Science Bleeds When It’s Cut

Science Bleeds When It’s Cut

By David M. Ewalt edited by Jeanna Bryner

In June, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., fired all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a panel that creates recommendations for safe and effective vaccination standards. His chosen replacements include ideological allies who have been outspoken skeptics of vaccine safety.

In August, Kennedy announced the cancellation of roughly $500 million in federal funding for the development of messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines for respiratory viruses, claiming that “mRNA technology poses more risks than benefits.” A month later he testified during a Senate hearing that he believed mRNA vaccines cause widespread serious harm, including death.

The data show otherwise. People who received mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 were significantly less likely to go to the ER, be hospitalized or die because of the illness; experts say severe side effects of these vaccines are very rare. The fact is mRNA COVID vaccines saved millions of lives, and their use in hundreds of millions has repeatedly demonstrated their safety.

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Not only could Kennedy’s campaign against mRNA research deter people from getting updated COVID vaccines, but it is also stunting the development of new mRNA technology for other diseases and disorders.

Our cover story, reported by journalist Rowan Moore Gerety, highlights one of the most exciting of these new applications: custom-built mRNA therapies tailored to the genetic makeup of a person’s cancer that can help that patient’s immune system go after the tumor cells’ unique mutant proteins. In other words, it’s a personalized cancer vaccine.

Early tests of these vaccines are extremely promising. But the federal government is far and away the largest source of funding for cancer research in the U.S., so Kennedy’s uninformed attack on mRNA technology threatens to halt advances in medicine. Other countries, including the U.K., are poised to advance mRNA cancer vaccine research, but the U.S., which has many more cancer research centers, is vital to the success of this field.

Sadly, Kennedy’s factually bankrupt campaign is only the latest example of the U.S. government retreating from groundbreaking research. At this moment, NASA’s Perseverance rover is crawling along the surface of Mars to answer some of the biggest questions in science: Was Mars once habitable? Did it ever host life? But more slashes in funding threaten to ruin that experiment, too.

Perseverance has spent almost five years collecting samples of Martian rock and soil along more than 20 miles of the planet’s surface. And it has stored dozens of small vials of material that could contain evidence of life. Unfortunately, we may never get to test them; the proposed 2026 budget for NASA kills the mission to collect Perseverance’s samples and deliver them to Earth. Science writer Jonathan O’Callaghan tells the story.

It’s hard to read articles like these without getting frustrated about the state of American science. Our researchers are dedicated to advancing knowledge, saving lives and making the world better; meanwhile our leaders are getting in their way.

An Internet meme has been stuck in my head as I write: The three-panel cartoon starts with a man riding a bicycle down a road while holding a stick in his hand. In the second panel, he jams the stick into the spokes of his front wheel. In the third, he’s curled up on the ground in agony, nursing a self-inflicted wound.

I hope that this unlikely bit of wisdom might inspire you to reach out to your legislators and others in leadership roles to remind them of the importance of funding scientific endeavors. Over the past 180 years this magazine has chronicled some of the greatest discoveries in human history and the epic successes of government-funded research. I think that we’d all like to see more of those stories in the next two centuries.

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