Saw this today:
By Adam B. Kushner
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, isn’t just a vaccine skeptic. He especially dislikes one type of vaccine: those that use mRNA technology, such as the first Covid shots. He has canceled nearly $500 million to make mRNA immunizations and a bird-flu vaccine that Moderna was developing.
This is a relatively new technology, and it’s worth remembering the moment the shots debuted for widespread use in late 2020. Three hundred thousand Americans had died from Covid. (The number eventually exceeded a million, the most of any country.) Most schools were still closed. White-collar workers were still mostly remote. Americans were in a mental health crisis. When I got my jab, I hadn’t eaten in a restaurant for a year. The vaccines ended all that.
Kennedy says they’re no good, and he’s halting government support for them. For today’s newsletter, I asked Apoorva Mandavilli, who covers vaccines for The Times, to explain what’s happening.
What is an mRNA vaccine?
Some vaccines use a weakened version of a bacterium or virus to provoke an immune response and train your body’s defenses. Others use a piece of the virus that the body can easily recognize as foreign. MRNA has the instructions for making only one small part of a virus. It directs the body’s cells to make that fragment, which then sets off an immune response.
What is Kennedy’s argument about mRNA?
Kennedy echoes many people’s discomfort with the speed at which the vaccines were developed. But mRNA vaccines had been studied for more than 20 years before Covid struck. His criticisms also go further than most. He has said the vaccines are ineffective because they don’t prevent infection. He has also said they’re dangerous, at one point referring to them as the “deadliest” vaccines ever made.
And what does the evidence show?
Like all vaccines, the Covid mRNA shots have some side effects. Anecdotally, thousands of people reported problems. But extensive studies in the U.S. and elsewhere found only a few serious ones. For example, the vaccines can cause heart problems in a small fraction of young men, and one study said there were seven severe cases of shingles for every million shots administered. This is comparable to the safety record of most other vaccines. It’s not surprising that we’ve heard more about Covid vaccines, because they were given to billions of people worldwide.
Kennedy prefers “whole-cell” vaccines to mRNA shots. What does that mean?
Whole-cell vaccines are based on a crude technology developed more than 100 years ago. Those vaccines use the entire pathogen, so they may expose the body to hundreds of antigens — the part of the bacterium or virus that provokes an immune response — at once.
Not surprisingly, they also cause very strong reactions, including seizures and fevers in young children. Over the decades, we have developed much cleaner, sleeker vaccines that contain only the few antigens they need. There is a trade-off: The newer vaccines sometimes are less protective than the cruder versions.
If more people getting shots have ugly side effects, as they would from those whole-cell vaccines, it may give even more fuel to the antivax movement.
It may. In the case of Covid vaccines, it may not even be mRNA tech causing the side effects. The coronavirus is a powerful adversary, and any vaccine designed to counter it may shock the immune system. There is no perfectly safe vaccine or drug.
One thing I don’t get: President Trump built Operation Warp Speed, the government effort to develop these Covid vaccines. And he spent years urging people to get them. What’s your best understanding of why mRNA is now out of favor with his administration?
The Covid mandates turned many against the vaccines as employers and schools required people to get inoculated. Kennedy brought his own political constituency, which includes many people opposed to vaccines, and Trump has given him a lot of autonomy to make decisions about public health.
