By Russ Gonnering at Brownstone dot org.

What is the relationship between education, knowledge, and wisdom? This is not a trivial question, and the ramifications are far from obvious. Our lives may literally depend on it.

Let me illustrate the problem. On 12/5/2025, a Joint Statement from numerous medical organizations was released, highly critical of the recent recommendation of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on modification of universal administration of the Hepatitis B vaccine to every newborn. The wording of the statement is telling:

"We are deeply alarmed by the actions taken this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). The apparent goal of this meeting was to sow doubt in vaccines rather than advance sound vaccine policy, and we will all pay a price for that.

"This is a significant departure from the historic role ACIP has played in shaping vaccine policy in the United States. Previously, we could expect science to drive decisions, experts to debate evidence, and consensus to lead to shared, clear recommendations. That is not the case with the current committee, and this change puts Americans' health at risk. (emphasis added)

This is like the statement from the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases from June 27, 2025, regarding the current makeup of the ACIP:

Deviation from the long-standing evidence-based process that has historically guided ACIP deliberations undermines transparency and trust, risks legitimizing misinformation, and is harmful to public health. A process that includes input from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) experts, working groups, and trusted scientific and medical organizations, has been critical to ensuring rigorous, transparent, evidence-based recommendations that the public and healthcare professionals can trust. Voting on critical policy recommendations without due process that includes a thorough, balanced, and vetted review of available data by qualified experts invalidates the results and leads to confusion and distrust of recommendations.

On 12/14/2025 Politico published a piece entitled This vaccine adviser to RFK Jr. has some choice words for his critics. It reviewed the firestorm of criticism being leveled at the current members of the ACIP of the CDC as well as the response from Retsef Levi, including:

I think we've adopted an extremely medicalized view of health. Our system is very centralized and coercive. Too many public-health policies assume that a small group at the top should make decisions for everyone and enforce them instead of putting the individual at the center and empowering people, with the support of doctors and others, to take ownership of their health.

Some ACIP members and presenters are criticized as not appropriate for the ACIP because they are not physicians or "experts." My view is quite different, and I agree with Professor Levi. They are terrific choices, not despite not being physician "experts," but because of it! And I will back this up with clear evidence.

The problem has to do with entrained thinking in both leaders and experts. When both are combined in decision-makers, so is the danger as explained by David Snowden and Mary Boone in A Leaders Framework for Decision Making:

…leaders are susceptible to entrained thinking,a conditioned response that occurs when people are blinded to new ways of thinking by the perspectives they acquired through past experience, training, and success…

Entrained thinking is a danger in complicated contexts, too, but it is the experts (rather than the leaders) who are prone to it, and they tend to dominate the domain. When this problem occurs, innovative suggestions by nonexperts may be overlooked or dismissed, resulting in lost opportunities. The experts have, after all, invested in building their knowledge, and they are unlikely to tolerate controversi...