At the heart of Operation Warp Speed — the program that produced the Covid-19 vaccines that saved millions of lives — was a little-known federal agency that coordinates the government’s responses to public health crises and maintains the nation’s medical stockpile.

Historically led by doctors, military officers or career public health officials, the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (or ASPR, pronounced “Asper”) is now being directed instead by John Knox, a firefighter turned anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist with no background in management or public health.

Six current and former senior Health and Human Services Department officials told MSNBC that in elevating Knox, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has placed an unqualified activist atop one of the federal government’s most critical health agencies. Most of them spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation for themselves or their colleagues, or were not authorized to speak publicly about the agency.

Those HHS veterans described ASPR under Knox as adrift: Experienced scientists and senior staff members have left or been pushed out; key roles in the agency have been filled with conspiracy theorists and advocates of false Covid treatments; and hundreds of millions of dollars in mRNA research contracts have been canceled, without good reason.

Most concerning, those officials said, is what could happen when a Covid denialist and anti-vaccine activist leads the very agency created to defend the country from the next pandemic.