The real threat to this revolutionary medical technology is not $500 million in grant cuts but the possibility of new regulatory barriers.

H ealth Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Tuesday that his department was canceling nearly $500 million in grants to aid the development of mRNA vaccines. Kennedy, a longtime vocal opponent of using the technology to prevent and treat illnesses, denied the efficacy of mRNA vaccines and doubted their safety when explaining the grant cancellations.

As NR’s editors explain, the most commonly raised concerns about mRNA vaccines are unfounded. In the case of the Covid vaccines, proponents can be fairly criticized for overselling the shots’ ability to prevent infection and transmission; but claims that, for instance, mRNA edits people’s DNA are entirely baseless. Rather, it replicates the RNA molecules that naturally exist in every cell of the human body, which carry genetic information copied from DNA to instruct said cells to produce countless proteins. The vaccines instruct one’s cells to produce a harmless antigen of the virus being targeted, enabling the body to learn how to fight it.

Short for messenger RNA, mRNA was discovered in the 1960s as a means to instruct human cells to produce certain proteins. Originally developed as a potential cancer treatment, scientists began broadening mRNA’s applications in the 2000s to include vaccinations for infectious diseases. The first (and so far only) mRNA vaccines ever approved for use on humans were the two Covid-19 vaccines developed in 2020 by BioNTech, in collaboration with Pfizer, and Moderna. Those immunizations were administered to billions of people around the world, dramatically reducing deaths and hospitalizations from the disease.

The creation of the mRNA Covid vaccines was, it’s fair to say, the most phenomenal medical breakthrough of the 21st century. Not only did the vaccines play a key role in ending a global pandemic that killed over 7 million people, but they validated, on the greatest scale imaginable, a medical technology to revolutionize mankind’s relationship with disease.

The awesome potential of mRNA to combat disease is difficult to overstate. Whereas traditional vaccines usually take years to formulate, mRNA vaccines can be designed in weeks or even days. Moderna’s Covid vaccine, which proved to be 94.5 percent effective in clinical trials, took one weekend to design. Pfizer and BioNTech’s took a few hours. mRNA is more customizable than traditional medicine, allowing for personalized treatments for patients. That may allow mRNA drugs to correct genetic defects and target specific tumors. Scientists believe that mRNA could someday prevent the progression of cancer from the earliest stages.

To be sure, there are still many challenges to translating mRNA into successful treatments. But to stymie the development of this technology now would be unfathomably wrongheaded.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long been a critic of many proven vaccines, but he’s especially disapproving of the mRNA ones. He once wrote that “mRNA jabs don’t stop infection, don’t block transmission, don’t block mutants, don’t last, don’t work at all.” At the National Institutes of Health, Kennedy has put his thumb on the scale to prioritize non-mRNA treatments and subject mRNA research to stricter scrutiny.

Now, Kennedy promises to redirect the $500 million in canceled grants for mRNA vaccines to what he calls “safer, broader vaccine platforms.” Far from letting the market determine investments by retracting the funds altogether, he is redeploying the funding to shift development away from mRNA.

The reasons Kennedy offers range from baseless to absurd. He says most of the mRNA vaccines that HHS was funding “are for flu or Covid, but as the pandemic showed us, mRNA vaccines don’t perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract.” That’s very misleading. While it’s true that the Covid vaccines — mRNA and traditional alike — did not prevent transmission nearly as effectively as scientists initially claimed, they were extremely effective at reducing serious illness, hospitalization, and death. What’s more, mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna were even more effective at preventing hospitalization, Covid symptoms, and infection than non-mRNA alternatives.

Kennedy also claims that, because “mRNA only codes for a small part of the viral protein,” these vaccines cannot cope with a virus’s variants. “One mutation, and the vaccine becomes ineffective,” he says, citing those who contracted the Omicron variant of Covid despite being vaccinated. This claim, too, is false. If anything, mRNA vaccines are more effective than traditional vaccines at coping with mutations. A 2023 study concluded that the “Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccines are highly safe and potent against different variants of COVID-19,” including Omicron. Moreover, because they can be formulated more quickly than traditional immunizations, mRNA vaccines can be updated to target new variants more rapidly as well. That advantage enabled Pfizer and Moderna — unlike any of the non-mRNA vaccines — to come out with Omicron-specific booster shots by the end of 2022.

Kennedy’s reasons for canceling mRNA grants don’t hold water, but the cancellations in themselves are not nearly as disastrous as the media and scientific community are making them out to be. The $500 million in HHS funding was spread out across 22 projects, giving an average of under $23 million to each one. For reference, the average total cost to bring a new vaccine to market is $886.8 million, according to HHS. No vaccine maker with a viable product on its hands is going to abandon development because it now has to cover 3 percent more of the cost.

The real danger to mRNA comes not from Kennedy’s funding cuts but from his ability to impose regulatory barriers that deter development and block patient access to new treatments. Layoffs at the FDA are already delaying new drug approvals, costing developers time and money. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that lengthening FDA review times by nine months would lead to one fewer drug being approved every year going forward. The regulatory process for vaccines — where mRNA development is concentrated — has in particular been tightened.

Kennedy’s control over drug approval at the FDA and research at the NIH gives him far greater power to slow the development and adoption of mRNA than does his cancellation of grants. What those cancellations indicate is that he may be willing to do so.