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U.S.|Scientists Hail This Medical Breakthrough. A Political Storm Could Cripple It.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/us/mrna-vaccines-backlash-covid.html
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Therapies involving mRNA, a key to Covid vaccines, hold great potential in treating several diseases, but some lawmakers want to ban them and the government is cutting funding.
May 8, 2025Updated 2:36 p.m. ET
To scientists who study it, mRNA is a miracle molecule. The vaccines that harnessed it against Covid saved an estimated 20 million lives, a rapid development that was recognized with a Nobel Prize. Clinical trials show mRNA-based vaccines increasing survival in patients with pancreatic and other deadly cancers. Biotechnology companies are investing in the promise of mRNA therapies to treat and even cure a host of genetic and chronic diseases, including Type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis.
But to some state legislators, mRNA therapies are “weapons of mass destruction” and a public health threat. They argue that these vaccines are untested and unsafe, and will be pumped into the food supply to “mass medicate” Americans against their will. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official, has falsely called the mRNA shots against Covid “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”
Short for messenger RNA, mRNA exists naturally in every cell of every living organism — its discovery in 1961 was also celebrated with a Nobel Prize. But its association with Covid has thrust it to the center of a political storm, buffeted by vaccine hesitancy and misinformation, anger over lockdowns and mandates, and the ascendance of the Make America Healthy Again movement in the Trump administration.
States and federal health agencies are playing on public wariness about vaccines to cancel research into mRNA more broadly, indicating how much the lingering politicization of Covid is fueling the new attacks on science.
The National Institutes of Health, which historically has funded the research behind almost every drug on the market, this month announced that it would shift money that had been spent studying mRNA vaccines to pay for a $500 million grant to study a universal vaccine using traditional, non-mRNA technology. Jay Bhattacharya, a leading critic of the Covid response and the new director of the N.I.H., called it a “paradigm shift.”
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English (US)