Most people in public health were worried about RFK Jr. becoming HHS Secretary. We weren’t sure how much damage he would do, but it was clear he didn’t know what he was doing, and wasn’t keen on following scientific evidence. Trump doesn’t even like RFK Jr. (and the feeling is mutual), so how long could this bromance last, anyway?
The answer: too long.
Never mind his steps to cut the federal health-related workforce 80,000 to 60,000 people—20% of the cuts being, by his own words, “mistakes” that would have to be reinstated—or his claims that multiple American children dying of measles were “not unusual.” He also used X to fire the entire Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, replacing them with people who are mostly unqualified and in at least one case a self-proclaimed anti-vaxxer. After the new ACIP still voted to recommend RSV vaccines and other flu vaccines (without thimerosal), RFK Jr. took the highly unusual step of ignoring them, failing to sign-off and make them official CDC recommendations—potentially endangering our access to these vaccines in the fall for the first time since they were FDA approved. Then he suddenly cancelled the planned meeting of the US Preventive Services Task Force (which is similar to the ACIP for immunizations, but instead votes to recommend screenings, counseling, and preventive services in clinical care in the US. USPSTF recommendations with an “A” or “B” letter grade must be covered by health insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act, so it’s a big deal). Since that’s what he did with the ACIP before firing everyone and replacing with people aligned with his own agenda, people were already concerned. Then the Wall Street Journal broke the news that he was planning to fire everyone on the USPSTF too, because they were too “woke.” (At least it’s a scientific reason. </sarcasm>)
But now he’s taken it a step further. Yesterday he announced that the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, was terminating 22 grants for further developing mRNA vaccines: around $500 million already under contract to develop even better vaccines with mRNA technology. Here’s the deal: mRNA vaccines were were so impressive during COVID that scientists are now scrambling to adapt the mRNA technology to work on vaccines for infectious diseases that have been extremely resistant to effective vaccines before now, like HIV, malaria, herpes, TB, hepatitis C, and more. It cannot be overstated: mRNA vaccines are a marvel of science. They’re so incredible that the two scientists who paved the way for them to save millions of lives during COVID were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2023.
There’s really no honest debate anymore about whether RFK Jr. is anti-vax, straight up. “Vaccine skeptics” want more research. They want to make sure we know what we’re getting, and that we’re only getting vaccines that are super safe and effective—with the benefits far outweighing any risks. A move like this takes away our ability to reach that goal. It prevents Americans (and people in the rest of the world) from being able to someday access new safe vaccines that save lives.
So why is RFK Jr. stopping the progress of U.S. research into mRNA technology? The official claim is that “data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.” This claim is as absurd as it is dangerous. Let’s look at the numbers.
672.6 million doses of COVID vaccines were given in the US from Dec 2020 through August 10, 2024, when Our World in Data stopped tracking it.
Here’s how many people were dying per day in the U.S. Those numbers on the X axis were deaths per day. Thousands of people every day. (Yes, it’s a “7-day rolling average.” That doesn’t mean deaths over the last 7 days, it means that instead of providing the exact count from a single day [not always very accurate], each day’s daily count is an average of the daily counts from the last 7 days, smoothing out any day-to-day anomalies in data reporting.) I’ve modified the graph below to shade the period of time during which the initial mRNA vaccines for COVID were gradually rolling out to people in the US. I’m quite sure you remember.
Of the 672.6 million doses given out during that time, 97.2% (653.5 million doses) were mRNA vaccines (the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccines).
OK. So millions and millions of Americans waited in long lines and sometimes traveled long distances to get mRNA vaccines to protect them from COVID. It mattered a lot. Here’s the difference in deaths per week from COVID-19 in the US, starting in October 9, 2021, when Our World in Data started tracking this. Unfortunately they don’t present the absolute death counts like I did above, but you don’t have to be a data scientist to understand what you’re seeing below. Each dot on this chart shows the number of deaths in that week per 100,000 people in the U.S. The green and blue lines are death rates among people who received vaccines (97.2% of which were mRNA vaccines). The red lines are death rates among people who did not.
Yes, it’s true that the death rates decreased overall as time went on, regardless of vaccination status. That doesn’t mean the vaccines didn’t work, it means that over time SARS-CoV-2 has mutated in helpful ways, and for most people it’s not as deadly as it was before. But even on the last point in the chart, the red dots were higher on the line every single week than the blue and green dots. These vaccines saved a huge number of lives just in the United States.
Think these data are just driven by older people, whom even RFK Jr.’s HHS agencies still recommend to get the COVID vaccine? Here’s the same graph just for people in their 30s and 40s. The red dots are still above the green and blue dots on every single week.
And then there’s children under age 5. As a reminder, the CDC used to recommend children get vaccinated for COVID starting at 6 months of age, until RFK Jr. decided this should be different on May 27 and the CDC webpage was subsequently updated.
Notice how essentially 100% of deaths of children under 5 from COVID-19 are among unvaccinated children? Right. (Yes, something funky is happening in the data from April 1, 2023, the last dot on the map. I don’t know why, sorry. I’ll try to look into it. It shouldn’t detract from the point here.)
By the way, if you’re interested in diving deeper on these data and how scientists analyze differences in COVID deaths by vaccination status, there’s a great explainer here.
The bottom line is that mRNA vaccines are amazing. There is very clear evidence that they worked incredibly well to save lives during COVID—I’ve only presented a sliver of the evidence backing this up—and there’s a reason that vaccinologists have been scrambling to see if this technology can be adapted to save millions more lives from all sorts of other diseases, too. RFK Jr. is trying to stop this scientific progress. You should be angry about that. You should call your representatives and insist they stand up and fight against this attack on our future health! Better yet, call them to demand RFK Jr.’s resignation. Enough is enough.