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ROBERT KENNEDY HAS GUTTED OUR BEST DEFENSE AGAINST FUTURE PANDEMICS
 
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Ryan Cooper
August 20, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ mRNA technology saved America’s bacon in 2020. Now RFK Jr. is
defunding it. In reality, mRNA is by far the best vaccine option
should a new viral outbreak strike because climate change is expanding
mosquito habitat, or bird flu... _

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears
before a Senate committee, May 14, 2025, at the Capitol in
Washington., Photo credit: John McDonnell/AP Photo // The American
Prospect

 

Back in May, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy
Jr. canceled
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$600 million contract with Moderna to develop a flu vaccine based on
messenger RNA (mRNA), and earlier this month, he canceled
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$500 million in mRNA contracts with the Biomedical Advanced Research
and Development Authority (BARDA). Together with Trump’s budget
cuts
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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
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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
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were relegated to the fringes of academia for decades, conducting
their work with small grants and scraps of funding.

Messenger RNA is a core part of how cells function. Two-stranded DNA
in the cell nucleus is unzipped and copied into a single strand of
mRNA, which is transported to the ribosome to produce whatever protein
is encoded, after which the mRNA falls apart. Once this process was
understood in the 1960s, scientists naturally wondered whether they
could design their own mRNA and thereby instruct human cells to make
specific proteins.

It took years to figure out how to produce custom mRNA, which indeed
would make cells in a petri dish produce any protein you cared to
encode. But when you injected it into a live subject, there was a
significant immune system overreaction. After more years of
experiments, Karikó and her colleagues figured out that if they added
pseudouridine to the mRNA, it would suppress the immune reaction long
enough for the mRNA to do its work. The last piece of the puzzle for a
vaccine was somehow preserving the mRNA long enough for it to
circulate throughout the body. This was achieved with lipid
nanoparticles, another extremely difficult technology that other
scientists developed over decades.

The previous world record for vaccine development was about four
years
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and the average was more like a decade. Using mRNA, BioNTech developed
their COVID vaccine in a few hours. Moderna did it over a
weekend—with an NIH scientist making the key design decisions
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incidentally. It could be done so quickly because (with all the
technical kinks worked out) scientists just had to analyze the
coronavirus spike protein and work up an mRNA formula that would
instruct cells to produce it for a short time. That foreign protein
triggers an immune response, thereby teaching the immune system to
attack the virus.

Successful trials were finished and FDA approval granted within 11
months. These vaccines saved an estimated 20 million lives worldwide
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including about one million Americans. Subsequent studies proved the
vaccines are safe and effective, with a safety profile better than
aspirin or Tylenol
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That’s why Karikó and her colleague Drew Weissman won the Nobel
Prize in 2023.

Even better, while mRNA is technically challenging to produce, once
you’ve got it figured out it is much, much easier to scale up. Flu
vaccines, for instance, are commonly made by breeding the virus in
eggs and then killing it, so the immune system can be exposed to a
nonfunctioning virus. This takes months; it’s a big reason why flu
shots are often rather ineffective, because scientists have to guess
what variety will be circulating after a long period of evolutionary
drift.

An mRNA shot, by contrast, can be directly targeted at whatever is
circulating right now and mass-produced in a factory within weeks.
That speed and flexibility have enabled major breakthroughs in vaccine
development for HIV
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diseases.

Better still, mRNA is useful for much more than traditional vaccines.
Being able to instruct cells to produce any protein you want is so
powerful that scientists are just starting to get their heads around
it. There are promising mRNA treatments in the works for cancer
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(Kennedy has preserved
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funding for these treatments, to be fair.)

In the press release announcing the recent mRNA contract
cancellation, Kennedy claimed
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“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
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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
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the mRNA shots to be effective and safe.

Kennedy promised that resources would be redirected to
“evidence-based, ethically grounded solutions—like whole-virus
vaccines.” Whole-virus technology is almost 150 years old, and while
it does work, as noted above, it is much, much slower than mRNA.

In reality, mRNA is _by far_ the best vaccine option should a new
viral outbreak strike—like the mosquito-borne dengue
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and Zika
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which are spreading around the world because climate change is
expanding mosquito habitat, or bird flu, which is almost certain
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another pandemic sooner or later.

In the future, humanity may look at mRNA as comparable in importance
to antibiotics or chlorinated drinking water. But America might be an
object lesson for future historians about the dangers of allowing
dishonest cranks to run one’s public-health agencies.

_[RYAN COOPER is a senior editor at the Prospect, and author of ‘How
Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question
in Politics
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He was previously a national correspondent for The Week.]_

_Read the original article at Prospect.org
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_

_Used with the permission. © The American Prospect
[[link removed]], Prospect.org, 2025 [[link removed]].
All rights reserved.  _

_Support the American Prospect [[link removed]]._

_Click here [[link removed]] to support the Prospect's
brand of independent impact journalism._

* mRNA
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* coronavirus
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* COVID-19
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* vaccines
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* bird flu
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* Robert F. Kennedy Jr
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* RFK
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* RFK jr.
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* Donald Trump
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* Trump 2.0
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* Trump Administration
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* federal government
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* health & social policy
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* Avian flu
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