RFK Jr. Ends Federal Contracts To Develop mRNA Vaccines

Failures

from the true-colors dept

One of the more frustrating parts of the RFK Jr. experience is nailing down his views. Part of that is because he tends to keep quite vague about those views, especially when it comes to vaccines, depending on who he is talking to. When he’s running an anti-vaxxer organization, his views are specific and clear. Sitting in front of Congress in a confirmation hearing to run HHS, however, causes him to speak in generalities and non-committal answers. The other problem here is that RFK Jr. also just seems to lie a lot.

For example, way back in November of last year, after his HHS nomination, Kennedy did an interview with NPR. He was, of course, asked about his long anti-vaxxer history and what he planned for vaccines if confirmed to run HHS. Here was his response.

Kennedy said in his NPR interview that vaccines were “not going to be taken away from anybody”.

He says he wants to improve the science on vaccine safety which he believes has “huge deficits” and that he wants good information so people “can make informed choices“.

And in previous hearings before Congress, Kennedy has specifically claimed he is not anti-vaccine.

So are we clear? Kennedy says he is not anti-vaccine, has never been anti-vaccine, and is not going to take vaccines away from anyone.

Fast forward through thousands of words about Kennedy that indicate the opposite to the present, where Kennedy is once again doing his anti-vaccine routine and is pulling the funding and contracts for mRNA vaccines for respiratory diseases. You know, like COVID, or influenza.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary and a longtime vaccine critic, announced in a statement Tuesday that $500 million worth of vaccine development projects, all using mRNA technology, will be halted.

The projects — 22 of them — are being led by some of the nation’s leading pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Moderna to prevent flu, COVID-19 and H5N1 infections.

Now, it should be emphasized that it’s only mRNA vaccines that are being defunded… for now. There are actually four different kinds of vaccines out there, with mRNA being but one. And there is some reasonable opinion out there that mRNA technology may have been over-hyped during the pandemic, though for obvious reasons, since it represented the light at the end of a death-tunnel. Though there’s also plenty of evidence that mRNA has the potential for some pretty big health breakthroughs. That’s how you get the same vaccine researcher, Adam Finn at the University of Bristol in the UK, to say both of these things.

Each has advantages and disadvantages, but Prof Finn argues we “overhyped” mRNA vaccines during the pandemic to the exclusion of other approaches, and now there is a process of adjusting.

“But to swing the pendulum so far that mRNA is useless and has no value and should not be developed or understood better is equally stupid, it did do remarkable things,” he says.

If you want a little bit of the gory medicine here, I’ll try to make it quick and simple. The advantage of mRNA technology is the speed with which you can produce iterative shots for variants of viruses. Other types of vaccines, such as inactivated or attenuated vaccines, tend to be more effective and preventing illness and keeping people from becoming contagious because they give the body’s immune system more, oh, let’s call it “virus meat” than the mRNA vaccine, which only provides instructions for the body to build specific proteins. So if you have a virus that remains fairly static, such as measles, an attenuated vaccine works great, because it offers more and longer protection and you don’t have to worry about the virus changing to evade your vaccine.

But if we’re talking about COVID, which branches into variants rapidly, you lose some of the effectiveness of an attenuated vaccine and make yourself far less nimble to combat those variants. There is utility in mRNA technology, in other words, as there is in the other flavors of immunization. Nuance is what is needed here, with granular decision making on using different vaccine technology depending on the illness.

From Kennedy, however, we get only this.

Kennedy said in the Tuesday statement that he wants the health department to move away from mRNA vaccines, calling on the department to start “investing in better solutions.” He provided no details on what those technologies might be.

He’s a proven liar, so I doubt that there will be much investment in solutions that involve other types of vaccines. He’s already railed against those other vaccination technologies, too, after all.

But if America really wants to invest in solutions that will move healthcare in the country forward, I would like to suggest we start with investing in some cardboard boxes. That way Kennedy will have something with which to clean out his office so we can send him on his way.

Filed Under: covid, death cult, flu, health and human services, hhs, mrna, rfk jr., vaccines