President Trump's administration has slammed the brakes on development of messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines, which proved their lifesaving potential during the COVID-19 pandemic but have come under increasing scrutiny among skeptics of mainstream science.

The vaccines marked a breakthrough in medical technology, drastically reducing the timeline for development of targeted vaccines and even showing promise in cancer research. Trump called mRNA the “gold standard” when he rolled out the first COVID-19 vaccines.

But now they are under assault by Trump’s Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, longtime anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and his allies in the “make America healthy again” movement.

HHS in late May canceled $766 million awarded to Moderna through the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) to develop a potential mRNA vaccine for bird flu. HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said of the decision, “This is not simply about efficacy — it’s about safety, integrity, and trust.”

“The reality is that mRNA technology remains under-tested, and we are not going to spend taxpayer dollars repeating the mistakes of the last administration, which concealed legitimate safety concerns from the public,” he added.

Unlike traditional vaccines that contain fragments or weakened versions of a virus, mRNA vaccines send messenger ribonucleic acid into cells to teach the immune system to recognize proteins connected to virus cells.

According to Joseph Varon, president and chief medical officer of the Independent Medical Alliance (IMA), the concerns for mRNA vaccine skeptics are the expedited timeline and conditions in which the........

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