When the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine was authorized for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in December 2020, President Donald Trump referred to it as a “medical miracle.”
“This is one of the greatest scientific accomplishments in history. It will save millions of lives and soon end the pandemic once and for all,” Trump said at the time in a speech delivered from the Oval Office.
COVID-19 vaccines, made with mRNA technology, were quickly rolled out with then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar referring to the vaccine as “safe and extraordinarily effective.”
However, last week, current Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the government was canceling at least $500 million of federally funded mRNA vaccine development, potentially affecting U.S. preparedness for future pandemics and squashing enthusiasm for technology that has been hailed as a potential promise for cancer and HIV vaccines.
Public health experts told ABC News the position Kennedy and those in his circle have taken on mRNA vaccines is very different from how the technology was viewed in the Trump administration during the president’s first term.
“The president was absolutely right when he called mRNA vaccines a miracle,” Dr. Richard Besser, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and former acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the Obama administration, told ABC News.
“It was absolutely miraculous that in under a year after a new infectious agent hit the world stage, we had multiple safe and highly effective vaccines to protect people. … What we have now is a situation where the Trump administration is backing away from mRNA technology,” Besser said. “It is totally out of line with what the president was saying during his first term, and it flies in the face of what science and evidence have demonstrated.”
Praise for mRNA vaccines
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the majority of Americans were masking and following stay-at-home orders, the Trump administration launched Operation Warp Speed in May 2020.
The goal of the public-private partnership, initiated by the U.S. government, was to help accelerate the development, testing, manufacturing and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics.
From more than 100 vaccine candidates, the government narrowed it down to fewer than 10 to receive funding for development and testing
Although mRNA was discovered in 1961, breakthroughs in developing mRNA vaccines began in the early 2000s, eventually leading to the development of COVID-19 vaccines in 2020. During the COVID-19 pandemic, mRNA technology demonstrated its ability to scale up vaccine production quickly, as seen with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
Public health officials in the Trump administration expressed enthusiasm for the vaccines.
Just before the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine received emergency use authorization from the FDA, Azar referred to the shot as “exceptionally safe” and “shockingly effective.”
Meanwhile, then-Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams encouraged Americans to get vaccinated, saying, “By golly, the finish line is in sight. So, we just got to keep on running. American people, we need you to keep on running.”
Additionally, in December 2020, during a virtual conversation hosted by the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, then-CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield said the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were “extremely safe” and were a “light at the end of the tunnel.”
“It is no longer a scientific problem, but whether we can get the population vaccinated,” he said at the time. “We’re in a fight and what we need now is unity of spirit and to let data and science drive our actions.”
In a further show of support, several of the nation’s top public health officials received a COVID-19 vaccine publicly to demonstrate its safety and effectiveness including Azar; Dr. Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Heath; Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of NIH’s National Institute on Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID); and Colleen McGowan, director of NIH’s Office of Research Services.