The latest atrocity in the Trump War on Science™ has just dropped.
Robert F Kennedy Jr. has just announced that federal funding for research on mRNA vaccines has been cut by $500 million.
Outrage has predictably followed. The United Auto Workers astroturf group Stand Up for Science is demanding that Kennedy be impeached—aren’t cabinet officers just fired?—and has provided a convenient petition to sign. Rick Bright, a former official at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who at one time helped manage funds for mRNA research, has taken to the New York Times to complain that America is “Abandoning One of the Greatest Medical Breakthroughs.” Nature magazine saw the writing on the wall for mRNA research in March, and is now telling us they “told you so.” The message is both consistent and clear. The diabolical tag team of anti-vaxxer kook and deranged anti-science bigot is endangering that ever-shimmering golden age of future medical breakthroughs that will evaporate unless we continue to feed shovelfuls of federal research dollars into the boiler. We’ve seen this narrative before: Trump is cutting (full panic): cancer research, climate change research, yada-yada-yada, it’s all being destroyed. The “abandonment” of mRNA vaccines is just the next panic to scare the rubes. Bad news: the rubes have caught on.
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What about that “greatest medical breakthrough”? Since the 1980s and prior to COVID-19, pharmaceutical companies had been dabbling in mRNA technology. During this time, mRNA technology was largely a technique in search of a use. Possible applications included novel cancer therapies, treatments for autoimmune diseases, and, coming in at low priority, vaccines. Results generally fell short of the promise, plagued by ongoing concerns over stability and effectiveness. Most of the heavy lifting to make mRNA therapies effective and safe was done by these companies prior to the pandemic.
It took the COVID-19 pandemic to bring mRNA technology into the spotlight. With the advent of Operation Warp Speed, the push to rapidly deliver vaccines against the new coronavirus, the federal government uncorked gushers of money, roughly $32 billion, distributed to private companies through an NIH agency, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). The author of the New York Times editorial, Rick Bright, headed BARDA for a time, until he quit in an acrimonious dispute over alternative COVID-19 therapies such as hydroxychloroquine and “heartburn medicine” (famotidine), which were proving to be effective against early-stage COVID-19 infections. Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna were first out of the blocks with potential anti-COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. At Moderna, the decision to promote vaccine development over other applications was not without controversy, but the decision proved to be a financially sound one. Substantial and continuing profits followed the fast-tracked approval of the vaccines, $50 billion in 2021 for Moderna and Pfizer BioNTech. The COVID-19 mRNA vaccines stand out as the greatest commercial success of mRNA technology.
As vaccines, however, mRNA technology has proved a mixed bag.
Reported adverse events (AE) are higher for the mRNA vaccines than for more traditional vaccines, although their incidence has arguably been exaggerated. Doubts have also swirled ever since about the effectiveness of the mRNA vaccines, and whether they prevent the disease or provide true immunity. Claims that they saved millions of lives are not based on actual mortality accounts but on demographic models that yield widely varying estimates. Anecdote: I took three rounds of the Moderna vaccine. I suffered no adverse events from the shots, but I did have two subsequent bouts of COVID-19 infection. After the omicron panic, I stopped the injections.
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The 22 mRNA projects that were recently cancelled were run through what remains of BARDA, and included projects on methods of vaccine delivery—such as skin patches—and vaccine hesitancy. There was also some redundancy of the BARDA projects with ongoing mRNA research in the Department of Defense, where it was being applied to biowarfare countermeasures. Would millions of lives be put in jeopardy if they were cut? One doesn’t want to prejudge the outcome of these projects, but it’s hard to discern mass death following their cancellation.
There is a deeper question to ask. Private industry funded much of the R&D behind mRNA vaccines. If it is such a promising technology, why can’t private industry step in and fund this work? The pharmaceutical industry has already invested heavily in mRNA technology and has funded the transformation of mRNA technology into practicable therapies. Why can’t they continue doing so? It’s not as if progress will cease if NIH funding is taken away: in the case of Nobelist Katalin Karikó, who, along with Drew Weismann, developed the modified RNA that made the Moderna vaccine relatively safe, the NIH was a positive hindrance, not a help.
Why, then, should the NIH be involved at all?
Follow Scott Turner on X and visit our Minding the Science column for in-depth analysis on topics ranging from wokeism in STEM, scientific ethics, and research funding to climate science, scientific organizations, and much more.
Image: “Solo-mrna-vaccine” by Spencerbdavis on Wikimedia Commons
