Today’s Assault on Vaccines Threatens Tomorrow’s Miracle Cures

For simple interventions that have saved millions of lives around the world, vaccines are falling out of favor here in the U.S. with astonishing speed. That’s not just putting our health at risk now — but it’s also making us decidedly less safe in the future by threatening our ability to respond to future pandemics and reducing our chances of getting new vaccines to treat current pathogens too.

During the Covid pandemic, we witnessed a unique advantage of the new mRNA vaccines: their incredibly fast development timelines. mRNA-based vaccines can be designed and validated in a much shorter period than traditional vaccines, making them a valuable tool for responding to emerging infectious diseases. The technology also turns out to be remarkably flexible, allowing scientists to design potential vaccines for a broad range of pathogens.

In another era, we’d be throwing money at mRNA vaccine developers as fast and as hard as we could. But in this era, vaccine hesitancy has gotten a huge boost from the current administration. It’s already taking a toll. Moderna, the leading mRNA vaccine developer here in the U.S., has signaled that it will pull back investment in the costly, late-stage clinical trials required to get some of the company’s new vaccines to market. Last year, the U.S. government canceled contracts that would have given Moderna some $600 million to support the development of a vaccine for bird flu. In a stunning move last week, the FDA refused to even review Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine — only to change course this week, agreeing to give the new shot a shot. This level of uncertainty will have a chilling effect on other companies and investors that may have been interested in creating their own mRNA or other novel vaccines.

Just consider what’s in Moderna’s development pipeline: candidate vaccines for norovirus, HIV, the EBV virus that has been found to cause multiple sclerosis, RSV in kids, Lyme disease, mpox, and more. That’s just the infectious diseases. Moderna has also turned its mRNA platform to rare diseases and cancer. All of these vaccines are in various stages of development; none has yet reached the market. Crossing that threshold would require massive investments that the company may no longer be able to make.

Plenty of vaccines fall apart in clinical studies; it would be unlikely that all of those vaccine candidates from Moderna would wind up on the market. But even if only a few of them were approved, it could still prevent a huge amount of sickness and possibly even death, especially among the most vulnerable groups. Between Moderna and other startups looking to build on the success of mRNA vaccines, we could have seen huge progress in public health. Much of that will never happen thanks to the funding and regulatory obstacles these companies now face. That also means we won’t have the talent, years of expertise, and resources associated with mRNA vaccines ready to go when the next pandemic comes along.

None of this is specific to Moderna or to mRNA vaccines. A New York Times story out this week rounded up some of the many signs of distress coming from the vaccine development field: “In Massachusetts, Moderna is pulling back on vaccine studies. In Texas, a small company canceled plans to build a factory that would have created new jobs manufacturing a technology used in vaccines. In San Diego, another manufacturing company laid off workers.” The same story quoted Stephen Hoge, Moderna’s president, who said, “There will be less invention, investment, and innovation in vaccines generally, across all the companies.”

The medical community is trying to shore up support for vaccines that are already on the market, although even that is proving difficult. The American Academy of Pediatrics has sued the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services over recent changes that stripped away recommendations for childhood vaccines, calling those changes “arbitrary and capricious.” Last week, the judge overseeing the case requested more information before making a ruling.

Let’s be clear: vaccines are a cornerstone of public health. It is devastating to see this administration’s policies taking a sledgehammer to one of the most effective tools we have to keep ourselves healthy and safe — policies that will undoubtedly lead to unnecessary sickness and premature death in our population.