The Department of Health and Human Services will cancel contracts and pull funding for some vaccines that are being developed to fight respiratory viruses like COVID-19 and the flu.
The Trump administration's decision to terminate hundreds of millions of dollars to develop mRNA vaccines imperils the country's ability to fight future pandemics and is built on false or misleading claims about the technology, public health experts said.
-- The Washington Post (@washingtonpost.com) Aug 6, 2025 at 4:55 PM
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Curious.
There's plenty of legitimate (peer reviewed) information to warrant the concern JPW expressed.
www.journalofinfection.com(24)00053-7/fulltext
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
academic.oup.com
Increased levels of igG4 from repeated mRNA vaccination appears well correlated.
RFK Jr. defends $500M cut for mRNA vaccines with pseudoscience gobbledygook
arstechnica.com
... He clearly has no idea what antigenic shift means.
If anyone needed a reminder that US health secretary and fervent anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has no background in science or medicine, look no further than the video he posted on social media Tuesday evening.
In the two-and-a-half-minute clip, Kennedy announced that he is cancelling nearly $500 million in funding for the development of mRNA-based vaccines against diseases that pose pandemic threats. The funding will be clawed back from 22 now-defunct contracts awarded through the federal agency tasked with developing medical countermeasures to public health threats. The agency is the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).
Kennedy is generally opposed to vaccines, but he is particularly hostile to mRNA-based vaccines. Since the remarkably successful debut of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic"which were developed and mass-produced with unprecedented speed"Kennedy has continually disparaged and spread misinformation about them.
In the video on Tuesday, Kennedy continued that trend, erroneously saying that, "as the pandemic showed us, mRNA vaccines don't perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract." In reality, COVID-19 vaccines are estimated to have saved more than 3 million lives in the US in just the first two years of the pandemic and additionally prevented more than 18 million hospitalizations in the US in that time. Nearly all COVID-19 vaccines used in the US are mRNA-based.
However, Kennedy's video only went more off the rails from there. He continued on with this nonsensical explanation:
Here's the problem: mRNA only codes for a small part of viral proteins usually a single antigen. One mutation, and the vaccine becomes ineffective. This dynamic drives a phenomenon called antigenic shift meaning that the vaccine paradoxically encourages new mutations and can actually prolong pandemics as the virus constantly mutates to escape the protective effects of the vaccine.
Fact-check
To unpack this nonsense, let's start with how mRNA-based vaccines work. These vaccines deliver a snippet of genetic code"in the form of messenger RNA (mRNA)"to cells. Our cells then translate that mRNA code into a protein that the immune system can, essentially, use for target practice, producing antibodies and cell-based responses against it. After that, if the immune system ever encounters that snippet on an actual invading virus or other germ, it will then recognize it and mount a protective response. Such snippets of germs or other harmful things that can prompt an immune response are generally called antigens.
In the case of COVID-19 vaccines, the mRNA snippet codes for a portion of the SARS-CoV-2 virus's spike protein, which is a critical external protein that the virus uses to attach to and infect cells. That portion of the spike protein is considered an antigen.
...
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