Perhaps you heard that Bobby Jr. canceled a major federal contract to develop a new bird flu vaccine last week? Yeah. He did that. And it’s devastating.
Jonathan Cohn at the Bulwark reports:
The contract was with Moderna, the Massachusetts-based biotech company that developed and continues to produce one of the original COVID-19 shots. The Biden administration awarded the contract last year, through a special government program designed to fund preparation for future public health threats.
Moderna was trying to use its know-how from COVID to invent a vaccine platform it could deploy rapidly against several types of influenza, including the H5N1 bird flu—a version of which, if you haven’t heard, has spread to the United States and is ravaging poultry farms. But it’s not the price of eggs keeping infectious-disease doctors up at night. It’s the possibility that a strain mutates, jumps species, and ends up in humans, who then start transmitting it to each other.
It’s happened before, in mostly isolated outbreaks, with mortality rates that reached 50 percent. That dwarfs the comparable figure for COVID-19, which in most countries was in the low single digits and yet still killed more than 7 million people around the world, including more than a million in the United States.
That death toll would have been even higher if not for speedy development of COVID vaccines, including Moderna’s, whose secret sauce is mRNA technology that generally allows for much quicker production. That’s why two of the scientists most responsible for the breakthrough won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. And it’s why that bird flu contract went to Moderna, whose early tests on the bird flu vaccine have already produced promising results.
But the contract was through the Department of Health and Human Services, which thanks to Donald Trump is under the leadership of Kennedy, the longtime vaccination critic whose egregious lies about the COVID shot include grossly exaggerating the prevalence of side effects and claiming it offers no protection against severe disease.
Bobby doesn’t like vaccines, we know that. He is a conspiracy theory crank. And he has surrounded himself with doctors who are also way outside the medical consensus and the dessicated potted plants in the Senate confirmed them all because it was easier. Now, as Joni Ernst says, we’re all gonna die.
HHS says that the mRNA shots have not been thoroughly tested but they were. And as Cohn reports:
Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told me in a phone interview he estimates as many as 1 billion people have gotten at least one dose of an mRNA vaccine, with only rare reports of serious side effects.
A billion people should be an adequate trial. Same for the measles vaccines and all the rest. But Bobby knows better. So good luck everyone.