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Four and a half years ago, fresh off the success of Operation Warp Speed, mRNA vaccines were widely considered—as President Donald Trump said in December 2020—a “medical miracle.” Last week, the United States government decidedly reversed that stance when Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. canceled nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of grants and contracts for mRNA-vaccine research.
With Kennedy leading HHS, this about-face is easy to parse as yet another anti-vaccine move. But the assault on mRNA is also proof of another kind of animus: the COVID-revenge campaign that top officials in this administration have been pursuing for months, attacking the policies, technologies, and people that defined the U.S.’s pandemic response. As the immediacy of the COVID crisis receded, public anger about the American response to it took deeper root—perhaps most prominently among some critics who are now Trump appointees. That acrimony has become an essential tool in Kennedy’s efforts to undermine vaccines. “It is leverage,” Dorit Reiss, a vaccine-law expert at UC Law San Francisco, told me. “It is a way to justify doing things that he wouldn’t be able to get away with otherwise.”
COVID revenge has defined the second Trump administration’s health policy from the beginning. Kennedy and his allies have ousted prominent HHS officials who played key roles in the development of COVID policy, as well as scientists at the National Institutes of Health, including close colleagues of Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (and, according to Trump, an idiot and a “disaster”). In June, Kennedy dismissed every member of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which has helped shape COVID-vaccine recommendations, and handpicked replacements for them. HHS and ACIP are now stacked with COVID contrarians who have repeatedly criticized COVID policies and minimized the benefits of vaccines. Under pressure from Trump officials, the NIH has terminated funding for hundreds of COVID-related grants. The president and his appointees have espoused the highly disputed notion that COVID began as a leak from “an unsafe lab in Wuhan, China”—and cited the NIH’s funding of related research as a reason to restrict federal agencies’ independent grant-awarding powers.
This administration is rapidly rewriting the narrative of COVID vaccines as well. In an early executive order, Trump called for an end to COVID-19-vaccine mandates in schools, even though few remained; earlier this month, HHS rolled back a Biden-era policy that financially rewarded hospitals for reporting staff-vaccination rates, describing the policy as “coercive.” The FDA has made it harder for manufacturers to bring new COVID shots to market, narrowed who can get the Novavax shot, and approved the Moderna COVID-19 vaccines for only a limited group of children, over the objections of agency experts. For its part, the CDC softened its COVID-shot guidance for pregnant people and children, after Kennedy—who has described the shots as “the deadliest vaccine ever made”—tried to unilaterally remove it. Experts told me they fear that what access remains to the shots for children and adults could still be abolished; so could COVID-vaccine manufacturers’ current protection from liability. (Andrew Nixon, an HHS spokesperson, said in an email that the department would not comment on potential regulatory changes.)
The latest assault against mRNA vaccines, experts told me, is difficult to disentangle from the administration’s pushback on COVID shots—which, because of the pandemic, the public now views as synonymous with the technology, Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, told me. Kennedy and his team justified the mRNA cuts by citing controversial research compiled by COVID critics, and suggesting—in contrast to a wealth of evidence—that the vaccines’ risks outweigh their benefits, and that they “fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.” And he insisted, without proof, that mRNA vaccines prolong pandemics. Meanwhile, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya argued that the cancellations were driven by a lack of public trust in the technology itself. In May, the Trump administration also pulled more than $700 million in funds from Moderna that had initially been awarded to develop mRNA-based flu vaccines. The mRNA funding terminated so far came from HHS’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority; multiple NIH officials told me that they anticipate that similar grant cuts will follow at their agency. (In an email, Kush Desai, a spokesperson for the White House, defended the administration’s decision as a way to prioritize funding with “the most untapped potential”; Nixon echoed that sentiment, casting the decision as “a necessary pivot in how we steward public health innovations in vaccines.”)
COVID is a politically convenient entryway to broader anti-vaccine sentiment. COVID shots are among the U.S.’s most politicized vaccines, and many Republicans have, since the outbreak’s early days, been skeptical of COVID-mitigation policies. Although most Americans remain supportive of vaccines on the whole, most Republicans—and many Democrats—say they’re no longer keen on getting more COVID shots. “People trust the COVID vaccines less,” Nuzzo told me, which makes it easy for the administration’s vaccine opponents to use attacks on those vaccines as purchase for broader assaults.
For all their COVID-centric hype, mRNA vaccines have long been under development for many unrelated diseases. And experts now worry that the blockades currently in place for certain types of mRNA vaccines could soon extend to other, similar technologies, including mRNA-based therapies in development for cancer and genetic disease, which might not make it through the approval process at Kennedy’s FDA. (Nixon said HHS would continue to invest in mRNA research for cancer and other complex diseases.) Casting doubt on COVID shots makes other vaccines that have been vetted in the same way—and found to be safe and effective, based on high-quality data—look dubious. “Once you establish that it’s okay to override something for COVID,” Reiss told me, “it’s much easier to say, ‘Well, now we’re going to unrecommend MMR.’” (Kennedy’s ACIP plans to review the entire childhood-immunization schedule and assess its cumulative effects.)
Plenty of other avenues remain for Kennedy to play on COVID discontent—fear of the shots’ side effects, distaste for mandates, declining trust in public health and medical experts—to pull back the government’s support for vaccination. He has announced, for instance, his intention to reform the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which helps protect manufacturers from lawsuits over illegitimate claims about a vaccine’s health effects, and his plans to find “ways to enlarge that program so that COVID-vaccine-injured people can be compensated.” Some of the experts I spoke with fear that the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee—the agency’s rough equivalent of ACIP—could be remade in Kennedy’s vision. The administration has also been very willing to rescind federal funding from universities in order to forward its own ideas: Kennedy could, perhaps, threaten to withhold money from universities that require any vaccines for students.
Kennedy has also insisted that “we need to stop trusting the experts”—that Americans, for instance, shouldn’t have been discouraged from doing their own research during the pandemic. He could use COVID as an excuse to make that maxim Americans’ reality: Many public-health and infectious-disease-focused professional societies rely on at least some degree of federal funding, Nirav D. Shah, a former principal deputy director of the CDC, told me. Stripping those resources would be “a way to cut their legs off”—or, at the very least, would further delegitimize those expert bodies in the public eye. Kennedy has already barred representatives from professional societies, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, from participating in ACIP subcommittees after those two societies and others collectively sued HHS over its shifts in COVID policy. The public fight between medicine and government is now accelerating the nation onto a path where advice diverges over not just COVID shots but vaccines generally. (When asked about how COVID resentment was guiding the administration’s decisions, Desai said that the media had politicized science to push for pandemic-era mandates and that The Atlantic “continues to fundamentally misunderstand how the Trump administration is reversing this COVID era politicization of HHS.”)
The coronavirus pandemic began during the first Trump presidency; now its legacy is being exploited by a second one. Had the pandemic never happened, Kennedy would likely still be attacking vaccines, maybe even from the same position of power he currently commands. But without the lightning rod of COVID, Kennedy’s attacks would be less effective. Already, one clear consequence of the Trump administration’s anti-COVID campaign is that it will leave the nation less knowledgeable about and less prepared against all infectious diseases, Gregory Poland, a vaccinologist and the president of Atria Research Institute, told me. That might be the Trump administration’s ultimate act of revenge. No matter who is in charge when the U.S. meets its next crisis, those leaders may be forced into a corner carved out by Trump and Kennedy—one from which the country must fight disease without adequate vaccination, research, or public-health expertise. This current administration will have left the nation with few other options.
