He's incapable of learning lessons and actively resists it.
The FDA’s official reason was that the trial of the vaccine
had been inadequate. But since Moderna had already discussed trial design with
officials, this is pretty obviously an excuse meant to provide cover for
Kennedy’s longstanding gibbering anti-vax quackery.
This is bad news for Americans who would like to avoid the
(sometimes deadly) flu virus. But the implications are much wider than that.
At the end of January, even before the latest RFK-engineered
setback, Moderna’s CEO Stéphane Bancel said that the company was planning to
pull back on crucial investments in late-stage mRNA vaccine trials.
“You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have
access to the US market,” he explained.
What this means is that RFK’s position as Trump’s chief
snake-oil death dealer could affect global development of new vaccines for
shingles, herpes, and the Epstein-Barr virus, the latter of which has been
linked to some cancers.
The Trump administration is a disaster not just for public
health in the US, but worldwide. There has been a great deal of discussion of
the ways in which Trump’s reckless foreign policy has put global security at
risk with his threats to Greenland, Canada, Europe, and general violent
unpredictability.
But US abandonment of public health leadership may well be
even more consequential. It will quite possibly lead to tens of millions of
needless deaths over the next decades.
Trump 1.0 seems enlightened by comparison
The second Trump administrations assault on mRNA vaccines is
especially bleak because the single unambiguous achievement of the first Trump
administration was the mRNA covid vaccine.
Most traditional vaccines work by weakening a pathogen and
injecting it into the body to trigger an immune response. By contrast, mRNA
vaccines tell the body’s cells to make proteins that exist in the
pathogens; it teaches the body to fight the disease without introducing it
directly into the body.
The big advantage with mRNA is speed of development.
Collecting, cultivating, and testing pathogens for each vaccine takes time. But
mRNA vaccine proteins are designed with computers, which means the process is
standardized and streamlined.
The technology for mRNA vaccines isn’t new — it was first
developed in the 1960s. An mRNA vaccine was developed to fight Ebola, but there
had been limited funding for broader applications.
Then covid hit.
The Trump administration’s response was initially cavalier
and reckless denial, followed by an attack on mitigation strategies like
masking. Federal government failures led to some 58,000 excess
American deaths.
But Trump did one thing right. Amid bipartisan pressure, his
administration in May 2020 embraced Operation Warp Speed, a more than $12
billion investment in a public/private partnership to develop vaccines. It was
a stunning success. Vaccines often take years or even decades to develop, but
mRNA vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna were ready in December 2020,
only eight months after Warp Speed began.
Other nations developed vaccines as well (and Pfizer was a
joint German effort) but the US accomplishment was hugely important.
America donated 800
million doses of vaccines globally, more than twice as much as any of its
nearest rivals, China (284.5m), Germany (175m) and France (124m). Vaccines are
believed to have prevented 19.8 million deaths worldwide,
as well as uncountable amounts of illness, suffering, and chronic disability.
The bipartisan American investment, which the Trump
administration led, was absolutely key to containing a horrific global pandemic
which could have been exponentially worse without the stunning accelerated
development of mRNA vaccines — one of the great public health triumphs in
modern history. But this miracle cure was only the beginning. The massive
investment in mRNA opened doors to numerous other medical advances.
As mentioned above, Moderna was planning to invest in
development of herpes and shingles vaccines. There have been promising
developments in a vaccine for pancreatic cancer. And scientists are working on
mRNA vaccines for H5N1 avian influenza, a virus which uncontrolled could lead
to a new pandemic.
The public health disaster that is Trump 2.0
These mRNA advances would obviously benefit people in the
United States, who would be much less likely to die of cancer, flu, pandemics,
and a range of other illnesses. But, as with the covid vaccines, the
implications of the technology would be felt far beyond US borders.
Vaccine distribution to less affluent nations can be poor
and maddeningly inegalitarian. But if the US could have a vaccine ready for the
next pandemic before it starts, the number of lives saved could be
incalculable.
Unfortunately, the skull’s head that is RFK Jr. and his team
of crack conspiracy theorists loathe covid vaccines and mRNA technology, which
they insist, sans evidence, pose dangerous risks to the public. Conspiracy
theories range from fringe assertions that mRNA alters the
human genome to Kennedy’s more straightforward but still utterly false
insistence that they cause deaths in young people and don’t prevent infection.
Based on these malevolent delusions, Kennedy has launched a
public health plan to play dice with worldwide suffering. Even before he
blocked the Moderna flu vaccine, he had already slashed hundreds
of millions of dollars in mRNA funding.
Funding cuts and administration hostility is likely to send
researchers overseas, cutting the
US out of leadership in what could be a $30 billion industry. Even worse,
though, is that certain vaccines will simply be shelved for years, if not
forever. And that is not even considering the calamity if, god forbid, there is
another global pandemic while Trump 2.0 is in power.
The ongoing atrocity
The possible future harms of Trump and RFK Jr. on public
health are terrifying. But in many ways the worst has already happened.
The US has been the largest supplier of humanitarian aid in
the world — and indeed, in history. But when Elon Musk’s DOGE gutted USAID
early in Trump’s second term, it unilaterally shut down vaccination, HIV, and
food aid programs across the world. The result was mass suffering on an
indescribable scale.
One estimate suggests that since the beginning of 2025,
USAID cuts have led to 880,000 excess
deaths, including almost 550,000 children. If cuts are not reversed by
2030, 14
million people could die — a number that rivals the death toll in
World War I.
The DOGE cuts are easily the worst single atrocity of
Trump’s term — and they are, by sheer numbers affected, arguably the worst
atrocity committed by a single president in US history. They have not gotten as
much coverage as many Trump horrors because they are concentrated overseas and
over large swathes of the globe. But there is simply little precedent for this
kind of mass murder through devastation of public health infrastructure.
The US in the post-war period built up resources, reach, and
influence that dwarfs that of any other nation ever. Its central place in
global health is difficult to calculate or imagine, even after the stunning
illustration of Operation Warp Speed. Global human rights law and theory, to
say nothing of US public opinion, lacks a good framework to respond to the
moral crime of precipitating a genocide-level event by simply refusing to fund
global lifesaving networks in the name of xenophobic hate budgeting.
Musk left government and DOGE has shut down. But Kennedy’s
attack on mRNA vaccines — and on a range of other vaccines as
well — carries on the same tradition of ghoulish mass murder. The worst measles outbreak
in the US in 30 years, amidst a global measles resurgence, is
only one indication of the potential horrors this administration is actively
courting.
Trump has brought us fascism, he is threatening war and
violence. But it is all too possible that his most lasting and horrific legacy,
in his second term as in his first, will be plague.
