Targeting a Vaccine
This is a relatively new technology, and it's worth remembering the moment the shots debuted for widespread use in late 2020. Three hundred thousand Americans had died from Covid. (The number eventually exceeded a million, the most of any country.) Most schools were still closed. White-collar workers were still mostly remote. Americans were in a mental health crisis. When I got my jab, I hadn't eaten in a restaurant for a year. The vaccines ended all that.
Kennedy says they're no good, and he's halting government support for them. For today's newsletter, I asked Apoorva Mandavilli, who covers vaccines for The Times, to explain what's happening.
What is an mRNA vaccine?
Some vaccines use a weakened version of a bacterium or virus to provoke an immune response and train your body's defenses. Others use a piece of the virus that the body can easily recognize as foreign. MRNA has the instructions for making only one small part of a virus. It directs the body's cells to make that fragment, which then sets off an immune response.
What is Kennedy's argument about mRNA?
Kennedy echoes many people's discomfort with the speed at which the vaccines were developed. But mRNA vaccines had been studied for more than 20 years before Covid struck. His criticisms also go further than most. He has said the vaccines are ineffective because they don't prevent infection. He has also said they're dangerous, at one point referring to them as the 'deadliest' vaccines ever made.
And what does the evidence show?
Like all vaccines, the Covid mRNA shots have some side effects. Anecdotally, thousands of people reported problems. But extensive studies in the U.S. and elsewhere found only a few serious ones. For example, the vaccines can cause heart problems in a small fraction of young men, and one study said there were seven severe cases of shingles for every million shots administered. This is comparable to the safety record of most other vaccines. It's not surprising that we've heard more about Covid vaccines, because they were given to billions of people worldwide.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Washington Post
a minute ago
- Washington Post
Doonesbury Comic Strips by Garry Trudeau - August 09, 2025
........Trump on Epstein inquiry: "The whole thing is a bullshit."....Trump on windmills: "They're killing whole thing is a con job."....Trump on Democrats: "Country-hating ARE EXTORTIONISTS!...The Dems are CRAZED LUNATICS!!!"....Trump on Rupert Murdoch and WSJ: "I'm going to sue his ass off, and that of his third-rate newspaper."....Trump on Josh Hawley: "A second-tier senator."....Scott Galloway: "If Trump brought half the competence, expertise, and elegance to governance as he does to grifting, the country would be in a much better place."....Fox host Megyn Kelly on Stephen Colbert: "He desperately wanted to be Keith Olbermann. And guess what? Keith Olbermann is a failure, and now so are you, Stephen Colbert."....Maureen Callahan on Colbert: "He is such a schoolmarm. He is such a hectoring, humorless lecturer."....Trump on Rep. Jasmine Crockett: "Very low-IQ person."....Laura Ingraham on Crockett: "Having a law degree doesn't mean you're smart."....Trump on Rep. AOC: "She's very low-IQ, and we really don't need low-IQ. Between her and Crockett, we're going to give them both an IQ test and see who comes out best."....Trump on CBS co-host Gayle King: "[Her] career is talent, no ratings, no strength!"....Trump on French President Macron: "What he says doesn't matter."....Memes reposted by Trump: "It's time to indict Obama the traitor!" "Joe Biden's presidency was the biggest scam in U.S. history."....WH Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on NPR and PBS: "These are not honest news organizations."....Matt Taibbi on NPR: "National Propaganda Radio."....Lev Parnas: "Trump's favorite lie: that he was the victim of a deep state conspiracy."....Pete Buttigieg: "The President sees a bad jobs report, and responds by getting rid of the person in charge of the statistics. This is how America becomes a third-rate country."....Sen. Ron Wyden: "Bottom line, Trump wants to cook the books."....Dan Rather on Trump: "Changes course more often than he changes his socks."....Tina Brown on Andrew Cuomo: "Has the air of a man on his way to a colonoscopy."....White House on South Park depiction of Trump in bed with Satan: "No fourth-rate show can derail President Trump's hot streak."....Jason Kander: "You know that scene in an action movie when the bad guy runs through the kitchen of a restaurant and pulls down all the pots and pans behind him to slow down his pursuers? We're in that part of the Trump presidency.".... ........Trump on Epstein inquiry: "The whole thing is a bullshit."....Trump on windmills: "They're killing whole thing is a con job."....Trump on Democrats: "Country-hating ARE EXTORTIONISTS!...The Dems are CRAZED LUNATICS!!!"....Trump on Rupert Murdoch and WSJ: "I'm going to sue his ass off, and that of his third-rate newspaper."....Trump on Josh Hawley: "A second-tier senator."....Scott Galloway: "If Trump brought half the competence, expertise, and elegance to governance as he does to grifting, the country would be in a much better place."....Fox host Megyn Kelly on Stephen Colbert: "He desperately wanted to be Keith Olbermann. And guess what? Keith Olbermann is a failure, and now so are you, Stephen Colbert."....Maureen Callahan on Colbert: "He is such a schoolmarm. He is such a hectoring, humorless lecturer."....Trump on Rep. Jasmine Crockett: "Very low-IQ person."....Laura Ingraham on Crockett: "Having a law degree doesn't mean you're smart."....Trump on Rep. AOC: "She's very low-IQ, and we really don't need low-IQ. Between her and Crockett, we're going to give them both an IQ test and see who comes out best."....Trump on CBS co-host Gayle King: "[Her] career is talent, no ratings, no strength!"....Trump on French President Macron: "What he says doesn't matter."....Memes reposted by Trump: "It's time to indict Obama the traitor!" "Joe Biden's presidency was the biggest scam in U.S. history."....WH Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on NPR and PBS: "These are not honest news organizations."....Matt Taibbi on NPR: "National Propaganda Radio."....Lev Parnas: "Trump's favorite lie: that he was the victim of a deep state conspiracy."....Pete Buttigieg: "The President sees a bad jobs report, and responds by getting rid of the person in charge of the statistics. This is how America becomes a third-rate country."....Sen. Ron Wyden: "Bottom line, Trump wants to cook the books."....Dan Rather on Trump: "Changes course more often than he changes his socks."....Tina Brown on Andrew Cuomo: "Has the air of a man on his way to a colonoscopy."....White House on South Park depiction of Trump in bed with Satan: "No fourth-rate show can derail President Trump's hot streak."....Jason Kander: "You know that scene in an action movie when the bad guy runs through the kitchen of a restaurant and pulls down all the pots and pans behind him to slow down his pursuers? We're in that part of the Trump presidency.".... ........Trump on Epstein inquiry: "The whole thing is a bullshit."....Trump on windmills: "They're killing whole thing is a con job."....Trump on Democrats: "Country-hating ARE EXTORTIONISTS!...The Dems are CRAZED LUNATICS!!!"....Trump on Rupert Murdoch and WSJ: "I'm going to sue his ass off, and that of his third-rate newspaper."....Trump on Josh Hawley: "A second-tier senator."....Scott Galloway: "If Trump brought half the competence, expertise, and elegance to governance as he does to grifting, the country would be in a much better place."....Fox host Megyn Kelly on Stephen Colbert: "He desperately wanted to be Keith Olbermann. And guess what? Keith Olbermann is a failure, and now so are you, Stephen Colbert."....Maureen Callahan on Colbert: "He is such a schoolmarm. He is such a hectoring, humorless lecturer."....Trump on Rep. Jasmine Crockett: "Very low-IQ person."....Laura Ingraham on Crockett: "Having a law degree doesn't mean you're smart."....Trump on Rep. AOC: "She's very low-IQ, and we really don't need low-IQ. Between her and Crockett, we're going to give them both an IQ test and see who comes out best."....Trump on CBS co-host Gayle King: "[Her] career is talent, no ratings, no strength!"....Trump on French President Macron: "What he says doesn't matter."....Memes reposted by Trump: "It's time to indict Obama the traitor!" "Joe Biden's presidency was the biggest scam in U.S. history."....WH Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on NPR and PBS: "These are not honest news organizations."....Matt Taibbi on NPR: "National Propaganda Radio."....Lev Parnas: "Trump's favorite lie: that he was the victim of a deep state conspiracy."....Pete Buttigieg: "The President sees a bad jobs report, and responds by getting rid of the person in charge of the statistics. This is how America becomes a third-rate country."....Sen. Ron Wyden: "Bottom line, Trump wants to cook the books."....Dan Rather on Trump: "Changes course more often than he changes his socks."....Tina Brown on Andrew Cuomo: "Has the air of a man on his way to a colonoscopy."....White House on South Park depiction of Trump in bed with Satan: "No fourth-rate show can derail President Trump's hot streak."....Jason Kander: "You know that scene in an action movie when the bad guy runs through the kitchen of a restaurant and pulls down all the pots and pans behind him to slow down his pursuers? We're in that part of the Trump presidency."....
New York Times
31 minutes ago
- New York Times
Trump Is Turning Us Into a Doddering Industrial Giant
The American economy seems to be slowing. Although the unemployment rate remains low, the jobs report released this month showed that the U.S. labor market has essentially been stalled since President Trump foisted 'Liberation Day' on us in April. Yes, it's true, the artificial intelligence sector remains white-hot, but once you look beyond it, the weather is chillier — the manufacturing sector may be shrinking, home building is slowing and most employment growth is happening in just one industry: health care. Perhaps this slowdown will soon reverse. But nearly seven months into his presidency, it's now clear that Mr. Trump and his officials' tax and trade policy — and their hatred for next-generation energy technologies — is distorting and, increasingly, robbing the economy of its complexity. And if he keeps at it, Mr. Trump will demote America into a deindustrialized power that relies on technology developed elsewhere and doesn't know how to sell much more than crypto, soybeans and petroleum products. You can see this, first, because Mr. Trump and his officials are waging a war on electricity infrastructure. This campaign is primarily driven by their opposition to the solar and wind farms that they associate with their foils, the Democrats. Even as electricity has clearly become more important to the economy — and even as the country's biggest technology firms strive to secure any spare electron for their new metropolis-size data centers — Mr. Trump and his team have begun a regulatory coup to smother new power development. That war began, of course, with Mr. Trump's signature domestic policy law, which pinched off long-running tax credits for wind and solar energy. But it does not stop there. In the past few weeks, the Trump administration has started an all-out war on renewable energy. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has weaponized his department's permitting process to slow down wind, solar and battery projects nationwide — every step of every federal permit for renewable energy must now pass under the eye of some political appointee. Another recent order has suggested that the federal government may essentially ban wind and solar farms from public land. A separate Transportation Department policy could even restrict companies' ability to build private wind farms on private land. At the same time, Chris Wright, the energy secretary, has killed federal financing for the Grain Belt Express transmission project, an electricity megaproject that was set to zip 5,000 megawatts of power across the Great Plains. Although the power line was fully permitted and approved, it had grown unpopular with some Missouri farmers, and thus with the Republican senator Josh Hawley. In other moods and moments, Mr. Wright has said that the country must build more power lines, not fewer. But in stranding the project, Mr. Wright has endangered a cheap new power supply and damaged the government's credibility. As long as he governs, executives cannot trust the Energy Department to keep its promises. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
31 minutes ago
- New York Times
There Is a Specter Haunting Trump's Economy: Stagflation
Since President Trump took office, economists have been waiting for his policies to work their way through the U.S. economy and reveal their consequences. The soft data, mostly surveys of consumers and businesses that track how people feel about the economy, turned down sharply months ago, while the hard data — jobs, G.D.P. growth, inflation — all seemed fine. But recently, a telling series of hard economic data rolled in that has rightfully raised alarm bells about slowing growth and increased inflation — a dreaded economic combination known as stagflation. Mr. Trump's tariffs are now clearly fueling inflation, particularly in goods such as home appliances, cars and food. In the first six months of the year, real (that is, inflation-adjusted) consumer spending, the main driver behind business cycles and robust economic expansion, barely grew, after rising 3 percent last year. G.D.P. growth slowed by about half, to 1.2 percent this year from 2.5 percent last year. When overall growth falls that sharply, the labor market tends to follow, which is precisely what happened: Job growth, at 35,000 per month on average between May and July, is dangerously close to stall speed. While presidents always take credit for good economic news and try to deflect bad news (in this president's case, by firing the messenger who delivered it), it's often hard to link what's going on in the economy to the current administration. Not this time. Whether it's historically high tariffs that never quite seem to stabilize, deportations that threaten to seriously disrupt labor supply in sectors like construction and health services, or a reverse-Robin Hood, budget-busting bill that takes money away from those most likely to spend it, Mr. Trump's policies have pushed economic uncertainty to levels last seen during the onset of the pandemic. This uncertainty has damped investment, hiring and consumption, while the tariffs increase prices. In other words: stagflation. For many American adults, the specter of stagflation may conjure thoughts of the 1970s. But if Mr. Trump's stagflation continues to grow, it will be different in one very important way: The economic damage will be almost entirely self-inflicted. In the '70s, stagflation was caused not by an unconstrained president but by 'exogenous shocks,' meaning big, unexpected disruptions originating from events outside the country and exacerbated by the inaction of the Federal Reserve to offset them. The biggest, and most famous, of these shocks involved the oil market. Because of the oil embargo the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries imposed on the United States in 1973 and the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the price of oil increased more than tenfold. As a result, by 1980, the United States was spending roughly six times as much on oil as it was in 1970. That change reverberated throughout the economy and caused inflation to reach a high of nearly 15 percent by the end of the decade. In what is now a famous horror story of monetary policy gone wrong, the Fed not only failed to respond to the rising inflationary pressures in the '70s; it actively made them worse. The reason was in part political: Arthur Burns yielded to pressure from the Nixon White House to disregard concerns about rising inflation and keep interest rates low to hold down unemployment. (Sound familiar?) The resulting stagflation crisis ended only when a new Fed chair, Paul Volcker, raised rates to almost 20 percent in 1980, leading to a deep and painful recession. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
