Trump undoes the one good thing he did

At least Trump had "Operation Warp Speed" to his credit. Until now.

It’s easier and honestly more fun to see the world in absolutes, divided into unambiguously good people and completely bad people, but real life is more complex. Even the worst human beings have at least a few entries on the positive side of the ledger.

Ted Bundy worked for a suicide hotline and convinced some people not to kill themselves. Bill Cosby broke down racial barriers in the entertainment industry and made a classic sitcom. Adolf Hitler built some big infrastructure projects and, in by far his greatest contribution to humanity, killed Adolf Hitler.¹ Pol Pot…well, um, I’m sure Pol Pot helped an old lady across the street once before having her executed for wearing glasses.²

And Donald Trump, in the midst of spectacularly mismanaging the COVID-19 pandemic as badly as he mismanaged pretty much everything else during his first term, oversaw “Operation Warp Speed,” which kick-started the development of revolutionary mRNA vaccines. Had his political career ended for good in 2021, we could have at least given him grudging credit for that if nothing else, especially as the technology develops and potentially saves even more lives.

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.

But Trump’s career didn’t end, alas, because we’re all being punished for the grave sins of humanity (probably something you did, specifically) and now forced into the darkest timeline.

And now Trump is in the process of dismantling that one good thing his Administration actually did, according to The Dispatch:

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.

[…]

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.

If RFK, Jr. weren’t involved I’d chalk this up to budget cuts and America’s ballooning fiscal deficit and debt. But with the worst Kennedy (including the one who did that thing with the car and the bridge) overseeing America’s health bureaucracy, you know there’s something much more sinister involved:

News that a major player in the anti-vaccine community may have been tasked by the Department of Health and Human Services to conduct a study looking for a link between immunizations and autism has been met with incredulity and dropped jaws among vaccine experts and others familiar with the anti-vaccine movement.