaliation from the governor’s office or the LSU Board of Supervisors?
Right now, we don’t have anything like that level of candor. We have a prestigious title quietly granted, a national anti-vax celebrity loudly celebrating it, and a university trying to get by on technicalities and half-truths.
Faculty, students, alumni, donors, and others who care about LSU’s reputation don’t have to accept this as normal. They can insist on answers from Pennington’s leadership, from the LSU president, and from the Board of Supervisors. They can demand that LSU either own this decision honestly—acknowledging the full context and consequences—or reverse it.
But the one thing that shouldn’t be allowed is exactly what LSU is trying right now: pretending that giving Robert Malone an LSU professorship is no big deal.
It is a big deal. It’s reckless. And it’s not honest. And it harms LSU.
Keep waiting for the renaming ceremony to Jeff Landry University, but even Huey Long wasn’t that vain. So it’ll happen, right?
I wish RFK could rise from the grave, shamble to the FDA building, and slap his son fo being everything he spent his life fighting against. And refuse to eat his brain, because, eww, worms!
The race to the bottom is bottomless, and often dangerous.