‘Enormous opportunity’: Why RFK Jr. scrapping mRNA vaccine funding is a major fumble

Video

Last week, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy Jr. announced his department was scrapping $500 million in mRNA vaccine research funding. Canadian infectious disease specialist and University of Toronto professor Allison McGeer joins the program to explain why she thinks RFK Jr.’s belief system is flawed when it comes to vaccines, and the enormous potential of mRNA technology for treating cancer and autoimmune diseases.

You can listen to this episode on Amazon, Apple, and Spotify.

Program Transcript

This is an automated transcript. Please check against delivery.

SEAN SPEER: Is mRNA technology a major medical breakthrough with huge promise, or an underwhelming and even risky technology, as US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr has recently claimed? I’m pleased to be joined by University of Toronto professor and infectious disease specialist, Dr Allison McGeer, to try to answer these questions and more. Dr. McGeer, thank you so much for joining me at Hub Hits. If you’ll permit me, I thought we would start with just a basic question, because, of course, during the pandemic, our audience would have heard a lot about mRNA technology, but it’s been less prevalent since then, can you just remind us what is it and how does it work?

ALLISON MCGEER: So mRNA technology was, well, brand new for most of us during the pandemic, although people have been working on it for 25 years before then it’s a new way of delivering protein to people. So think of it in terms of vaccines, because that’s where most of us have met it when you get a regular vaccine, mostly you get an injection, and that injection is of a protein, okay, the piece that kind of drives how things work inside ourselves and your immune system responds to that protein because it recognises it as foreign practices on it, so that if you get exposed to the real thing, you have a response build up, and you respond faster and are less likely to get sick. What mRNA does is, instead of delivering the protein, it delivers the message that the DNA in your cell, the nucleus of your cell, sends to the cell when a protein needs to be made. That’s called messenger RNA. Okay, that’s why it’s called messenger RNA that takes the message from your DNA into the machinery that makes protein. So instead of injecting the protein, an mRNA vaccine injects a little piece of mRNA that directs the ribosomes in your cell to make the protein. So from a vaccine point of view, it’s just another mechanism to make the protein, but now you can imagine all of the things that you can do if you can inject a piece of messenger RNA and make a protein. Think treatment of cancer, treatment of autoimmune diseases, right? It’s it’s got an enormous potential as a platform for delivering proteins, kind of indirectly, for all sorts of diseases. And so people, in fact, before COVID, people didn’t really think that mRNA is going to work as well for vaccines. Okay, all of the work, almost all the work, was in cancer and and other treatments. As it turns out, mRNA, vaccines for covid worked really well. And so now people are also thinking about it in terms of vaccines for other things. And in particular, we saw the advantage of mRNA vaccines during covid, which is that they’re easier to make and you can get them more quickly. So in a pandemic situation, and we’re kind of another pandemic, or, as some of my colleagues pointed out, in a bioterrorism scenario where we need responses quickly, mRNA, vaccines are much more effective than all of the other platforms that we have for making vaccines.

SEAN SPEER: That’s a great comprehensive answer, Professor. I want to stay on the subject of the possible applications. I said before we got started that I’m by no means a pharmacological or expert in medical technology, but I am interested in innovation and technology and progress. And in the aftermath of the pandemic, figures like economist Tyler Cowen, were arguing that mRNA represented the end of technological stagnation. This was one of the big ideas that was going to lead to major advances in medicine and human health. Why don’t you just elaborate about the excitement in your community about the promise of mRNA?

ALLISON MCGEER: Well, maybe the easiest illustration of that is there’s now an organisation for companies that are working on mRNA. It’s called the Alliance for mRNA medicines. It’s got more than 75 members around the globe. So this, this is a really big development and innovation thing this is, may well be, you know, fingers crossed. We were early in the journey, but people have already used it to learn more about why current, why all of our HIV vaccines have, you know, died on the drawing table. Okay, and and as of last month, we have a new approach for how we might be able to make vaccines that we learned because of this mRNA technology. So it has, I mean, you know, I think there are lots of new things in the world, and I don’t want to pitch mRNA is but, you know, the ultimate game changer, okay, but there’s no question that, as a platform, it provides an. Enormous opportunity for approaches to all sorts of diseases, and not just for products that will make things better, but for understanding how things work, so that we can, you know, use other platforms to make better products, right? So I’d say, I think, well, I thought, everybody okay, and I was wrong about our page in here, but I think the global consensus is that this a really significant advance in making life better for people, whether it’s treatment for cancer or prevention of disease.

SEAN SPEER: So it’s against that backdrop. We’ve had these recent pronouncements from the HHS Secretary, Robert Kennedy, and he’s deport and his department, it stems from some research that it’s carried out that has led him in the department to the conclusion that mRNA technology represents a greater risk than benefit for respiratory viruses such as COVID-19.

ALLISON MCGEER: So let me stop you, because this is not RFK’s department that is saying this. This is not HHS. This is RFK Jr. And I think we need to be specific about what an individual is saying, as opposed to what a government department is saying. And so all the people I know who work for HHS, and there’s a bunch of them who are into vaccines, would not be of that opinion. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that RFK Jr does not look at evidence the way you look at evidence. RFK Jr. has a belief system about mRNA, and when he goes looking for evidence, he then looks for evidence that supports his belief system and ignores the evidence that doesn’t support his belief system. That’s actually really hard to do. And I think, you know, one of my colleagues in United States said, you know, earlier this week that as far as he was concerned, you know, it was either staggering incompetence or willful misrepresentation, right? It’s hard to know, but it is. You know, the the data that RFK Jr bases his arguments on is actually nothing wrong with the data, but his interpretation of it is to support his belief system, as opposed to actually evaluate the evidence and figure out what’s going on. And you know that’s where the problem lies.

SEAN SPEER: Well, that’s precisely where I was going to go. Dr. McGeer, why don’t you unpack that a bit more for us, the Secretary asserts that the vaccine is unsafe, and he points to evidence of adverse side effects. What does his analysis there get wrong in your mind?

ALLISON MCGEER: Most of the recent statement about what’s going on is based on a series of experiments about the damage that spike protein, okay, which is the major surface protein of the virus and its pieces of that spike protein that we use to make the vaccine is dangerous to people. And there’s no question the spike protein is dangerous to people. That’s you know, why people die to covid, okay, let’s be clear, but the experiments that were done looking at it are not evidence that the vaccine is dangerous. They are not evidence that the vaccine is more dangerous than the infection, which is really the relevant question, right? That the question here is not, do covid vaccines have adverse events? Of course, everything has adverse amounts. Getting out of bed in the morning has risks, right? Having a shower as with so it’s not that there aren’t adverse amounts to covid vaccines. The relevant question is, are you in greater danger by getting vaccinated or in greater danger by leaving yourself exposed to covid and so so and many of the papers that RFK sites are very clear in their conclusions that they’re not looking at what happens with vaccines. You know, vaccines are not delivered into your cardiac muscle, okay? Vaccines are not delivered into the fluid around your brain, okay? But people have done experiments. You know, again, you want to understand covid, you want to understand how infections and vaccines work, have to do a whole lot of different kinds of experiments. And so all those experiments were perfectly reasonable. The interpretation of them is yes, in some circumstances, spike protein is very dangerous, as is the virus. Their interpretation is not so the vaccines are more dangerous than disease, which is what RFK is suggesting from just, you know, reading the evidence.

SEAN SPEER: Now he’s not merely made these pronouncements. It’s also come to manifest it in itself, in policy that he announced, the US government tends to significantly cut funding for mRNA research talk about that significance, given our earlier conversation about its huge potentiality when it comes to medicine and human health?

ALLISON MCGEER: I think of it in two ways. The first of it is, as my colleague, as states have said, you know that the adjectives that have been applied are, you know, reckless, short sighted, cutting off your nose to spite your face, right? This is, this is not an intelligent decision for the improving the health care of Americans. And of course, you know, we’re global now and many of us have come to depend on the Americans for a lot of innovation events and health. And so it will unquestionably slow down a lot of advancements that might have been made in improving health. Now there’s, obviously, there’s obviously, there’s lots of other countries in the world. There’s lots of other people working on mRNA. People. At the moment, what’s been stopped is mRNA for infectious diseases. But I think you know, knowing how this government has functioned, everybody’s really worried about that kind of morphing into less support for mRNA globally. So that’s the first issue. No question, it harms development and improving health. The second issue, to me, is more about, you know, I don’t think any of us think that single unelected people in government should be the people who make decisions about innovation in, you know, either academia or industry, right? I know that the people who are working in that area, the people who know those areas, you know, I want healthcare, you know, I want the vaccine industry to be in charge of making new vaccine. That’s what they do, and they do it well. And so for me, the concept that a single person with whatever agenda to advance in in government is in charge is is just really not a good idea for ongoing improvements in not just health, but in, you know, innovation, in you know, our you know, development of industry and science in general.

SEAN SPEER: Final question, in light of this immediate cut to mRNA research, and as you say, the possible risk that it extends more broadly to other offshoots of mRNA research, is there a need, or even an opportunity for Canada to step up and fill some of those gaps? Should the Canadian government, in effect, seize on the opportunity to try to strengthen Canada’s mRNA ecosystem here, including possibly drawing some American researchers and scholars to Canada?

ALLISON MCGEER: Yeah, I don’t think there’s any question. And I think our government knows that, you know, we have a big by manufacturing initiative in Canada to make vaccines. A large piece of that is the development of mRNA vaccines in Canada and their manufacturing Canada. So it’s, you know, and it is kind of true that we’ve been riding on the American coattails for a lot of things, in research, for a lot of years. It’s worthwhile, okay, but it’s over, and so, so I think there’s a very clear need for the next pandemic. You know, we we know unquestionably that where there’s going to be another pandemic, when there is another pandemic, vaccines are the way out of it. And so the way we effectively get vaccines early, and vaccines that work at the moment is mRNA. So there’s a very clear need to step up. And I think there’s, there’s good evidence that we are stepping up. Of course, we could do more, and we should be. But, you know, they, they people, people in Canada and in the rest of the world know that and are moving on. It is just that. It would be better if it were, you know, with our American colleagues, as opposed to on our own.

SEAN SPEER: Well said. Thank you so much for helping us work through these issues. I’ve been speaking to University of Toronto professor and infectious disease special, infectious disease specialist, Dr Allison McGeer. Thank you so much for joining us at Hub Hits, and for our broader community of listeners and viewers. If you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe to us on the various audio and video platforms and like and comment on our content. Look forward to catching up with you tomorrow. Thank you. Bye, bye.

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Last week, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy Jr. announced his department was scrapping $500 million in mRNA vaccine research funding. Canadian infectious disease specialist and University of Toronto professor Allison McGeer joins the program to explain why she thinks RFK Jr.’s belief system is flawed when it comes to vaccines, and the enormous potential of mRNA technology for treating cancer and autoimmune diseases. You can listen to this episode on Amazon, Apple, and Spotify. Program Transcript This is an automated transcript. Please check against delivery. SEAN SPEER: Is mRNA technology a major medical breakthrough with huge promise, or an underwhelming and even risky technology, as US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr has recently claimed? I’m pleased to be joined by University of Toronto professor and infectious disease specialist, Dr Allison McGeer, to try to answer these questions and more. Dr. McGeer, thank you so much for joining me at Hub Hits. If you’ll permit me, I thought we would start with just a basic question, because, of course, during the pandemic, our audience would have heard a lot about mRNA technology, but it’s been less prevalent since then, can you just remind us what is it and how does it work? ALLISON MCGEER: So mRNA technology was, well, brand new for most of us during the pandemic, although people have been working on it for 25 years before then it’s a new way of delivering protein to people. So think of it in terms of vaccines, because that’s where most of us have met it when you get a regular vaccine, mostly you get an injection, and that injection is of a protein, okay, the piece that kind of drives how things work inside ourselves and your immune system responds to that protein because it recognises it as foreign practices on it, so that if you get exposed to the real thing, you have a response build up, and you respond faster and are less likely to get sick. What mRNA does is, instead of delivering the protein, it delivers the message that the DNA in your cell, the nucleus of your cell, sends to the cell when a protein needs to be made. That’s called messenger RNA. Okay, that’s why it’s called messenger RNA that takes the message from your DNA into the machinery that makes protein. So instead of injecting the protein, an mRNA vaccine injects a little piece of mRNA that directs the ribosomes in your cell to make the protein. So from a vaccine point of view, it’s just another mechanism to make the protein, but now you can imagine all of the things that you can do if you can inject a piece of messenger RNA and make a protein. Think treatment of cancer, treatment of autoimmune diseases, right? It’s it’s got an enormous potential as a platform for delivering proteins, kind of indirectly, for all sorts of diseases. And so people, in fact, before COVID, people didn’t really think that mRNA is going to work as well for vaccines. Okay, all of the work, almost all the work, was in cancer and and other treatments. As it turns out, mRNA, vaccines for covid worked really well. And so now people are also thinking about it in terms of vaccines for other things. And in particular, we saw the advantage of mRNA vaccines during covid, which is that they’re easier to make and you can get them more quickly. So in a pandemic situation, and we’re kind of another pandemic, or, as some of my colleagues pointed out, in a bioterrorism scenario where we need responses quickly, mRNA, vaccines are much more effective than all of the other platforms that we have for making vaccines. SEAN SPEER: That’s a great comprehensive answer, Professor. I want to stay on the subject of the possible applications. I said before we got started that I’m by no means a pharmacological or expert in medical technology, but I am interested in innovation and technology and progress. And in the aftermath of the pandemic, figures like economist Tyler Cowen, were arguing that mRNA represented the end of technological stagnation. This was one of the big ideas that was going to lead to major advances in medicine and human health. Why don’t you just elaborate about the excitement in your community about the promise of mRNA? ALLISON MCGEER: Well, maybe the easiest illustration of that is there’s now an organisation for companies that are working on mRNA. It’s called the Alliance for mRNA medicines. It’s got more than 75 members around the globe. So this, this is a really big development and innovation thing this is, may well be, you know, fingers crossed. We were early in the journey, but people have already used it to learn more about why current, why all of our HIV vaccines have, you know, died on the drawing table. Okay, and and as of last month, we have a new approach for how we might be able to make vaccines that we learned because of this mRNA technology. So it has, I mean, you know, I think there are lots of new things in the world, and I don’t want to pitch mRNA is but, you know, the ultimate game changer, okay, but there’s no question that, as a platform, it provides an. Enormous opportunity for approaches to all sorts of diseases, and not just for products that will make things better, but for understanding how things work, so that we can, you know, use other platforms to make better products, right? So I’d say, I think, well, I thought, everybody okay, and I was wrong about our page in here, but I think the global consensus is that this a really significant advance in making life better for people, whether it’s treatment for cancer or prevention of disease. SEAN SPEER: So it’s against that backdrop. We’ve had these recent pronouncements from the HHS Secretary, Robert Kennedy, and he’s deport and his department, it stems from some research that it’s carried out that has led him in the department to the conclusion that mRNA technology represents a greater risk than benefit for respiratory viruses such as COVID-19. ALLISON MCGEER: So let me stop you, because this is not RFK’s department that is saying this. This is not HHS. This is RFK Jr. And I think we need to be specific about what an individual is saying, as opposed to what a government department is saying. And so all the people I know who work for HHS, and there’s a bunch of them who are into vaccines, would not be of that opinion. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that RFK Jr does not look at evidence the way you look at evidence. RFK Jr. has a belief system about mRNA, and when he goes looking for evidence, he then looks for evidence that supports his belief system and ignores the evidence that doesn’t support his belief system. That’s actually really hard to do. And I think, you know, one of my colleagues in United States said, you know, earlier this week that as far as he was concerned, you know, it was either staggering incompetence or willful misrepresentation, right? It’s hard to know, but it is. You know, the the data that RFK Jr bases his arguments on is actually nothing wrong with the data, but his interpretation of it is to support his belief system, as opposed to actually evaluate the evidence and figure out what’s going on. And you know that’s where the problem lies. SEAN SPEER: Well, that’s precisely where I was going to go. Dr. McGeer, why don’t you unpack that a bit more for us, the Secretary asserts that the vaccine is unsafe, and he points to evidence of adverse side effects. What does his analysis there get wrong in your mind? ALLISON MCGEER: Most of the recent statement about what’s going on is based on a series of experiments about the damage that spike protein, okay, which is the major surface protein of the virus and its pieces of that spike protein that we use to make the vaccine is dangerous to people. And there’s no question the spike protein is dangerous to people. That’s you know, why people die to covid, okay, let’s be clear, but the experiments that were done looking at it are not evidence that the vaccine is dangerous. They are not evidence that the vaccine is more dangerous than the infection, which is really the relevant question, right? That the question here is not, do covid vaccines have adverse events? Of course, everything has adverse amounts. Getting out of bed in the morning has risks, right? Having a shower as with so it’s not that there aren’t adverse amounts to covid vaccines. The relevant question is, are you in greater danger by getting vaccinated or in greater danger by leaving yourself exposed to covid and so so and many of the papers that RFK sites are very clear in their conclusions that they’re not looking at what happens with vaccines. You know, vaccines are not delivered into your cardiac muscle, okay? Vaccines are not delivered into the fluid around your brain, okay? But people have done experiments. You know, again, you want to understand covid, you want to understand how infections and vaccines work, have to do a whole lot of different kinds of experiments. And so all those experiments were perfectly reasonable. The interpretation of them is yes, in some circumstances, spike protein is very dangerous, as is the virus. Their interpretation is not so the vaccines are more dangerous than disease, which is what RFK is suggesting from just, you know, reading the evidence. SEAN SPEER: Now he’s not merely made these pronouncements. It’s also come to manifest it in itself, in policy that he announced, the US government tends to significantly cut funding for mRNA research talk about that significance, given our earlier conversation about its huge potentiality when it comes to medicine and human health? ALLISON MCGEER: I think of it in two ways. The first of it is, as my colleague, as states have said, you know that the adjectives that have been applied are, you know, reckless, short sighted, cutting off your nose to spite your face, right? This is, this is not an intelligent decision for the improving the health care of Americans. And of course, you know, we’re global now and many of us have come to depend on the Americans for a lot of innovation events and health. And so it will unquestionably slow down a lot of advancements that might have been made in improving health. Now there’s, obviously, there’s obviously, there’s lots of other countries in the world. There’s lots of other people working on mRNA. People. At the moment, what’s been stopped is mRNA for infectious diseases. But I think you know, knowing how this government has functioned, everybody’s really worried about that kind of morphing into less support for mRNA globally. So that’s the first issue. No question, it harms development and improving health. The second issue, to me, is more about, you know, I don’t think any of us think that single unelected people in government should be the people who make decisions about innovation in, you know, either academia or industry, right? I know that the people who are working in that area, the people who know those areas, you know, I want healthcare, you know, I want the vaccine industry to be in charge of making new vaccine. That’s what they do, and they do it well. And so for me, the concept that a single person with whatever agenda to advance in in government is in charge is is just really not a good idea for ongoing improvements in not just health, but in, you know, innovation, in you know, our you know, development of industry and science in general. SEAN SPEER: Final question, in light of this immediate cut to mRNA research, and as you say, the possible risk that it extends more broadly to other offshoots of mRNA research, is there a need, or even an opportunity for Canada to step up and fill some of those gaps? Should the Canadian government, in effect, seize on the opportunity to try to strengthen Canada’s mRNA ecosystem here, including possibly drawing some American researchers and scholars to Canada? ALLISON MCGEER: Yeah, I don’t think there’s any question. And I think our government knows that, you know, we have a big by manufacturing initiative in Canada to make vaccines. A large piece of that is the development of mRNA vaccines in Canada and their manufacturing Canada. So it’s, you know, and it is kind of true that we’ve been riding on the American coattails for a lot of things, in research, for a lot of years. It’s worthwhile, okay, but it’s over, and so, so I think there’s a very clear need for the next pandemic. You know, we we know unquestionably that where there’s going to be another pandemic, when there is another pandemic, vaccines are the way out of it. And so the way we effectively get vaccines early, and vaccines that work at the moment is mRNA. So there’s a very clear need to step up. And I think there’s, there’s good evidence that we are stepping up. Of course, we could do more, and we should be. But, you know, they, they people, people in Canada and in the rest of the world know that and are moving on. It is just that. It would be better if it were, you know, with our American colleagues, as opposed to on our own. SEAN SPEER: Well said. Thank you so much for helping us work through these issues. I’ve been speaking to University of Toronto professor and infectious disease special, infectious disease specialist, Dr Allison McGeer. Thank you so much for joining us at Hub Hits, and for our broader community of listeners and viewers. If you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe to us on the various audio and video platforms and like and comment on our content. Look forward to catching up with you tomorrow. Thank you. Bye, bye.

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