Cancelling mRNA studies is the highest irresponsibility

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...