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Robert Kennedy Has Gutted Our Best Defense Against Future Pandemics [View all]
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.
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.
https://prospect.org/health/2025-08-20-robert-kennedy-has-gutted-best-defense-future-pandemics/]
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