Trump and RFK Jr.'s Latest Vaccine Reversal Weakens America in Three Crucial Ways

In an age of porous memory, we forget just how bad the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic was. We may remember President Trump suggesting that we inject ourselves with a bleach-like “disinfectant,” for example, but forget just how ham-handed the CDC’s early testing and communication efforts were. We recall the fierce battle over mask-wearing, but forget the colossal failure of getting essential protective equipment to front-line hospital workers and first responders … and the dangerous fragility of our basic medical supply chains.

But in America’s pandemic response, Trump 45 did have one standout success—one that even his harshest critics applaud: the development of a highly effective SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, produced miraculously in under a year. Indeed, “Operation Warp Speed,” the bold initiative that marshaled a slew of federal health and defense agencies, academic centers, and private drugmakers to produce anti-COVID vaccines and other medicines, may be the first such government program to deserve its moniker.

Now, Trump 47 and his minions are attempting to destroy that legacy and the ingenious medical weaponry that spun out of the effort: vaccines that use messenger RNA, or mRNA, to induce the body’s immune system to fight an infection. This past Tuesday, the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, said that BARDA—a federal agency tasked with fostering next-generation medical technologies—would “wind down” twenty-two mRNA-focused contracts worth just under $500 million. In actuality, the government wasn’t just winding down its investment in this new technology, it had already begun canceling some contracts outright, “de-scoping” or restructuring others, and rejecting all future awards that were in the works. For medical science, it was a Tuesday morning massacre.

In a video HHS released with the announcement, the department’s MAHA-raja, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said that mRNA vaccines—such as Moderna’s COVID vaccine, which was developed in cooperation with the government, and Pfizer’s and BioNTech’s (mostly) privately developed shot—home in on specific targets on their quarry, and once those viruses mutate, the vaccines become ineffective. Claimed Kennedy, this can have the effect, paradoxically, of “encouraging” new mutations in infections such as the coronavirus or the flu—adding that HHS had determined that “mRNA technology poses more risk than benefits in these respiratory viruses.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, looked on in May 2020 as President Trump announced "Operation Warp Speed," the Trump administration’s plan to produce and distribute a coronavirus vaccine by the end of 2020.

There are, unfortunately, three major problems with Kennedy’s analysis. The first is that little of it is true. “Baseless,” is the term influenza expert Michael Osterholm, PhD, MPH, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, used to describe the Secretary’s remarks in a conversation with NPR. Leading virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen doesn’t mince words either: “Kennedy is basically wrong about almost everything he said in that statement,” she tells me.

“Even though the COVID vaccines don’t completely prevent infection for a lot of people, they do reduce it—and they also reduce virus replication in people who do get infected because they clear the virus faster,” says Rasmussen, who is principal research scientist at the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO) and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Vaccine.

The infected individuals are not only less sick, they are also—importantly—less likely to spread the virus, and that, overall, reduces transmission. “So, you actually have less virus replication—and, therefore, less opportunity for mutation—in a vaccinated population than you do in an unvaccinated population,” she says. (Rasmussen’s must-read Substack posts offer a fuller—and livelier—evisceration of the HHS Secretary’s claims.)

A heap of evidence suggests, for example, that the first substantive transformation of the coronavirus—the Delta variant—emerged from a largely unvaccinated population, in India, before spreading around the globe—not, as Kennedy suggests from evolutionary selection pressure derived from a Moderna- or Pfizer-vaccinated patient in the States. Likewise, Omicron very likely arose from an immunocompromised person who kept getting reinfected, giving the virus a far greater chance to evolve in that host. The vaccines had nothing to do with it.

What’s more, in spite of the emergence of these new dominant strains, the two mRNA vaccines and their quickly produced booster shots have been profoundly effective in keeping people alive and out of the hospital. Which was their job to begin with. “That’s what vaccines are actually for,” says Rasmussen, “preventing severe disease and death.”

In under two years, SARS-CoV-2 spread to more than 800 million people around the globe. By October 2021, the virus’s endless copying and mutation within those many human hosts had already produced, by one estimate, 1.4 million variants—that is to say, copies of the virus in which at least one part of its genomic sequence was unique. Nonetheless, the vast majority of those who received the initial mRNA jabs—which amounted to 92% of vaccinated adults in the U.S.—somehow weathered this evolutionary explosion, contrary to Kennedy’s claim. Antibodies against one version of the SARS-2 virus, it appears, were more “cross-reactive” to other variants—that is, more able to neutralize them—than first supposed. The potential reasons for this are many, ranging from the uncanny persistence of white-blood-cell warriors called T cells and B cells to the recognition that mRNA vaccines causes certain classes of immune cells to have a longer-term memory of the pathogen.

While the science is still unfolding on this, there is one group of data that is no longer theoretical. According to Trump’s own CDC—and no surprise, you have to root through the archives to find these stats—the risk of dying from COVID “among unvaccinated adults was 3 times higher for adults aged 18–29 years, 5 times higher for adults aged 30–49 years, and 6 times higher for adults aged 50–64 years.” Those who got the recommended boosters fared better still.

A large study in The Lancet found that the COVID vaccines prevented 14.4 million deaths from the illness across 185 countries in a single year, from December 2020 to December 2021. In a far more conservative take, Stanford University’s John Ioannidis determined that they averted a mere 2.5 million deaths globally from 2020-2024. That’s, by far, the lowest estimate out there.

Yes, as with any drug, there are risks to the vaccines. The most discussed? A rare association—roughly 27 cases per million doses in young males (ages 12 to 24)—between the mRNA vaxxes and swelling of the heart muscle (myocarditis) or lining (pericarditis), both typically reversible conditions. But could anyone reflect on all these stats and fairly conclude that the vaccines ever posed more risk than benefit?

The second major problem with the Trump administration’s action last Tuesday is even more dismaying. By summarily zeroing-out funding for mRNA research on infectious diseases such as influenza and coronavirus, Trump 47 has intentionally—and inexplicably—harmed America’s ability to respond to the next pandemic, an event that will irrevocably come. In turning their backs on the most noteworthy success of Trump 45—speeding up the production of an arsenal that could be adapted on the fly to whatever new foe attacked—Trump 47 and his health czar have made the nation and the world far less safe.

Infectious disease experts often speak of the Red Queen Hypothesis when discussing the pace of pathogenic evolution. As the Red Queen tells the young protagonist in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” Thanks to decades’ worth of scientific study, the mRNA technology that built the COVID vaccines, has enabled us to achieve that unlikely sprint against the fastest-moving and most-lethal pandemic since the 1918 influenza outbreak.

That’s because messenger RNA is, effectively, biological software. Scientists can program it to instruct cells to make virtually any protein that’s needed. Traditional vaccines introduce an innocuous component of an actual virus—or, in some cases, an inactivated whole pathogen—in order to trigger an immune response. Messenger RNA vaccines, by contrast, don’t introduce any virus into the body. Rather, they use our own cellular machinery to make a harmless protein associated uniquely with that pathogen. In both cases, the “foreign” entity serves as a red flag to immune sentries, which in turn, direct other cellular defenders to swoop in and destroy the interloper.

But this biological “software” has another key benefit, too: It can be written—and rewritten, and rewritten—in a matter of hours or days. Moderna was able to develop a candidate mRNA vaccine, in fact, within a few days of learning the genomic sequence of the SARS-2 coronavirus. Previous efforts developing vaccines for HPV, shingles, and pneumococcal disease took between nine and 13 years, according to a McKinsey & Company analysis. (Others have pegged the full development timeline for some vaccines as 20 years or longer.)

Kennedy says he wants to scrap the new technology and return to the old way of making vaccines. That old way requires growing an actual virus in some sort of medium, typically chicken eggs. To make enough vaccine targeted to, say, a new lethal strain of influenza strain, you’d first need “a ton of chicken eggs,” Rasmussen says. “You’d also need about nine months to a year and, potentially, a containment laboratory to manufacture these vaccines at population scale—whereas, with mRNA vaccines, you don't need to grow any virus. You don't need any eggs. And you can basically start manufacturing it the day that you get the sequence for the spike protein.”

Going back to the old way is akin to trading in a new iPhone for a rotary dial phone connected to a wall outlet. The new way is safer, faster, smarter, cheaper, more adaptable, and more efficient. The old way often failed outright. One 2021 study that examined 220 traditional vaccine development efforts from 2005 through March 2020 found that the probability of going from Phase 2 trials to licensure over the course of a decade was a paltry 10%.

That’s why the University of Minnesota’s Osterholm, perhaps the nation’s most respected voice on pandemic preparedness, called Kennedy’s action last Tuesday “the most dangerous public health judgment” he’d seen in half a century. “We will pay a tremendous price in terms of illnesses and deaths,” he predicted, terrifyingly, to NPR.

As if all that isn't bad enough, there’s also a third problem with the Trump administration’s rug-pull for mRNA vaccine research—and this one, conceivably, may be even more damaging in the long run than the first two: It has put an arctic freeze on drugmakers’ mRNA research and will almost surely hurt academic research in the field across the board. Word has it that young investigators have been warned against even mentioning the term in their grant applications for fear that the NIH will summarily reject them. And the concern goes well beyond COVID or the flu.

In a multitude of research programs, for instance, drug developers have been studying how to use mRNA to program personalized vaccines against cancer in a similar way to how it’s being trained against viruses. Applied sometimes in combination with other therapies, the strategy is now being tested against some of the deadliest malignancies, including pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, metastatic melanoma, and advanced liver cancer. More than 120 trials are in the works. And while the clinical studies are still in relatively early stages, and real scientific challenges remain, many of the preliminary results are truly promising.

An inherent advantage for mRNA therapies—whether aimed at respiratory infections or noncommunicable diseases like cancer—is their ability to go after multiple targets. Functionally, there is no limit to how many antigens, or target proteins, an mRNA vaccine can include. Given cancer’s relentless capacity to evolve and evade, this Hydra-like quality may let us overcome the hidden resistance mechanisms that enable many tumors to re-emerge and spread even after apparent remissions.

In the case of cardiovascular disease, researchers are in the early phases of testing synthetic mRNA’s ability to promote new cell growth, and the formation of healthy new blood vessels, in areas where heart muscle tissue has died after a heart attack.

Messenger RNA, likewise, offers new hope for a litany of orphan genetic diseases where most big drugmakers haven’t invested. mRNA breaks down immediately (in mere hours or days) after it delivers its protein-building message, which makes it easier for clinicians to control a drug’s biological effect and make quick adjustments as needed. In addition, mRNA doesn’t integrate with the cellular genome—or even enter the cell nucleus, for that matter. Such factors, in theory, can sometimes make it safer than gene therapy in treating certain uncommon genetic diseases.

As of late July, Moderna—one of the two companies that produced a COVID vaccine in record time—was busy investigating mRNA therapies in six such disorders.

One of those disorders is Methylmalonic Acidemia (MMA), a rare group of inherited conditions in which the body cannot effectively break down proteins and fats, leading to a dangerous buildup of acid in the blood. It’s a rotten disease for which, currently, there is no cure. Moderna said in its most recent quarterly earnings statement that it expects to have a “registration” (late-stage) trial in the works for an investigational mRNA therapy against MMA later this year—but that’s, in large part, contingent on the Food and Drug Administration, which is fostering the effort through a pilot program: “Support for Clinical Trials Advancing Rare Disease Therapeutics,” or START.

A big question, of course, is whether the FDA will, like its parent HHS, ratchet down its support for mRNA drugs in the development pipeline. Another, perhaps bigger one, is what will happen to all the private investment into this tech as pharmaceutical executives feel the deep freeze from Washington. Right now, it seems, the answers to both questions are likely to be chilling.