The head of the National Institutes of Health has offered a new explanation for why the federal government canceled $500 million in contracts to help develop messenger RNA vaccines, saying the platform is not viable because the public doesn’t trust it.
The agency’s director, Jay Bhattacharya, made the statement during an appearance on right-wing provocateur Steve Bannon’s podcast, “War Room,” that aired on Saturday. His rationale for the cancellation of the contracts does not align with the explanation offered last week by his boss, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who said vaccines made using this platform were not effective and were unsafe.
The NIH director, who came to national prominence during the pandemic as a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration — a policy statement urging the U.S. government to lift Covid containment measures — said the declining uptake of Covid boosters signals that the public isn’t willing to be immunized with mRNA-based vaccines.
“As far as public health goes, the mRNA platform for vaccines is no longer viable,” Bhattacharya said. “You can’t have a platform where such a large fraction of the population distrusts the platform, if you’re going to use it for vaccines, and expect it to work.”
Kennedy has been among the most prominent figures in the U.S. voicing distrust of the vaccines, long before he became the U.S. secretary of health and human services.
Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, called Bhattacharya’s comment “disingenuous.”
Kennedy and his allies have argued — despite scientific evidence — that the vaccines are not safe and effective, and “that message that they’re selling is one of the major reasons why there is potential public reluctance,” Osterholm told STAT.
Bhattacharya confirmed it was Kennedy’s decision to terminate the contracts that had been issued by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. BARDA is the HHS division responsible for developing medical countermeasures for natural and bioterror threats. In May, BARDA also rescinded $766 million in grants to Moderna for work the vaccine manufacturer was doing to develop, test, and bring through licensure several vaccines for flu viruses that could trigger pandemics.
On the Bannon podcast, Bhattacharya said that, in his view, the mRNA vaccine platform is “promising but not yet ready for prime time for vaccines.”
Billions of people around the world have been vaccinated with mRNA-based vaccines since the first two vaccines for Covid — Cominarty, made by the Pfizer and BioNTech partnership, and Spikevax, made by Moderna — went into use in December 2020. Other vaccines made using different production approaches eventually came to market. But a substantial portion of Covid vaccine doses administered in the intervening years were made using mRNA and widely credited with saving millions of lives.
Bhattacharya reiterated a concern sometimes espoused by critics of mRNA vaccines that relates to the fact that the shots trigger the body to produce the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, thereby training the immune system to recognize it and produce antibodies to attack the virus in the case of infection. Critics of the vaccines argue it isn’t possible to know how much antigen — the protein the immune system is being introduced to — these vaccines generate.
“For vaccines, what you want is a technology where you understand the dose of the antigen being given,” he said. When “you have a platform like the mRNA platform, what you’re doing essentially [is] you’re turning your body into an antigen factor. You’re taking your cells, which are capable of taking the mRNA programming, and turn out an antigen that you want to be produced there.”
Scott Hensley, a professor of microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, said the concern Bhattacharya raised is also true in the case of another type of vaccine, those made using live but weakened viruses. Examples of live attenuated vaccines include the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, the rotavirus vaccine, and the chickenpox (varicella) vaccine.
“Studies have shown that the mRNA is destroyed shortly after vaccination,” said Hensley, who is working to develop a universal flu vaccine using mRNA technology. “It is difficult to quantify the amount of antigen produced by the vaccine, but this is an issue that has already been addressed in vaccinology.”
“Dr. Bhattacharya might not realize that a lot of human vaccines are based on live-attenuated viruses, where we similarly cannot definitively quantify antigen amounts produced in [recipients],” he said. “This is why we complete human clinical studies before vaccines are widely used in humans. The mRNA and live attenuated vaccine platforms have both proven to be safe and effective in clinical studies.”
Bhattacharya also noted that Covid vaccines made using mRNA do not prevent infection; he said he contracted Covid for the first time two months after getting vaccinated. In fact, this is true about all Covid vaccines — none permanently block infection — and about vaccines that protect against influenza as well. The vaccines, which are made using a variety of production platforms, do, however, lower the risk of severe infection that would lead to hospitalization or death.
“We would all love a vaccine that prevents infections altogether, but keeping people alive and out of the hospital during a pandemic is pretty darn good,” Hensley said.
The prospect that mRNA technology could be improved is a rationale for further investment in research, not abandonment of this production method, he added.
“We should try to improve the mRNA platform by investing in mRNA vaccine research. If we continue to invest in this platform, in 5-10 years we will likely be able to develop vaccines that elicit broader responses and better mucosal responses that prevent infections,” Hensley said in an email. “Now is the time to continue to develop this platform so that we can be ready to respond to the next pandemic.”
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