Showing that his loyalty to his own anti-vax mentality is greater than his loyalty to Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the dangerous quack atop the Department of Health and Human Services, has announced that he will be rescinding a half billion dollars in grants and contracts for the development of mRNA technology and vaccines.
It was mRNA that was key to both the Pfizer-BioNTech and the Moderna COVID vaccines that were created under Trump in his first term, but RFK does not like life-saving vaccines and so he’s pulling the plug.
Part of the problem with policymaking at the level of the federal government is that the impacts are often too large, too long-winded, too abstract to really be able to nearly encompass their full breadth, particularly for busy people who have their own immediate concerns to worry about. In this case, though, we can point to very clear, very grim and almost unavoidable repercussions directly caused by this decision: many people worldwide — including in the United States — will die deaths that could have been prevented.
Setting aside all of the jargon, at its most basic level a vaccine is about allowing the body to ward off or survive pathogens that would otherwise be extremely dangerous and debilitating or kill a person outright. The model itself is far from new; inoculations in some form of another, including the basic utilization of a dead virus to create antibodies that can attack a live one, date back centuries.
What’s mainly changed since then is that we have only advanced our understanding and technology to keep infectious diseases from running rampant in our society. One such technological leap was the mRNA process, an innovation so significant that its pioneers won the Nobel prize. The effectiveness and the safety of this process has been well-documented in research settings, but we don’t even have to parse the studies to know this because we all collectively lived it.
As Trump’s Operation Warp Speed produced, the first and most widespread COVID inoculations were mRNA-based vaccines, which enabled us to blunt the rampaging pandemic and much more quickly return our society to a semblance of normalcy.
Those COVID vaccines have already been synthesized, but the real issue here are the ones that haven’t, or even the inoculations for viruses that we have not even identified or think to be a threat today. Whether we like it or not, our relationship to infectious diseases is something akin to an arms race, in which we are constantly trying to counteract pathogens that, by dint of evolution, are constantly finding ways to elude our defenses and sicken us.
We’ve stayed largely on top of this arms race over the last six decades or so in particular because of constant efforts that have developed sophisticated tools to fight back, including mRNA. A disarmament here for no other reason than ideologically-driven conspiracy that drives Bobby Kennedy is going to mean that we give the diseases an opening, which they will no doubt exploit to sicken and kill us. There are quite simply no two ways about it, and any pause in the research could have dire consequences, even if it is reversed later.
Ongoing and sometimes multimonth or even multiyear projects will lose funding and might have to be shut down, with all their efforts wasted. There’s no way to really put the genie back in the bottle so we have to stop it in the first place, which means RFK must be fired immediately or impeached and removed by Congress. Many lives hang in the balance.
