Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced this week that HHS is terminating about $500 million in investments in developing mRNA vaccines.
The technology instructs the body to produce a protein that is part of a virus, triggering an immune response. Famously — or, notoriously, as far as RFK Jr. is concerned — mRNA was used to develop Covid vaccines on a rapid basis during the pandemic.
As Kennedy explained at his announcement, most of these shots are for the flu or Covid. But, “as the pandemic showed us,” he continued, “mRNA vaccines don’t perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract.” If the viral infection that the mRNA vaccines are designed to combat undergoes “one mutation,” the “vaccine becomes ineffective,” Kennedy asserted, and can perversely prolong a pandemic.
“HHS has determined that mRNA technology poses more risk than benefits for these respiratory viruses,” Kennedy concluded. And so it will substitute its funding for “troubled mRNA programs” with support for other vaccines that “don’t collapse when viruses mutate.”
Researchers first found that treating infectious bacteria with substances that block RNA synthesis prevents protein production over 60 years ago. That discovery and its corollary, that mRNA can be designed to produce any protein researchers wanted, including those that teach immune systems to block specific infections, has since been put into application.
Besides allowing for an expedited production schedule, the mRNA vaccines don’t rely on a whole live virus, which creates some risk of causing an infection.
It is true that individual mRNA vaccines need regular tweaking to account for variations in a virus’s genetic code — hence, the seasonal Covid vaccine updates. The public’s interest in getting regular, updated Covid shots waned along with the pandemic, but only because that virus’s “copying errors” led to it becoming less severe over time. At the pandemic’s height, when the virus was at its deadliest, a randomized control trial of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine in 43,000 volunteers found that it had 90 percent efficacy in preventing serious illness. Moderna’s RSV vaccine found similar results — 83.7 percent across 37,000 in 22 countries.
The vaccines did not prevent infection, as some erroneously said they would (and kept insisting when the evidence was clearly otherwise). But, even if vaccine mandates were absurd and unjust, there is little evidence to gainsay the consensus that the Covid vaccines prevented serious negative outcomes and deaths. An October 2024 CDC analysis of data compiled in 2023 and 2024 found that, even if subsequent Covid variants proved as infectious as ever, the risk of hospitalization or death from the disease among immunized adults was reduced by 70 percent.
In the absence of these vaccines, America’s (and the world’s) experience in the pandemic would have been worse, and it would have taken even longer for lockdown mentality to lift. It is a bitter irony that the fruits of Project Warp Speed — a feat of public-private enterprise that put all of America’s competitive advantages to effect with maximum benefit — is regarded as a stain on Donald Trump’s record by his second-term appointees.
HHS maintains that it is not giving up on mRNA technology completely — at least, for now. That’s good. This technology’s promise is profound. Researchers have been applying mRNA technology to the development of vaccines that target some of the worst plagues that presently afflict mankind. Malaria, which kills more than 400,000 per year, is an mRNA vaccine candidate. So, too, is HIV. Indeed, this tailorable technology can be applied to vexing infections like dengue and yellow fevers, filoviruses that range from Marburg and Ebola, rhabdoviridae like rabies, and Flaviviridae including hepatitis C.
Researchers were perhaps most excited by the advantages mRNA technology would provide in the effort to create a nimble vaccination program targeting the notoriously protean influenza virus. Apparently, America will cede that research to private institutions and other countries.
Maybe RFK Jr. is privy to evidence controverting all of this, but the secretary has not earned the benefit of the doubt. It’s very convenient that this famous vaccine skeptic, a longtime opponent of the Covid vaccination regime (among many other vaccination regimes) and a propagator of dubious or wholly unbelievable claims about mRNA vaccines’ effects, managed to quickly uncover research supporting his priors.
In June, Kennedy dismissed all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), replacing them with figures who share his skepticism toward vaccinations generally, not just the Covid shots. Kennedy has cut his department’s funding for studying vaccine hesitancy among the general public, and he has halted U.S. cooperation with some international organizations that promote increased immunization rates.
Taken in isolation, each of these maneuvers might be, if not justified, at least understandable. Taken together, however, they paint a portrait of a longtime vaccine skeptic who is pursuing exactly the agenda he said he would.