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There’s a weird little trick to living longer. It’s one that influencers won’t tell you; after all, there’s no way to earn a commission on it. It can be found tucked in the back of CVS, or even at any regular old doctor’s office. It’s expensive, but you may very well be able to get it for free. The government increasingly—staggeringly, stupefyingly—doesn’t want you to know about it.
It’s vaccination, a concept so boring, so establishment that it’s easy to forget that it matters at all. Vaccines, it’s been said for years, work so well to eliminate terrible illnesses like polio and measles that some people question why we need to inject them into our kids at all. But even a remarkable recent vaccine success seems to have been wiped from the memory of our leaders. In December 2020, Donald Trump called the COVID-19 vaccine an “incredible success”: “Before Operation Warp Speed, the typical timeframe for development and approval, as you know, could be infinity,” he said in remarks at the White House. “And we were very, very happy that we were able to get things done at a level that nobody has ever seen before.” In 2020, the American life expectancy dipped by nearly two years. Vaccination went a long way toward correcting that.
Now, Trump’s administration has its hands around the throat of the very technology that made the rapid development of the COVID vaccine possible. On Tuesday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the incredibly ill-suited leader of the Department of Health and Human Services, announced that the agency would be defunding the development of mRNA vaccines, canceling $500 million in contracts. He implied that these vaccines are broadly unsafe and ineffective, a position that no credible expert agrees with. On the contrary, cutting this funding is downright reckless: “I don’t think I’ve seen a more dangerous decision in public health in my 50 years in the business,” Mike Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, told the Associated Press. The COVID pandemic saw the first mRNA vaccine brought to market, and the technology could prove useful for protecting us against everything from cancer to norovirus (the illness that, in addition to death, can cause one to shit and vomit at the same time). RFK Jr.’s war on mRNA won’t halt all mRNA vaccine progress, Scientific American notes, but it will notably affect our ability to be prepared for the next pandemic. Which means more people will die than should have to.
Or to put it another way: This is really, really bad for human longevity. Why bother putting it like that? If vaccination is boring, routine, old news like landing on the moon, the science of living longer is alluring, sexy, obsession-worthy. We pop rapamycin supplements (that probably don’t do anything for aging). We try to follow the lifestyle and habits of people who supposedly live remarkably long lives in so-called Blue Zones (whoops, those might be fake). We sauna and cold plunge (though you know what, those activities are nice and I am on board with them). The rich buy access to longevity clinics, and the super rich do all kinds of frankly very weird stuff. Certain tech moguls, in particular, seem to love both longevity science and cozying up to the Trump administration: Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel have all invested in companies working toward the pursuit of living longer, and all have dined with, donated to, or otherwise supported the president. The most extreme and costly efforts in longevity technology are personally pursued by Bryan Johnson, the man who claims to have the goal of not dying. In a July interview with Wired, Johnson wouldn’t quite endorse RFK Jr.’s “break public health” MO, but he wouldn’t denounce it, either, noting that “change produces a new path that people didn’t anticipate.” Well, this change, in mRNA vaccine funding, produces a path that we can anticipate, which could be summed up as: die sooner.
Longevity bros, now is the time to be shrieking at the top of your lungs about how bad these vaccine cuts are—for America’s longevity, and for yours. When we talk about longevity science, we tend to focus on the individual: what you can do, what you can buy, what blood test you can take so that you personally can live longer. And it’s true, there are steps one can take to extend one’s own lifespan, though these tend to be a little boring, like “Don’t eat too much junk food” and “Go to the doctor.” But how long we will live is also a matter of the larger environment we’re in, including whether it’s an environment where disease is spreading freely. What circulates in the world can always wind up on your doorstep.
Longevity is something that we can best achieve not as individuals taking supplements and getting transfusions of young blood, but by collectively engaging in and contributing via tax dollars to practices that promote everyone’s well-being. We will live longer by working together to live longer—or we will die sooner by rejecting the fact that our fates are all connected. I mean this literally. Destroying public health is bad for everyone’s health. Yes, the consequences of the damage to mRNA vaccine development will not be evenly felt across demographics; COVID hit some populations much, much harder than others. But at the end of the day, germs don’t really care who you are. When a novel disease spreads and we don’t have a way to whip up protection against it, the rich will die, too.
