Will medical science survive RFK Jr.?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. scrapped $500 million in mRNA vaccine research contracts
By The Week
In hindsight, handing the reins of American public health to a “wholly unqualified anti-vaccine nutter” may have been a mistake, said Rex Huppke in USA Today. Taking a break from his campaigns to promote the recuperative powers of sunshine, raw milk, and beef tallow, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced last week that he’s canceling 22 contracts, worth a combined $500 million, for research into mRNA vaccines. First deployed during the pandemic by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, mRNA shots instruct the body to produce a fragment of a virus, which then sparks an immune response within the body. That technology saved millions of lives and could soon yield treatments for diseases from malaria to type 1 diabetes and cancer. Explaining his decision, Kennedy said mRNA vaccines are ineffective at preventing upper respiratory infections—never mind that the Covid shots reduced hospitalization and death by 70% among immunized adults—and have caused “epidemics” of myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart, a claim not backed by data. At best, scrapping mRNA research is a “generational setback” for American science, said Devi Sridhar in The Guardian. But with avian flu “now just one mutation away” from human-to-human transmission, Kennedy may have robbed us all of a tool to fight the next pandemic.
