It’s hard to imagine, but just five years ago, very few people outside of a small group of extremely determined scientists had heard of mRNA. Then came the pandemic. The once obscure molecule was celebrated as our salvation, as it served as the basis for vaccines to fight Covid-19. The once-unknown scientists who had advanced mRNA technology won the Nobel Prize in 2023 for saving millions of lives.
For mRNA, vaccines were just supposed to be the beginning. The technology was supposed to be the holy grail, the thing that would turn our bodies into factories for making the medicines that could cure us of—well, anything, from rare diseases to cancer. “Out of the horror of Covid will come remarkable advances,” said Jeremy Farrar, the then-director of Wellcome, a charitable trust dedicated to healthcare, in 2022.
Fast-forward to today, with mRNA now facing an implacable foe: Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In 2021 RFK Jr. claimed that the Covid shot was “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” Two weeks ago he announced that the federal government was canceling nearly $500 million in government-funded mRNA research projects. Entrepreneurs who have founded companies to develop mRNA-based therapeutics say the government’s antipathy is causing investors to pull out.
Moderna, the 15-year-old biotech company that was founded to exploit mRNA—its very name is a play on the molecule—has lost 95 percent of market value, and it plans to lay off 10 percent of its workforce. Even before Kennedy’s latest salvo, the government had canceled a $766 million contract with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) to develop several flu vaccines.
For mRNA true believers—and there are still plenty of them—these attacks on a molecule with such lifesaving potential is akin to Galileo’s trial in the seventeenth century for the heretical claim that the earth revolves around the sun, shutting down science and preventing progress.
Except that the truth, as is so often the case, is more complicated.
