U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced last week that his department would slash about $500 million in mRNA vaccine contracts, a hit to an industry already reeling from other public funding cuts.
Those impacts are being felt in Vermont, experts say.
Kennedy and other vaccine skeptics in President Donald Trump’s administration have espoused distrust of mRNA technology. But experts say the criticism is by and large inaccurate and the vaccines are safe and effective, having saved millions of lives during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We are now at a point where the most efficacious of technologies, because it’s new, is causing fear, and that fear has found a political outlet,” said Dev Majumdar, an immunologist at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine who focuses on RNA biology. “There’s no question that mRNA vaccines work.”
When used in vaccines, messenger RNA, known as mRNA, teach cells to create a protein or parts of protein that lead to an immune response, helping protect a person against a disease. Scientists can use the mRNA platform to develop vaccines more quickly, and the method is an alternative to other forms of vaccines, like those that include a weakened form of a pathogen.
The Covid-19 vaccines manufactured by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech used mRNA. Moderna has also developed an mRNA vaccine targeting Respiratory Syncytial Virus, known as RSV.
Majumdar, who leads a UVM RNA lab, said scientists should continually prioritize how they talk to the public about vaccines and pandemic preparedness. It’s OK for scientists to acknowledge when past work has failed, he argued, and there should be no shame in celebrating successes.
“The public is a part of the process, and we have to constantly try to do better to bring the public in,” Majumdar said.
In Vermont, the national debate and federal cuts to vaccine research is having an impact on a significant player in the mRNA manufacturing field.
Vernal Biosciences in Colchester manufactures mRNA — for research and clinical trials — as well as lipid nanoparticles, which help mRNA achieve scientists’ intended uses. With additional investment in recent years, the company has been able to follow stricter federal guidelines with the goal of expanding its client base.
Billions of dollars in cuts to public financing of research from the likes of the National Institutes of Health have hit the mRNA field hard, said Christian Cobaugh, Vernal’s founder and chief scientific officer. Plus, the industry, which boomed during the Covid-19 pandemic, was flooded with new players, and demand has since dropped.
“We’re all feeling it,” Cobaugh said. “It just takes more money out of the total pool.”
When it comes to the impact of reduced public investment, Cobaugh said it ranges from the “specific” to “wait and see.” Cuts to National Institutes of Health grants led Vernal to stop some work mid-contract, he said, in the short-term costing the company in the six figures with a long-term impact in the seven figures.
In addition to infectious disease vaccines, mRNA use has shown promise in treating cancer and in gene editing therapies. So far, the latter two applications have not been as targeted by federal funding cuts.
The most recent Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority mRNA vaccine contract clawbacks mainly impact research and development into infectious diseases, according to Cobaugh. That’s a field central to pandemic preparedness, one that’s long relied on public funding.
“We will be less prepared” for the next pandemic, he said. “I don’t want people to be scared that we’re not going to be ready for this. We’re just not going to be as ready as we could be.”
As for the future of mRNA vaccines in a landscape marred by skeptics, Cobaugh said he believes opposition to the technology is fringe.
“What we’re dealing with here is a fundamental loss in critical thinking skills,” he said. “If people continue to outsource their decisions to politicians of all stripes, we’re going to continue to struggle with technology and where it should fit into our lives.”
Majumdar fears cuts to vaccine research may harm the industry in ways that won’t become fully clear for a decade or more.
“It’s hurt morale a lot among the people who spend 60 to 80 hours per week working on these things,” he said. “I really, really worry that we’re looking at the precipice of a lost generation of young people that really wanted to go into this, that wanted to cure cancer and fight disease.”
