MAHA v. Moderna: The COVID vaccine maker is under attack by RFK Jr.'s department of health
Moderna CEO and cofounder Stéphane Bancel probably never imagined he'd look back on March 2023 as the good old days. Then, he merely had to go before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee and take a spitty dressing-down from Senator Bernie Sanders over the price of Moderna's COVID vaccine. The company was held up as a poster child for 'corporate greed.' For a U.S. pharma executive, though, that was more or less business as usual.
Today, the situation is anything but. With the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent anti-vaxxer, to be the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services this February, once-fringe medical theories have been escalated to the level of policy, throwing established scientific and regulatory norms into doubt. Among drugmakers, perhaps none is worse situated to absorb the D.C. vibe shift than Moderna, which is now being targeted not for its pricing but for its one and only product: mRNA-based vaccines.
Kennedy has shown a particular distaste for mRNA vaccines, such as those that were rapidly developed by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech in response to the global outbreak of COVID-19. During the height of the pandemic, Kennedy petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to revoke authorization for COVID-19 vaccines and not approve any future ones, saying that the risks of adverse reactions and death weren't adequately studied. These vaccines—which have been safely administered to billions of people around the world and in 2021 alone saved at least an estimated 14.4 million lives worldwide—have been the subject of conspiracy theories and misinformation since they were first authorized for emergency use in late 2020. Among the debunked claims of critics: the vaccines can alter a person's genome; they contain microchips or tracking devices; They cause something dubbed turbo cancer. Several states, including Florida, Kentucky, South Carolina, Idaho, and Texas are considering laws that would severely limit or ban the use of mRNA vaccines. Louisiana and Texas have already ended mass vaccinations and any promotion of the vaccines.
Now, Kennedy's HHS is taking action against Moderna's signature product. In the past month alone, the CDC has revised its public health recommendations for COVID-19 vaccines, the FDA altered its vaccine approval process, and the government canceled a $766 million contract with Moderna to develop new vaccines against pandemic threats including H5N1 avian influenza. Taken together, these moves have effectively knee-capped Moderna's business. They've also jeopardized public health, and spread uncertainty across the burgeoning landscape of next-generation RNA-based therapeutics.
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