U.S. health agency leadership and policymakers seem intent on undermining trust in mRNA, the technology that saved millions of lives during the COVID pandemic and has shown promise in addressing a range of infectious diseases and even cancer.
One troubling sign of the trend came when, according to KFF reporting, National Institutes of Health officials told academic researchers to remove any mention of mRNA vaccine technology from their grant applications. The directive dovetails with weak or misleading messaging from public health agencies on the value of vaccines and proposed state legislation that would ban mRNA shots.
All of this is sending public health in the wrong direction, whether because people eschew today’s COVID vaccine or refuse to take whatever mRNA shots are developed to address a future pandemic — if those vaccines are developed at all.
“What this is doing is quite literally putting partisan politics in front of a cure for cancer,” said Matthew Motta, an assistant professor of Health Law, Policy, & Management at Boston University’s School of Public Health. “It’s really sad that this is going to impact people’s lives in a very tangible way.”
The mRNA technology took decades to develop. It was painstaking work supported by NIH and ultimately recognized with the 2023 Nobel Prize in medicine. The goal is no different than that of a conventional vaccine — to expose the immune system to key components of a bad actor, whether a virus or a cancer mutation, so it learns how to shut it down the next time it appears.
Here’s what an mRNA vaccine does not do: integrate into or interact with our DNA, cause infertility, contain microchips or cause people to “shed” the vaccine.
And yet those claims have persisted — and not just from random people pushing conspiracy theories on social media. Government officials have also pushed the false theories. A 2021 analysis by the Center for Countering Digital Hate identified Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as one of the most prominent spreaders of disinformation about the COVID vaccine. Kennedy lobbied to get the vaccine pulled from the market in mid-2021 and later called it “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”
In addition to potential cuts to research on mRNA, NIH separately terminated dozens of grants related to studying vaccine hesitancy, some of which centered on the COVID vaccines. HHS, meanwhile, is weighing pulling a $590 million contract awarded to Moderna to use its technology to develop bird flu shots.
Defunding or de-emphasizing research into mRNA and related vaccine hesitancy is deeply concerning. The suppression of scientific inquiry into an area of study that has already saved millions of lives puts all of us in harm’s way.
Our COVID vaccines do a great job of keeping people out of the hospital and from dying, but we should continue to look for shots that prevent infection or are more potent or can be made more cheaply. And, of course, the early promise the technology has shown in cancer is enough to warrant a full-court press.
The scarier scenario is that we might find ourselves in an increasingly dangerous feedback loop around mRNA and vaccination, where distrust fomented by health agencies breeds anti-vaccine laws reinforcing that distrust. Since Trump took office, multiple states have introduced legislation targeting mRNA vaccines.
All of these actions by state and federal leaders don’t just set up barriers but feed mistrust that could affect attitudes about the safety and value of all shots, whether for COVID, bird flu or other diseases. That’s sending science backward and will ultimately be harmful to the American public.
Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, health care and the pharmaceutical industry.
