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Back in May, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. canceled a $600 million contract with Moderna to develop a flu vaccine based on messenger RNA (mRNA), and earlier this month, he canceled another $500 million in mRNA contracts with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). Together with Trump’s budget cuts to federal research agencies, this dispenses with the bulk of federally funded vaccine research in the U.S.
A more gratuitously self-harming decision would be hard to imagine. America, formerly the largest backer of medical research and development in the world, used to be the world leader in mRNA technology; now other nations will get that crown for free, and even then they will likely have to replicate a lot of prior effort. It’s as if Prometheus decided to return fire to the gods because woo-woo Instagram influencers convinced him that cooking your food is unhealthy. Unless Kennedy’s decision is reversed, very possibly millions of Americans will die.
It is almost impossible to overstate how lucky the world was to have mRNA technology at the point of viability in 2020. It is an extremely finicky technology that showed little immediate promise, and hence got little institutional support in its early stages. The scientists who developed it, like Hungarian American Kati Karikó, were relegated to the fringes of academia for decades, conducting their work with small grants and scraps of funding.
In the press release announcing the recent mRNA contract cancellation, Kennedy claimed: “We reviewed the science, listened to the experts, and acted. BARDA is terminating 22 mRNA vaccine development investments because the data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.”
As Jake Scott at Stat News explains in detail, Kennedy is either totally scientifically illiterate or a flagrant liar or both. The “data” he cites—a compilation of studies put together by sundry anti-vaccine cranks, whose lead author is a dentist—mostly didn’t have anything to do with vaccines; instead they were studies of the COVID spike protein itself. Some of the studies even noted explicitly that COVID vaccination greatly reduces risks to your health. Kennedy also does not mention the multiple enormous studies showing the mRNA shots to be effective and safe. |
