This isn't even representative of the professor's own work. It's an illustrative metaphor during an undergrad course to make the content more relatable, and he's clearly oversimplifying. This wasn't even intended to be widely shared by the professor. It's part of MIT's MOOC policy to make content accessible to anyone, and whoever manages the social was right that it would get engagement.
Here's his research, which is related to informing public health policy and has 55k citations https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=c4FeOJQAAAAJ.