The year is 2035 and the world is dealing with another pandemic, only this time it’s even worse. A bird flu strain has made the leap that scientists have long feared, evolving into a virus that spreads as quickly as COVID-19 but kills at a much higher rate. Businesses and schools have shut down. Economies have crashed. The infected are overwhelming hospitals.
In a virtual press conference, officials announce that there is hope, because the same kind of vaccine that got us through COVID will work this time as well. The catch is that it will take a few more months to develop and produce. And the death toll, already in the millions for the United States alone, is rising fast.
A reporter on the zoom call asks: Why will it take so long? Well, the officials explain, we had a chance about a decade ago to prepare for this by creating a ready-to-deploy vaccine platform that would have shaved months from the process. But our predecessors who were in charge back then killed the funding. So we don’t have that head start.
EVERYTHING ABOUT THE ABOVE SCENARIO is hypothetical—except the final part about the funding. That part happened last week.
On Tuesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the Trump administration was canceling about half a billion dollars of federal contracts with companies and institutions that have been working to develop the next generation of mRNA vaccines.
MRNA stands for messenger RNA, the naturally occurring genetic material that cells use as their guide for making proteins. Vaccines with mRNA have a synthetic version of the material, with “coding” instructing cells to manufacture proteins that are part of viruses or other hostile elements, so that the body’s immune system can learn to recognize and fight them.
Research in this field goes back decades, with the first clinical trials of an mRNA vaccine (for a cancer treatment) in 2008. In early 2020, when COVID hit, the technology was ready for primetime. Scientists developed, tested, and mass produced mRNA vaccines that contained instructions for a protein spike on the coronavirus surface.
The process took about eleven months—a medical miracle given vaccines usually take years to develop1—and it worked, saving literally millions of lives worldwide. Now the hope is to improve on that progress, making it possible to develop and deploy mRNA vaccines even more quickly in response to future outbreaks and to other medical threats, as well.
To realize that potential, the Biden administration decided to invest heavily in mRNA research, much of it through an agency called BARDA, which is the federal government’s R&D division when it comes to pandemic and bioterrorism preparedness. But BARDA is part of HHS, which means it’s now under the control of Kennedy, whose hostility to vaccines generally—and mRNA specifically—is no secret.
In May, he announced that he was canceling a contract with Moderna—which produced one of the original COVID shots—to develop mRNA vaccines for other purposes. Now he’s canceling nearly two dozen more.
Kennedy made the announcement in a two-and-a-half minute video and accompanying press release, in which he stated “we reviewed the science” and “listened to the experts.” Several days later—after repeatedly declining to answer inquiries (including mine) about just what science and experts he had in mind—HHS updated its online press release with a link on the word “data.”2
The link is revealing, though more for what it says about Kennedy than what it says about mRNA technology. It goes to a page with a long list of studies that purportedly show the harms of the vaccines. But, notably, the page itself is not a government website, nor is it from a peer-reviewed journal or some other reputable source. Rather, it’s a storage page on an open website where anybody can post data, coding, or other research tools for sharing.
And what you’ll find on the website is exactly the sort of stuff you’d expect to find on a site with no gatekeepers. The authors listed on the mRNA page include a scientist who has touted the benefits of hydroxychloroquine and another who has claimed the COVID vaccine creates toxins in the body. According to the listing, they and two collaborators originally compiled the citations for Toxic Shock, an independently published 2024 book that claims that mRNA vaccines “are the real menace to our country’s long-term wellbeing.”
That book, by the way, has an introduction by Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican senator known for spreading vaccine misinformation. It also includes a chapter from author Naomi Wolf, who famously claimed (among many other things) that COVID vaccines were causing miscarriage.
To say these views are out of step with the scientific consensus would be an understatement.
Here, for example, is what top researchers have actually found when it comes to the claim on vaccines and miscarriage.
And here’s a Factcheck.org overview of some other misleading or false claims that show up regularly in anti-mRNA rhetoric.
And here’s an article from STAT3 on all the experts who think mRNA vaccines look like the best weapon against future pandemics.
But you wouldn’t know any of this by listening to Kennedy speak. That’s because he has perfected the art of undermining public confidence in vaccines by leaning on a tiny handful of fringe researchers and then sounding “sciencey”—throwing around bits of medical jargon—to give the impression he’s an expert himself.
“This is what upsets me about him the most—and believe me, there are a lot of choices—but what upsets me most about him is that he couches his reasoning in scientific terms,” Paul Offit, physician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania, told me in a phone interview. “It makes it sound like he knows what he’s talking about when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about at all.”
Offit is one of the most widely respected, widely quoted vaccination experts on the planet. So in order to get a reality check on Kennedy’s rhetoric—and some perspective on his decision to pull mRNA funding—I asked him and a few of his peers to evaluate some of the key claims from last week’s HHS video.
Here’s what they had to say.
Kennedy Claim 1: “MRNA vaccines don’t perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract.”
The idea that the COVID vaccine didn’t work is a staple of anti-vaccine rhetoric. And it is plainly not true. Studies have shown convincingly, unequivocally that taking the shot reduces your chances of getting very sick—and, ultimately, of dying.
“They probably saved 3 million lives in this country—and an estimated 250,000 people, roughly, lost their lives because they chose not to be vaccinated,” Offit said.
One reason Kennedy’s argument might sound convincing is that it gestures at somewhat complex reality: The vaccine did not stop transmission or prevent disease altogether. People were expecting a total eradication, the kind the polio vaccine delivered. They didn’t get it.
But while that’s partly a result of experts and public health officials overpromising—a mistake they’ve hopefully learned not to make next time—it’s also a result of people like Kennedy pretending there’s no difference between getting sick from COVID, which still happens all the time, and getting sick enough to die, which happens a lot more rarely.
“MRNA vaccines against COVID are very good at preventing people from dying from COVID and very good at preventing people from being hospitalized due to COVID,” said Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious diseases physician in New York City and the author of the book Booster Shots. “That’s really, really important.”4
Plus, Ratner said, there’s always the chance that mRNA vaccines could become more effective after more research—for example, the type that the United States had been funding until Kennedy canceled it.
“I just don’t think you can extrapolate to what mRNA vaccines will do in all infections based on what they do for COVID,” Ratner said.
Kennedy Claim 2: “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.”
It’s true that respiratory viruses can mutate quickly, reducing the effectiveness of vaccines. That is precisely what has happened with COVID, as it moved through variant stages from “Alpha” to “Omicron.”
But even with Omicron, “we still saw very strong [vaccine] protection against serious illness, hospitalizations and deaths,” said Michael Osterholm, professor and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota.
Osterholm, another widely respected scholar who is coauthor of a forthcoming book called The Big One, was especially exasperated by Kennedy’s use of the term “antigenic shift.”
“This is a classic example of someone who has no idea what he was talking about,” Osterholm said, explaining that what’s actually happening is antigenic “drift”—the phenomenon of viruses mutating incrementally in ways that reduce but don’t eliminate vaccine effectiveness.
“This is what he’s really good at, throwing words out there,” Osterholm said. “The level of protection against clinical illness and infection—meaning transmission capacity—is reduced over time, yes. But the level of protection against serious illness, hospitalizations, and deaths actually is quite sustained with these vaccines.”
As for the idea that the vaccine has caused the virus to mutate more rapidly, that didn’t make a lot of sense to Kathryn Edwards, an internationally respected infectious disease professor at Vanderbilt.
“There is a natural mutation of viruses,” Edwards said. “Flu changes every year, and that’s clearly not a function of the vaccines—not enough people are vaccinated for that to be the case.”
Offit ticked off a list of technical reasons why he thought Kennedy’s theory about the vaccine accelerating mutation of the virus was wrong.5 “I don’t think there’s any evidence that is what’s happened,” Offit said, noting that COVID has been stuck in its Omicron phase for a while now.
“We’re still in the Omicron era,” Offit said. “So where is Pi?”6
Kennedy Claim 3: “MRNA technology poses more risk than benefits for these respiratory viruses.”
The specter of awful side effects is probably the one that fuels vaccine skepticism the most, in no small part because figures like Kennedy have repeatedly insisted certain kinds of shots cause autism, despite mountains of research debunking that theory.
But while all vaccines can cause mild reactions and some can, on rare occasions, cause more serious side effects—as all medical interventions do—“hundreds of millions, probably billions of people got the mRNA shots,” Edwards noted, “and the reactions really were quite minimal.” If there were serious, widespread risks associated with the vaccines, she noted, the evidence of it would be everywhere.
It’s one more area of broad consensus among scientists—including Ratner, who called Kennedy’s claim “wildly disingenuous. There are some side effects of the vaccines, but those are greatly outweighed by the protection that you get against COVID.”
The condition that frequently comes up in these discussions is myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart, which monitoring showed was a rare side effect of the shots (and one that appeared mostly just for adolescent boys and young men). Moreover, myocarditis is substantially more likely to occur—and to cause serious harm—for unvaccinated people who get COVID, Offit noted.
“I would argue,” Offit said, “this is one of the safest vaccines ever made.”
THESE WERE JUST THREE of the specious claims Kennedy made; there were others, too. But it’s likely that for many people who viewed the video—especially RFK Jr.’s most dedicated MAHA acolytes and longtime admirers of his anti-vaccine activism—hearing fact-checks from the likes of Offit, Osterholm, and the others may not make much of an impression.
That’s not true for everybody, however. Lots of people actually do listen to the most credentialed, most highly cited experts, because they assume those are the people who know best. It’s a good assumption—and all the more reason to worry that Kennedy is ignoring them so brazenly, in ways that could hurt so much in the future.
That speed is one reason why the scientists behind the vaccine were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine three years later.
The online press release as it was originally published, without any link on the word “data,” can be seen backed up here and here. So much for Kennedy’s pledge, during his confirmation hearings, to usher in an era of “radical transparency” at HHS.
The STAT article is by Helen Branswell, one of the most trusted journalists on this subject, who called Kennedy’s decision to pull mRNA funding a “crippling blow” to pandemic preparedness.
The idiosyncrasies of respiratory disease do have implications for vaccination, Offit added, but not in the way Kennedy explains it. Upper respiratory diseases tend to have short incubation periods, which will always make blocking infection more difficult. But that’s hardly the same as rendering them ineffective. “The goal of the vaccine for a short-incubation-period disease is to prevent serious illness,” Offit said. “That’s the goal—to keep you out of the hospital, keep you out of the intensive care unit, keep you out of the morgue.”
Among the reasons that Offit cited was the role of cytotoxic T-cells in the immune response—which, Offit said, remained able to do their jobs of fighting infections even after viruses have mutated.
Although the COVID variants are named after the letters of the Greek alphabet, a couple of letters have been skipped. Here’s why.