RFK Jr.'s cancellation of mRNA vaccine research is even worse than it first seemed

Los Angeles Times

a day ago

On first glance, the data that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cited to justify canceling some $500 million in federal grants for mRNA vaccine research looked impressive.
The data, according to the agency, were embodied in some 400 research papers listed in a compilation that ran to 181 pages. The document was headlined 'COVID-19 mRNA 'vaccine' harms research collection.'
'After reviewing the science and consulting top experts at NIH and FDA,' Kennedy said on a video posted on X, referring to the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, 'HHS has determined that mRNA technology poses more risk than benefits' for respiratory viruses such as COVID-19 and flu. 'We reviewed the science, listened to the experts, and acted,' he wrote in an accompanying post.
Is that so? A close look at the so-called data reveals that the vast majority of the cited papers — all but about 40 — have little or nothing to do with the vaccines. They concern the consequences of COVID-19 infection, not the shots.
Many of the papers that do reference the vaccines are studies not of human subjects, but laboratory mice; in some of these studies the mice received the vaccines via injections directly into the brain or intravenously, which is not how people receive the vaccines.
What's also important is the lack of evidence supporting the agency's claims. The data packet fails to include well-researched studies attesting to the safety and efficacy of the mRNA vaccines, including some published very recently. Among those is an exhaustive study by Danish researchers of more than 1 million recipients of the latest mRNA COVID booster, published July 28.
That study investigated the incidence of 29 potential adverse side effects from the vaccine, including heart, liver and kidney failure; neurological conditions; diabetes; and arthritis. It found 'no statistically significant risk' of any of them from the vaccine.
That includes myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle that is often cited by anti-vaccine agitators as a dangerous side effect of the mRNA vaccines. That condition was most commonly seen among young men, particularly if they had received two shots within a short time span. But for the most part it was mild and short-term; once the booster was reformulated after 2022, the effect appeared to disappear.
No deaths from the condition were known to have occurred, and myocarditis effects were more common and serious among unvaccinated people infected with COVID.
Nor did the agency's data packet include an estimate of lives saved by the COVID vaccines, led by Stanford epidemiologist John P.A. Ioannidis and published July 25. That study calculated that from the beginning of the global vaccination campaign in 2020 through September 2024 as many as 4 million lives were saved by the vaccines.
Ioannidis acknowledged that his estimate is 'conservative.' Indeed, in 2022 the Commonwealth Fund estimated that in just the first two years the vaccines were available, the shots prevented more than 18 million hospitalizations and more than 3 million COVID-related deaths in the U.S. alone. A 2022 study in The Lancet, a British medical journal, estimated as many as 20 million COVID-related lives saved around the world in just the first year of vaccination.
Weigh those figures against Kennedy's assertion that the mRNA vaccines pose 'more risks than benefits,' and it becomes evident that decision-making has gone seriously awry at the Department of Health and Human Services under Kennedy's leadership.
To Jake Scott, an infectious disease expert at Stanford Medical School who painstakingly examined the agency's data citations, they point to 'textbook confirmation bias'—the quest for information that confirms someone's preexisting beliefs. In this case, that someone is Kennedy, whose record of anti-vaccine advocacy is indisputable.
The mismatch between the data packet cited by Kennedy and the established facts of the vaccines' safety and efficacy explain why Kennedy's cancellation of 22 contracts supporting mRNA vaccine research has been greeted by experts as a senseless and devastating blow against science and public health.
'I have have been in this business for over 50 years on the front lines of public health,...and I can say unequivocally that this was the most dangerous public health decision I have ever seen made by a government body,' Michael Osterholm, an expert in infectious diseases at the University of Minnesota, told PBS.
At the very least, if Kennedy is so convinced that the effects mRNA vaccines are not sufficiently well-understood, the solution is more research, not less. I asked Kennedy's department to respond to criticism of his decision, but received no response.
A few words about the mRNA technology.
Using messenger RNA as an intermediary in their actions, the vaccines instruct the body how to manufacture parts of a pathogen that its immune system can recognize and fight. For immunologists, the virtues of the new technology are manifest. Vaccines to combat new pathogens or new versions of existing pathogens can be engineered quickly, allowing them to be rolled out to stifle pandemics before they even emerge.
The potential utility of mRNA vaccines is unprecedentedly broad. The possible targets under study today — including in some of the research contracts Kennedy cancelled — include flu, HIV, hepatitis C, malaria, tuberculosis, and cancer, Drew Weissman of the University of Pennsylvania and other scientists told Nature in 2021. Weissman shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Katalin Karikó in 2023 for their work on mRNA vaccines.
In the U.S., the development of the mRNA COVID vaccine was sponsored by $2.5 billion in grants and purchase guarantees from the federal government to Moderna, one of the two drugmakers that brought out the COVID vaccines, partially through Operation Warp Speed, an R&D effort under the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA.
That's the agency that Kennedy has ordered to cancel the mRNA contracts. President Trump bragged about the achievement during his first term, but reversed course after the vaccines became the target of fearmongering from the right-wing and the anti-vaccine camp.
Kennedy's video on X explaining his decision was replete with fundamental misconceptions about the vaccines, according to scientists and real-world data.
'As the pandemic showed us, mRNA vaccines don't perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract,' he said. But that's plainly contradicted by the record of lives saved and hospitalizations averted. Statistics published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which falls under Kennedy's jurisdiction, show that the average weekly COVID case rate in late 2020 was 347.8 per 100,000 population among the unvaccinated, but 25 per 100,000 among the fully vaccinated and boosted population. The weekly average death rate in the same period was 7.8 among the unvaccinated and 0.1 among the vaccinated.
He claimed that the vaccines promote the mutation of COVID; 'one mutation, and the vaccine becomes ineffective,' Kennedy said. Neither of those statements is supported by science.
'MRNA vaccines do not cause the virus to mutate — they do that all on their own,' writes Steven Novella, a neurologist and veteran misinformation debunker. 'What causes new variants to arise more quickly is allowing a virus to spread uninhibited throughout a population — the more it replicates, the more opportunities there are for new mutations. Widespread vaccination therefore decreases new mutations and variants.'
Moreover, no 'one mutation' causes the vaccines to become ineffective; as vaccinologist Peter Hotez observes, in no known case has a single mutation rendered the vaccine ineffective. Boosters developed for COVID variants have remained relatively effective even as new variants become dominant. Anyway, the virtue of mRNA technology is that the vaccine can be rapidly retooled to meet the challenge of new variants.
That brings us to the data package Kennedy's agency offered to defend his decision.
It's not the product of U.S. government scientists, although one of its developers, Steven Hatfill, is currently on the HHS staff. Its other chief compilers are identified as Martin Wucher, a dentist ; Byram Bridle, a faculty member at a Canadian veterinary college; and Erik Sass, a nonfiction author.
I reached out to all three for comment but received no reply. The compilation originated as material for a book titled 'TOXIC SHOT: Facing the Dangers of the COVID 'Vaccines',' an anthology of essays by prominent anti-vaxxers.
The compilation doesn't make the case for canceling the research. A paper listed as support for the myocarditis threat, for example, states, 'no causality can be assumed or established' linking the condition to the vaccine because of the lack of a control group for comparison. 'There is no direct evidence of a vaccine-induced inflammatory response' to the vaccine.
Kennedy's action is almost certain to hamstring American science for years, possibly decades, to come. It's the antithesis of Trump's claim to put 'America First,' for it cedes the development of a life-saving medical technology to Europe and China. And it's not limited to the development of vaccines for respiratory diseases.
During a recent appearance on a podcast hosted by the right-wing influencer Steve Bannon, the newly-appointed commissioner of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, declared, 'As far as public health goes for vaccines, the mRNA platform is no longer viable.'
Bhattacharya justified this statement by noting a rise in public skepticism about mRNA technology. What he didn't say was that the skepticism was promoted by Kennedy and other anti-vaxxers denigrating the technology; a competent and responsible NIH chief would be defending a technological innovation, not magnifying disinformation about it.
The truth is that the mRNA platform is likely to be seen in retrospect as a historic advance in healthcare ... everywhere but in the United States.