Why US federal health agencies are abandoning mRNA vaccines

So perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised when the US Department of Health and Human Services, which RFK Jr. now heads, announced “the beginning of a coordinated wind-down” of mRNA vaccine development earlier this month. HHS is canceling almost $500 million worth of funding for the technology. “The data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like covid and flu,” Kennedy said in a statement.

Well, as we’ve seen, the mRNA covid vaccines were hugely effective during the pandemic. And researchers are working on other mRNA vaccines for infections including flu. Our current flu vaccines aren’t ideal—they are produced slowly in a process that requires hen’s eggs, based on predictions about which flu strains are likely to be prominent in the winter. They’re not all that protective.

mRNA vaccines, on the other hand, can be made quickly and cheaply, perhaps once we already know which flu strains we need to protect against. And scientists are making progress with universal flu vaccines—drugs that could potentially protect against multiple flu strains.

Kennedy’s other claim is that the vaccines aren’t safe. There have certainly been reports of adverse events. Usually these are mild and short-lived—most people will be familiar with the fatigue and flu-like symptoms that can follow a covid jab. But some are more serious: Some people have developed neurological and cardiovascular conditions. 

These problems are rare, according to an evaluation of adverse outcomes in almost 100 million people who received covid vaccines. Most studies of mRNA vaccines haven’t reported an increase in the risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a condition that affects nerves and has been linked to covid vaccines.

Covid vaccines can increase the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis in young men. But the picture isn’t straightforward. Vaccinated individuals appear to have double the risk of myocarditis compared with unvaccinated people. But the overall risk is still low. And it’s still not as high as the risk of myocarditis following a covid infection.

And then there are the claims that mRNA vaccines don’t have the support of the public. That’s what Jay Bhattacharya, director of the NIH, wrote in an opinion piece published in the Washington Post on Wednesday.

“No matter how elegant the science, a platform that lacks credibility among the people it seeks to protect cannot fulfill its public health mission,” Bhattacharya wrote. He blamed the Biden administration, which he wrote “did not manage public trust in the coronavirus vaccines.”