{"id":12835569,"date":"2025-08-20T01:56:02","date_gmt":"2025-08-20T05:56:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.philstockworld.com\/?p=12835569"},"modified":"2025-08-20T16:57:46","modified_gmt":"2025-08-20T20:57:46","slug":"health-will-medical-science-survive-rfk-jr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.philstockworld.com\/2025\/08\/20\/health-will-medical-science-survive-rfk-jr\/","title":{"rendered":"Will medical science survive RFK Jr.?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2 class=\"header__title \"><a href=\"https:\/\/theweek.com\/politics\/health-medical-science-survive-rfk-jr?utm_source=flipboard&amp;utm_content=topic\/coronavirus\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Will medical science survive RFK Jr.?<\/a><\/h2>\n<p class=\"header__strapline\">Robert F. Kennedy Jr. scrapped $500 million in mRNA vaccine research contracts<\/p>\n<p>By <a href=\"https:\/\/theweek.com\/politics\/health-medical-science-survive-rfk-jr?utm_source=flipboard&amp;utm_content=topic\/coronavirus\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Week\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n<p id=\"2b57b77c-d48c-4807-a88c-5315d7844e03\">In hindsight, handing the reins of American public health to a &#8220;wholly unqualified anti-vaccine nutter&#8221; may have been a mistake, said\u00a0<strong>Rex Huppke<\/strong>\u00a0in\u00a0<em><strong>USA Today<\/strong><\/em>. Taking a break from his campaigns to promote the recuperative powers of sunshine, raw milk, and beef tallow, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced last week that he&#8217;s canceling <a href=\"https:\/\/www.yahoo.com\/news\/articles\/rfk-jr-shuts-down-mrna-154828184.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">22 contracts, worth a combined $500 million<\/a>, for research into mRNA vaccines. First deployed during the pandemic by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, mRNA shots instruct the body to produce a fragment of a virus, which then sparks an immune response within the body. That technology saved millions of lives and could soon yield treatments for diseases from malaria to type 1 diabetes and\u00a0<a class=\"hawk-link-parsed\" href=\"https:\/\/theweek.com\/tag\/cancer\" data-analytics-id=\"inline-link\" data-auto-tag-linker=\"true\" data-before-rewrite-localise=\"https:\/\/theweek.com\/tag\/cancer\" data-hl-processed=\"none\" data-custom-tracking-id=\"8192491545333583562\" data-hawk-tracked=\"hawklinks\" data-google-interstitial=\"false\" data-label=\"cancer\">cancer<\/a>. Explaining his decision, Kennedy said mRNA vaccines are ineffective at preventing upper respiratory infections\u2014never mind that the Covid shots reduced hospitalization and death by 70% among immunized adults\u2014and have caused &#8220;epidemics&#8221; of myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart, a claim not backed by data. At best, scrapping mRNA research is a &#8220;generational setback&#8221; for American science, said\u00a0<strong>Devi Sridhar<\/strong>\u00a0in\u00a0<em><strong>The Guardian<\/strong><\/em>. But with avian flu &#8220;now just one mutation away&#8221; from human-to-human transmission, Kennedy may have robbed us all of a tool to fight the next pandemic.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/theweek.com\/politics\/health-medical-science-survive-rfk-jr?utm_source=flipboard&amp;utm_content=topic\/coronavirus\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">More here &gt;<\/a><\/p>\n<div id=\"ad-unit-1\" class=\"ad-unit\">\u00a0<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In hindsight, handing the reins of American public health to a &#8220;wholly unqualified anti-vaccine nutter&#8221; may have been a mistake, said Rex Huppke in USA \u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":183,"featured_media":12835571,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25541,26294,21,1,12,25391],"tags":[26297,1335,371,858],"class_list":{"0":"post-12835569","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-biotech","8":"category-health","9":"category-available","10":"category-uncategorized","11":"category-phils-favorites","12":"category-members-corner","13":"tag-biotech","14":"tag-health","15":"tag-politics","16":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philstockworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12835569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philstockworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philstockworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philstockworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/183"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philstockworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12835569"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.philstockworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12835569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12835660,"href":"https:\/\/www.philstockworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12835569\/revisions\/12835660"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philstockworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12835571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philstockworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12835569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philstockworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12835569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philstockworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12835569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}