Portside

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.

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, 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, 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, including about one million Americans. Subsequent studies proved the vaccines are safe and effective, with a safety profile better than aspirin or Tylenol. 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, tuberculosis, and other 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, heart disease, liver disease, and more. (Kennedy has preserved some funding for these treatments, to be fair.)

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.

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, chikungunya, and Zika viruses, which are spreading around the world because climate change is expanding mosquito habitat, or bird flu, which is almost certain to touch off 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.’ He was previously a national correspondent for The Week.]

Read the original article at Prospect.org.

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