Robert Kennedy Has Gutted Our Best Defense Against Future Pandemics
mRNA technology saved America’s bacon in 2020. Now RFK Jr. is defunding it.
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.
