The Trump Administration Threatens mRNA Research

Happy Thursday! And happy Opening Day to all who celebrate (even Cubs and Dodgers fans, despite the fact their teams already played in Tokyo last week). As Charlie Hustle, aka Pete Rose, once said: “Opening Day is like Christmas, except it’s warmer.”

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The Atlantic on Wednesday published the full text thread in which top administration officials discussed plans for a U.S. military campaign targeting the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen. In the communications—conducted over a Signal group chat to which Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg was inadvertently added—Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared sensitive operational details about the March 15 airstrikes on the same day they were carried out. Appearing to contradict administration officials’ insistence that the chat did not divulge classified information, the messages included information about the timing of attacks using F-18 fighter jets, MQ-9 drones, and Tomahawk cruise missiles. “If this text had been received by someone hostile to American interests—or someone merely indiscreet, and with access to social media—the Houthis would have had time to prepare for what was meant to be a surprise attack on their strongholds,” Goldberg noted in the report. “The consequences for American pilots could have been catastrophic.”
• The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have retaken the country’s capital of Khartoum, Sudan’s military chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, announced Wednesday. The capital city has been at the center of fighting throughout the nearly two-year civil war between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which as of late 2024 had left more than 28,000 people dead nationwide and displaced 11 million others. The capture of Khartoum and its international airport marked a key victory for the SAF, though fighting is likely to continue as the RSF fighters dig in in the western Darfur region.
• Brazil’s Supreme Court unanimously ruled Wednesday that former President Jair Bolsonaro must stand trial for allegedly attempting to overturn his loss in the country’s 2022 election and planning a coup. Prosecutors accuse the country’s former leader of plotting to kill his successor, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, as well as the vice president and a Supreme Court justice. Bolsonaro, who has long denied the charges against him, said Wednesday that he is facing a “political trial” aimed at preventing him from running for president in 2026. The justices said that seven of Bolsonaro’s political allies should also stand trial on five counts for their alleged involvement in the scheme. 
• President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order imposing 25 percent tariffs on cars and car parts imported into the United States. The new duties, which are intended to boost the domestic auto industry, are expected to hit both foreign manufacturers and American automakers who build cars abroad or import components. However, the White House later noted that auto parts covered by the U.S.-Canada-Mexico Agreement (USMCA) would be exempt until Customs and Border Protection “establishes a process to apply tariffs to their non-U.S. content.” The measures are set to take effect on April 3 at 12:01 a.m. ET. 
• The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1^st Circuit on Wednesday denied a request by the Trump administration to reverse a block on its efforts to pause federal funding to states. The decision, which bars the Office of Management and Budget from implementing a now-rescinded January memo freezing federal payments, came in response to lawsuits brought by attorneys general from 22 states and the District of Columbia. In an opinion upholding U.S. District Judge John McConnell’s ruling earlier this month, the three-judge panel wrote that the freeze would result in a “number of harms” to the plaintiff states, including “the inability to pay existing debt; impediments to planning, hiring, and operations; and disruptions to research projects by state universities.”

What’s Up With mRNA Research?

Health and Human Services Secretary (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may not be chatty on Signal, but he’s making plenty of noise in the medical world. Just over a month into his tenure, Kennedy is beginning to reverse one of the first Trump administration’s major successes: mRNA vaccines. 

As COVID-19 spread across the U.S. in 2020, the Trump administration launched Operation Warp Speed—an initiative that brought the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine to market in record time. But with the pandemic also came a revival of vaccine skepticism. Now, with Kennedy atop HHS, that anti-vax sentiment is making its way to the highest levels of government just as scientists are achieving striking breakthroughs in mRNA research.

Immunization technology using mRNA is not like vaccines of the past. “It’s a very novel approach,” Dr. Chris Beyrer, an epidemiologist and head of the Duke Global Health Institute, explained to TMD. Messenger RNA is a molecule that acts as the transcript for creating a protein, like an antibody or an antigen. But when mRNA is injected into the body, it is quickly degraded by certain enzymes. 

But recent advances in nanotechnology led to a major innovation: mRNA could be wrapped in a lipid nanoparticle, which is how both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines delivered messages to cells through mRNA. In the case of the COVID-19 vaccines, the message tells the cell to make a “spike protein” similar to what is found on the virus, prompting the immune system to create antibodies that help the body fight off a future infection. The COVID-19 versions would eventually be the first mRNA vaccines to become available for widespread use. 

The breakthrough is largely credited to the first Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, a partnership between the federal government and the private sector to rapidly develop the vaccines during the pandemic. The Trump administration spent more than $12 billion on the effort, leading to the emergency-use authorization of the two-dose Pfizer vaccine in just nine months. 

“It was one of the greater scientific or medical achievements in my lifetime,” Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania, told TMD. “So would I have initially said that Donald Trump supported mRNA vaccines? Yes, more than any other president or any other person in the history of this country.” And the success sparked a wave of promising research into other, non-COVID medical applications, particularly because the vaccines could be updated and manufactured quickly.

In the final days of the Biden administration, HHS awarded Moderna a $590 million grant to develop mRNA vaccines against influenza viruses, allowing the pharmaceutical company to fast-track work on a bird flu vaccine. A vaccine against tuberculosis recently underwent successful preclinical trials in Australia, and Moderna is currently working on a vaccine for norovirus, although trials have been put on pause because of side effects. 

But the technology may have applications beyond the prevention of infectious diseases. Researchers believe it could be used to treat cancer. “Because you have this lipid nanoparticle, you can target it specifically to a cancer cell,” Offit said. “It has a lot of promise as a cancer therapy.” 

In the U.K., scientists recently completed the final stage of testing in research into whether personalized mRNA vaccines can be used to treat cancer patients. “It finished one year ahead of schedule,” Dr. Lennard Lee, the medical director of the Ellison Institute of Technology Oxford and a leading researcher for the U.K.’s cancer vaccine initiative, told TMD. The trial’s results are still pending, but it could be completed within five years of when the mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 first became available. 

In February, a phase I trial of an mRNA vaccine against pancreatic cancer—which has a survival rate of only 12.8 percent—produced encouraging results. Of the eight trial participants whose bodies responded to the vaccine, only two saw their cancer return within three years, compared to seven of the eight whose bodies did not respond to the treatment. And researchers are studying whether the technology can be used to treat other forms of cancer. Last year, doctors kicked off a phase II trial for an mRNA vaccine against melanoma. 

But the promising developments coincide with growing vaccine skepticism from top U.S. health agencies. Earlier this month, the National Institute of Health (NIH) instructed its staff to compile a list of federal grants going toward mRNA vaccine research, raising the specter of targeted cuts. The Biden administration’s $590 million grant to Moderna for bird flu research is reportedly being reevaluated. 

And work on mRNA immunization appears to have already been caught up in the Trump administration’s cost-cutting efforts. According to Beyrer, a grant to develop an mRNA vaccine against HIV in Africa was slashed amid the push to shutter the United States Agency for International Development. And a grant to a Columbia University scientist studying the body’s immune response to mRNA was also reportedly canceled. “You’re seeing people who have grants to study mRNA as vaccines, or as immune therapeutics, or cancer vaccines that are starting to lose their grants,” Offit said. “Trump, who was arguably a champion of mRNA vaccines, is no longer a champion for them.”

Whether further efforts to curtail mRNA immunization research are coming down the pipeline is an open question. But there are signs that cuts to vaccine research more broadly may be imminent. 

The NIH recently moved to eliminate or limit more than 40 grants for studies seeking to understand growing vaccine hesitancy. “I think that’s one of the clearest indications we have about the hostility to vaccine science from this administration,” Beyrer said of the decision. And just a week after Kennedy was confirmed as its head, HHS announced that it had postponed the meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—a panel of experts who advise the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines. The postponement, according to the HHS, was to accommodate public comment. ACIP is now scheduled to meet in April. 

“This is a very important meeting timing-wise to decide what antigen should go into the next year’s flu vaccine, and then give the manufacturers about six months lead time to manufacture and evaluate the safety and immunogenicity of these vaccines,” Beyrer said. “This is threatening the next flu vaccine.” The Food and Drug Administration’s advisory committee on vaccines has also been canceled. 

“We’re living in dangerous times,” Offit said. “I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

Today’s Must-Read

Toeing the Company Line

Worth Your Time

• Writing for Comment Magazine, Nick Spencer considered whether the West is in the midst of a great overcorrection. “We in the West have never loved our political leaders. Mass Observation studies of Britain in the 1930s and 1940s reported the public describing the political class as ‘hypocritical’ and ‘distrusted,’ full of ‘twisters,’ ‘clever rogues,’ and ‘liars.’ Skepticism toward political leaders is the price of democracy,” he wrote. “If, as many people think, healthy skepticism has long since tipped over into a corrosive cynicism, some kind of course correction is welcome. And yet we are seeing signs of a perilous overcorrection. Polls tell us that a perturbing number of (especially) young people say they want a strong leader, unencumbered by the tedious restraints of democracy, to ‘sort things out.’ Donald Trump’s apparent preference for autocrats over the democratically elected leaders that have traditionally made up America’s allies adds fuel to this fire. The trend has generated some excitable headlines. ‘More than half of Gen Z wants UK to become a dictatorship,’ one headline claimed. … Correcting for democracy’s undoubted inadequacies, we cannot afford to overcorrect our way to autocracy.”

Presented Without Comment

Newsweek: Trump Dubs Himself ‘Fertilization President’ At Women’s History Month Event

“We’re going to have tremendous goodies in the bag for women, too,” Trump said Wednesday. “The women, between the fertilization and all of the other things that we’re talking about, it’s going to be great.”

…

“Fertilization,” he said as people in the audience laughed. “I’m still very proud of it. I don’t care. I’ll be known as the fertilization president and that’s not bad. I’ve been called much worse and actually, I like it. I like it.”

In the Zeitgeist

The Disney live-action Snow White arrived in American theaters on Friday, and with it, a fair bit of controversy. The modern remake of the classic fairytale currently has a dismal 1.6 out of 10 stars on IMDb, but we’ll let you be the judge. 

Let Us Know

In what ways do you see the “great overcorrection” playing out here in the United States?