Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision this week to discontinue funding of the development of messenger RNA vaccines has alarmed scientists, who have warned that it will leave the country far less prepared for future pandemics. But it is also a matter of national security.
Not all biological threats are natural. And if the United States were ever to be targeted in a bioterrorism attack, it would now be less prepared for that emergency as well, security experts say. As the development of Covid-19 shots in 2020 illustrated, mRNA technology can shave crucial months off the timeline of vaccine deliveries.
“We’re unilaterally disarming ourselves in a period in which the bio threats are continuing to proliferate,” said Stephen Morrison, director for global health policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. “It’s reckless. It’s putting Americans at risk.”
“It’s also coming at a time in which we’ve dismantled the White House apparatus for dealing with these threats,” Morrison added, a reference to the fact that the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy is currently leaderless and effectively unstaffed. “So we are just steadily … dismantling our assets, both the institutional and human capabilities that we need, and the technological capabilities that we need, and that harms U.S. national security and harms our capability to protect Americans and others.”
On Tuesday, Kennedy announced that his department’s division responsible for developing medical countermeasures for natural and bioterror threats, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), would cease funding work on mRNA vaccines. In his statement on the social media site X, he made a number of erroneous claims about the safety and effectiveness of mRNA vaccines, which were the backbone of the global response to the Covid pandemic.
The decision followed an earlier move by Kennedy to cancel $766 million in government contracts with the vaccine maker Moderna to develop, test, and bring through licensure a number of vaccines for flu viruses that could trigger pandemics. If that work had been allowed to continue to completion, it would have shaved months off of the vaccine delivery timeline if any of the targeted strains ever started a pandemic.
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