Cancelling mRNA studies is the highest irresponsibility
By Editors,
Nature
| 08. 15. 2025
The rest of the world is not following the US government’s dangerous path, and will stick with the technology that helped the world out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A technology that played a key part in saving millions of lives during the COVID-19 pandemic1 should be feted to the skies. Instead, US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr announced last week that the US federal government is terminating 22 grants worth nearly US$500 million for projects researching messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines.
This is the technology that, in his first term (2017–21), US President Donald Trump included in Operation Warp Speed: the federal government’s $18-billion programme to procure COVID-19 vaccines for US populations in record time2. It is also the technology that is showing potential for treating cancers3, autoimmune diseases and inherited conditions such as sickle cell disease. But now, in a statement accompanying the grant cancellations, Kennedy stated that “these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu”. And in an article for The Washington Post, Jay Bhattacharya, director of the US National Institutes of Health, wrote that mRNA technology “failed to earn the public’s trust”, which fuelled vaccine hesitancy.
Shock and disbelief does not even begin...
Related Articles
By Vittoria Vardanega, SWI swissinfo.ch | 02.13.2026
In recent years, sperm donation has produced family trees of unprecedented size, stretching across countries and, in some cases, continents. Stories of “mass donors” have captured public attention, most recently through the Netflix documentary series, The Man with 1,000 Kids...
By Jonathan D. Moreno, Hastings Center Bioethics Forum | 02.09.2026
When I began to write a book about bioethics and the rules-based international order, the idea that the world was facing the greatest geopolitical change since World War II was uncontroversial for those who were paying attention to such esoterica...
By Zachary Brennan, Endpoints News | 02.23.2026
The FDA is spelling out the details of a new pathway to help speed personalized cell and gene therapies to market for rare diseases.
Monday’s long-awaited draft guidance outlines the agency’s “plausible mechanism” framework, a pathway FDA Commissioner Marty Makary...
By David Jensen, California Stem Cell Report | 02.10.2026
Touchy issues involving accusations that California’s $12 billion gene and stem cell research agency is pushing aside “good science” in favor of new priorities and preferences will be aired again in late March at a public meeting in Sacramento.
The...
