“This Is What We Voted For!” MAHA World Celebrates mRNA News (Experts Say It Will Kill People)

MAHA world is celebrating this week as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., of brain-worm fame, announced that the US government was cancelling nearly $500 million in contracts for developing mRNA vaccines, the kind that allowed life to return to normal during the COVID pandemic. In a video revealing the decision, Kennedy, who swims in raw sewage and doesn’t think germs make people sick, said his reason for doing so was that mRNA vaccines “fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.” Is that actually true? No. And yet, it didn’t stop Kennedy supporters from raising figurative glasses of raw milk in his direction and cheering the move like he’d said he’d replaced all of HHS’s career scientists with whale carcasses he drove home from the beach.

Dr. Simone Gold, who believes the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were the result of “government-pharma collusion” and wants to “make hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin available over-the-counter,” said the news was proof “truth is winning.” Lauren Lee, whose X bio reads “Medical freedom, parental rights, MAHA, & all that’s sacred,” said the decision shows the MAHA movement is making “huge strides.” Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, the founder of “Americans for Health Freedom” applauded the decision and expressed hope Kennedy will go even further and “pull all mRNA shots off the market.” The world’s most infamous conspiracy theorist declared: “This is what we voted for!”

Meanwhile, actual health experts reacted to the news with alarm and devastation, given that cancelling the contracts hurts the US’s ability to fight the next pandemic, flies in the face of Kennedy’s claims of wanting to combat chronic diseases, and literally has national security implications.

“I’ve been in this business for 50 years, I’ve served seven different presidential administrations, and I can say with certainty that this was the most dangerous public health decision I’ve ever witnessed,” Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, tells Vanity Fair. He added that “what Secretary Kennedy said [about mRNA vaccines] was largely not truthful” and that the ones used to fight COVID “have had an amazing ability to reduce hospitalizations and death.”

Government investment in vaccine development is essential because it’s not seen as particularly attractive for the pharmaceutical industry, Brian Skorney, a biotech analyst at the investment firm Robert W. Baird & Co. tells me by email. And pulling that support now could certainly impede the development of an mRNA vaccine for a new virus. One glimmer of hope? Skorney believes “there is a reasonable argument that, right now, because of the profits that were obtained from the COVID vaccines, there is a bit of a renaissance of investment in the space by industry and, right now, that extra $500M probably isn’t really needed relative to the money industry is already putting in.” Still, he says, “That is also the case with a lot of other stuff that the government funds as well so I think on a relative basis, this is probably not the best place to look to reduce costs either.” And, he says, “There is really no doubt in my mind that going into the end of 2020 [mRNA vaccines] were a massive contributor to reducing disease burden and reopening of society and for any potential drawbacks related to them, which I think are very few but are present, the speed at which one can make a mRNA vaccine to a new virus is a valuable capability to have.”

As Rick Bright, a former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, put it to STAT: “This decision will have severe consequences, measured in lost lives, when a rapid vaccine response is needed.”

At this time, you might be wondering what the president has to say about the cancellation of the contracts and the suggestion that mRNA vaccines, which he once called a “medical miracle,” are not to be trusted. And the answer is: It’s not entirely clear he has any idea: