Shots Fired

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On Tuesday the biggest yahoo in an administration that’s crawling with them announced that he was canceling roughly half a billion dollars in funding for 22 projects related to mRNA vaccines. That followed the cancellation in May of a nearly $600 million contract for Moderna to develop an mRNA inoculation against bird flu, a prime candidate to cause the next global pandemic. Moderna and Pfizer famously used mRNA to produce a vaccine for the COVID virus in a matter of months in 2020, saving millions of lives globally.

That’s the technology that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed yesterday with a straight face had failed to “perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract.”

The mRNA platform is the bleeding edge of immunology. Not only does it allow researchers to develop vaccines for emerging viruses far more quickly than traditional methods, scientists believe it has the potential to prevent even non-infectious diseases like cancer. America is now disarming unilaterally in the race to perfect that technology. It will be perfected by someone—but that someone won’t be us.

Every scientific empire comes to an end, The Atlantic noted recently. American voters chose last November to end ours. There’s nothing to be done about it now. Is there?

Maybe.

Funding for the government will run out on September 30. Democrats passed on their last opportunity to extract policy concessions from the president by forcing a shutdown, but soon they’ll have another. Should they use it to demand that Kennedy reinstate federal support for mRNA vaccines?

“Shut down the government to fund vaccines!” feels like a non-sequitur at first blush. After everything Trump’s done over the last six months that might plausibly justify Democratic obstruction to stop him, funding for … vaccine technology is the hill to die on?

Not reversing the Medicaid cuts in the Big Beautiful Bill? Not rescinding his probably illegal “emergency” tariff powers? Not barring him from sending immigrants to a Salvadoran dungeon without due process on the off chance that some might be gang members? Not putting a stop to his ludicrous graft machine? Vaccines?

Yeah, vaccines. Start with the polling. According to a new YouGov survey, majorities of all three partisan groups (including 52 percent of Republicans) believe that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks. Cutting off Americans’ access to shots won’t be like cutting off foreign aid, the consequences of which none of us have to live with directly. Anti-vax policy is something that everyone, particularly parents, will suffer from.

“But RFK is targeting mRNA vaccines specifically, not all vaccines,” you might say. Nonsense. He’s purged the expert panel that advises the CDC on authorizing new vaccines and replaced half of its former members with cranks. He’s commissioned a “study” from a discredited skeptic on the repeatedly debunked theory that vaccines cause autism. He’s halted support for research on how to reduce vaccine hesitancy and scrapped funding for defenses against “priority pathogens” that might cause new pandemics.

This is a guy who said just last year, “There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.” He’s not anti-mRNA; he’s not even anti-vax at this point. What he is, functionally if not intentionally, is anti-anti-disease. With the possible exception of winding down USAID, no Trump policy is apt to have a higher body count than letting Kennedy run roughshod over American science.

The Democratic message writes itself: Millions of people, maybe your own child, will get seriously sick because Trump has turned public health over to a dangerous New Age yokel. There are few concessions Chuck Schumer could realistically gain from Trump that would do as much good for as many people as forcing him to correct course at the Department of Health and Human Services. It is, quite literally, a matter of life and death. 

There’s another strategic angle available to Democrats if they pursue this. The United States is at risk of falling behind China technologically in all sorts of ways—on artificial intelligence, on renewable energy, and now on biotechnology—and each of those, including Tuesday’s defunding of mRNA projects, is a security vulnerability. “These tools serve as a deterrent to prevent other nations from using certain biological agents,” one health expert who served in Trump’s first administration said yesterday of mRNA technology. “The speed of the technology to create new biodefense capabilities is a national security asset.”

When I say that we’re disarming unilaterally by not developing this technology, I’m not speaking metaphorically. Vaccines are a crucial weapon against biological warfare, and we’re laying down that weapon needlessly. Kennedy’s decision isn’t much different from dismantling a missile defense system that’s been proven to work.

There are also political benefits to forcing a fight over vaccines. Democrats could cause mischief on the right by reminding Americans that funding the COVID mRNA vaccines was Trump’s greatest first-term achievement. The president himself used to brag about it before the subject became taboo among Republicans. “The vaccines do work,” he said in 2021, “and they are effective. So here’s my thing: I think I saved millions and millions of lives around the world.”

He really did—and, Trump being Trump, he might not be able to resist taking a bow once Democrats begin opportunistically applauding him for it. This could become a fun wedge issue for the left, forcing right-wingers from the White House on down essentially to choose between celebrating the president’s track record on vaccination or renouncing it.

Even if Trump were to come down on Kennedy’s side and refuse to reverse his decision on mRNA funding, as I assume he would, that would benefit Democrats long-term by forcing Republicans to take full political ownership of anti-vaxxism in the bright media spotlight of a shutdown fight. The next time we have an outbreak of a frightening new virus and no vaccine on the shelf to contain it, everyone will know which party is to blame.

To all of that one might say, “Sure, but vaccines are still a boutique issue relative to many others.” Yes and no. The subject of mRNA technology is somewhat esoteric, but Trump burning scientific research in America to the ground is not, especially when you remember that he did it on false pretenses. DOGE achieved next to nothing in savings by going scorched-earth on science, then Republicans turned around and ran up another $3.3 trillion on the federal credit card to wipe out whatever small gains the agency had made. The administration didn’t have to do this. It chose to do it.

For once, when Democrats accuse the GOP of standing in the way of “progress,” they won’t be speaking euphemistically.

I said before in March and will say again here that Kennedy’s anti-vaccine crusade is the closest we’ll probably come under Trump to book-burning. Most of his abuses of power are based on some legitimate grievance that can be used to rationalize them—immigration enforcement really was neglected by Joe Biden’s administration, some universities really are too soft on left-wing antisemitism, letting trans women compete in women’s sports really does create an unfair advantage. Anti-vaxxism has no such fig leaf of reasonableness. It’s spiteful kookery that resents certain forms of knowledge because of their “elite” provenance and works backward from there to try to discredit them, whatever that might mean for the country. You can’t despise it enough.

It’s everything wrong with Trumpist populism wrapped up in a bow—proudly ignorant, strategically short-sighted, callously destructive, gratuitously ruthless. When you look at it that way, Democrats should find it quite easy to rally around vaccines as their shutdown hill to die on.

But no one thinks they’re going to do that, right?

I’m skeptical that Democrats will shut down the government next month.

Granted, they may have no choice. Their base really, really wants to see some fight from them—like, really—and that impulse will intensify over the next eight weeks as the White House’s ruthless redistricting scheme advances. If you think Democrats are currently as unpopular as they can realistically be, wait and see what happens if Schumer waves off another shutdown while states like Texas are gerrymandering their way mid-cycle to an extra five GOP seats in the House.

Schumer might feel obliged to pull the trigger. But, for a few reasons, he won’t want to.

That argument starts with the same issue that American politics always starts with: the economy. Job growth is slowing down, inflation is ticking up, and the latest round of imbecilic tariffs is about to start biting. By the time September 30 arrives, we might be in the middle of a national panic about an imminent recession. Trump’s job approval could be poised to break through the 40 percent floor.

Shutting down the government at a moment like that would hand the White House a gift-wrapped pretext to blame Democrats next year for any economic hardships caused by the president’s trade policies. It wasn’t the tariffs that shrank the economy, Trump will say, it was the shutdown. Will Americans fall for that? Sure. Half of them will, as they always do.

Denying him that pretext is one reason for Democrats not to go nuclear. Another is that vaccines really would be an odd place for liberals to draw a political red line given the issue’s relative absence so far from their critique of Trump. It’s not that the subject is unimportant, it’s that they’ve been preoccupied with a dozen other lines of attack since January 20 about trade, corruption, ICE’s brutality to immigrants, and so on. Suddenly, out of nowhere, mRNA is the point of no return?

If the goal of shutdown brinkmanship is to “win” the PR war by convincing the public that extreme measures were needed to force concessions, the obvious hill to die on is the Big Beautiful Bill. That’s the thing that Democrats are going to run on in the midterm campaign, so it makes sense that they would use this moment to start educating Americans about its deficiencies. “Rescind the Medicaid cuts!” is a smart rallying cry for a party that’s looking to rebuild goodwill among the working class. “Bring back vaccines!” would be an especially bad choice by comparison.

And yes, while the polling on vaccination is in Democrats’ favor, so is the polling on the bill. If the 2024 election stands for anything, it’s the idea that Americans care about their own wallets a lot more than they do about gassy topics like “democracy.” I can imagine vaccines being received the same way: “I’m still paying too much at the grocery store and liberals are worried about … flu shots?” Some voters, including plenty of left-leaning ones, would come away believing that Democrats still haven’t gotten their priorities straight since last November.

Supporting vaccination, as most Americans do, and supporting it so much that you’re willing to furlough the federal bureaucracy over it for a few weeks are two different things, quite simply. Go look at Gallup’s latest numbers for what voters call “the most important problem” facing the country right now and see how issues like the federal debt and health care rank. Americans care about them—but not really, at least not relative to the economy.

Beyond all of that, Democrats would face more prosaic difficulties from a vaccine-inspired shutdown.

Their argument against Republican brinkmanship has always been that federal services are too vital for too many Americans to justify holding them hostage in exchange for a policy ransom. If liberals suddenly embrace that approach for vaccine funding—or for anything else—then that critique is up in smoke. It may seem silly at this point to expect either party to continue to follow traditional norms of “fair play,” but the left has been following that one for a while and it’s gained some traction in recent years. America hasn’t had a shutdown since the president’s first term, after all. For Democrats to start taking hostages again now would re-normalize the practice.

They’re also unlikely to end up getting what they want from the White House. It’s all but unthinkable that Trump would cave to Democratic demands that he overrule Kennedy and reinstate mRNA funding, not because he cares so much about the issue but because it would gall him as a bully to let himself be bullied by left-wing extortion. “Fighting” means never letting yourself be intimidated by the enemy, and that would apply doubly to defending Kennedy, given how popular he is with MAGA’s most crankish elements. The president is already feeling (a little) heat from his base over the missing Jeffrey Epstein files; knifing RFK in the back to make Chuck Schumer happy wouldn’t help.

And then there’s this knotty problem: If you worry about political polarization fueling vaccine skepticism in America, is a big hyperpolarized shutdown fight over the issue likely to make that problem better or worse?

As I mentioned earlier, Republicans were the partisan cohort least likely to believe that the benefits of vaccines outweigh the risks in the new YouGov poll. A Gallup poll published last year asked whether it’s “extremely important” that parents vaccinate their children and found just 26 percent of GOPers agreeing—down from 52 percent as recently as 2019. In the same survey, 31 percent of Republicans (and leaners) agreed that vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they’re designed to prevent. By comparison, that share was 5 percent among Democrats.

A significant minority of the right is anti-vax, in other words, but still only a minority. Does that remain true if mRNA vaccines suddenly become a political loyalty test between Trump and RFK on the one hand and Schumer on the other? Or would that convince Republicans who have remained semi-sane until now that maybe MAGAs were right to suspect some sort of covert elite liberal agenda behind support for vaccination?

It’s pitiful that Democrats need to consider whether the right’s impulse to “own the libs” will lead to fewer red-state children being vaccinated if the left goes to the mat to make sure those kids can still access vaccines, but that’s America 2025 for you.

It probably won’t matter in the end, though. If there’s a shutdown, and I doubt there will be, it won’t be about vaccines. In the name of making America healthy again, Kennedy will continue unimpeded in his important work of ending preventative health care in the United States as we know it. If We The People don’t deserve that, having been apprised of this risk before we voted as we did last fall, I’d be curious to hear why.