Health Experts Alarmed by RFK Jr.’s ‘Frightening’ Cuts to mRNA Vaccine Funding

The Department of Health and Human Services announced Tuesday that it would cancel nearly half a billion dollars in mRNA vaccine contracts, including with a company based in the East Bay — a move that experts said was based on unfounded safety concerns.

After Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the department would wind down its investments in the technology first used to vaccinate against COVID-19, experts called the move “frightening” and said it could hamper biomedical companies’ ability to prepare for future virus outbreaks.

“Have we already forgotten this quickly what these vaccines actually did for us during COVID-19? How many lives they saved — millions of lives,” asked Dr. Abraar Karan, who researches emerging vaccinations against COVID-19, bird flu and other infectious diseases at Stanford University. “Actually, that was a proof of concept that we need to be investing more, not less, in this technology.”

A total of 22 pulled investments include contracts with Emory University and funding for a trial at Emeryville-based Gritstone, which primarily focuses on cancer research and was granted HHS funding to test a new COVID-19 vaccine meant to have longer durability and protection from existing and emerging strains of the virus in 2023. The company did not respond to KQED’s request for comment about what programs the cuts will affect.

Vaccinations that use mRNA technology, like the Moderna and Pfizer shots that were rolled out to fight COVID-19 in 2021, protect people by generating a fragment of the virus to initiate an immune response in the body. They’re considered to be one of the best tools scientists have against fast-moving and changing illnesses — like those that cause pandemics — because they can be created and tested more quickly than older “whole-virus” inoculations, and can be altered more easily as illnesses evolve.

Despite a strong body of research showing their safety and effectiveness, Kennedy and the Trump administration have repeatedly called the vaccines dangerous.

In a video posted Tuesday on Instagram explaining the canceled mRNA investments, Kennedy falsely claimed that the vaccines “don’t perform well against viruses that affect the upper respiratory tract,” and said that one mutation in a virus can render them ineffective.

Karan said that Kennedy’s assertion, which has become prominent among a rising cohort of vaccine-skeptical Americans, is based on the idea that the shots are meant to prohibit respiratory illnesses entirely, and can retain full effectiveness long-term.

“That’s not really the standard we use for any vaccines,” he told KQED. “We used to give people flu shots, and we would say, ‘This can help reduce the duration of symptoms. It can make it so that you’re not sick for five days, maybe for two or three days.’

“It’s reducing the severity of severe disease — that was sort of the standard,” he continued.

Kennedy also claimed in the social media video that the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines encourage the disease to mutate, and can be rendered ineffective by a single mutation.

Karan said that’s “fundamentally untrue.”

“With RNA viruses, you’ve got a lot of mutations going on constantly, so vaccines need to be updated,” he said.

Take flu shots, for example. The U.S. produces whole-virus vaccines for influenza, which contain dead or weakened strains of the virus, as opposed to the fragment isolated in mRNA shots, but “you still run into the same problem,” according to Karan. “We have to update flu vaccines every year as well.”

Catherine Flores, the executive director of the California Immunization Coalition, said she’s worried that Kennedy’s history of comments about mRNA and other vaccines, coupled with the pulled funding, could cause more people to fear vaccinations in general, even when they’ve been proven to be safe and effective.

This year, the U.S. has already recorded its highest number of measles cases in three decades due to outbreaks beginning in undervaccinated parts of West Texas.

Following the Texas outbreak, Kennedy endorsed the measles vaccine in April, but he’s historically been skeptical of it and has been a central figure in a rising movement questioning overall vaccine safety and effectiveness. The U.S.’s overall vaccination rate against the virus has fallen 2.5% since 2020.

While the U.S. is currently considered to have eliminated measles, it will lose that status if the disease continues to spread for a year without interruption.

“It’s insidious,” Flores said. “Because [Kennedy] has this title and this platform … some people are going to hear it and other people are going to start thinking twice about [vaccines], whereas before maybe they didn’t have those doubts. How many people just won’t vaccinate now because of that creation of doubt that he’s planting?”

In addition to its potential effect on vaccination rates, which are key to the “herd immunity” so often referenced during the pandemic, Flores is worried that cutting investment in new technology could leave the U.S. underprepared for future viral outbreaks.

The move comes just two months after HHS cancelled a more than $750 million contract with Moderna to develop a vaccine protecting against flu strains with pandemic potential, including bird flu. The deal was coupled with benefits such as the right to purchase shots for Americans ahead of a potential bird flu pandemic. For years, scientists have been warning that the virus that right now rarely transfers from person to person could mutate to be more infectious.

“The mRNA technology that we had ready to go when COVID-19 started happening was because of all the research that was going on in the past,” Flores told KQED. “It just didn’t happen. It was already under study and use and investigation, and so this can set a lot of projects, a lot of opportunities, back.”

Health and Human Services said in its announcement that its Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority division, which housed the mRNA research projects, would shift to focus on vaccines with “stronger safety records” and more “transparent” practices, including whole-virus vaccines — like those in flu shots — and new technologies.

It’s unclear how the divestment will affect overall mRNA research, though Flores believes it will be harder and more costly for companies. She and Karan both said that the latest mRNA booster shots tailored to emerging strains of COVID-19 should roll out as scheduled this fall, but how companies plan to research and develop future shots is unknown.

At a press conference in Alaska later Tuesday, Kennedy said work was underway on an alternative “universal vaccine” to protect against COVID-19 and the flu.

KQED’s Carly Severn contributed to this report.