The American scientific community is in a difficult place. I started my first job in an academic research laboratory (funded by the Energy Research and Development Administration and the National Science Foundation) in 1975, which somehow was fifty years ago when I was the youngest person in the laboratory instead of the oldest. I have seen some of the best and some of the worst of what that world has to offer, for those who do science and those who benefit from scientific research.
The current situation is unlike anything anyone has ever seen in a living memory that goes back to the early-1950s, when the National Science Foundation was established according to the far-seeing vision of Vannevar Bush. The National Institute of Health became the National Institutes of Health following his blueprint to spread scientific expertise among academic institutions, medical schools, and independent research institutions such as the Marine Biological Laboratory, Scripps Research, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. The outcomes have been astonishing. Since 1950 approximately 280 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, Physics, and Physiology or Medicine have been awarded to American scientists or scientists who worked in American institutions. [1] A Nobel Prize is not proof of the importance of the underlying science (e.g., Lobotomy, 1949) but it is a good bet.
We have discussed the importance of basic and clinical research several times over the past three years. That will not be repeated here. American science writ large had a good run for seventy-five years, albeit with some ups and downs. The question now, one that I never expected to address, is whether that run is over. My focus is necessarily on biomedical science, which has seen billions of dollars in peer-reviewed research projects cancelled for political reasons. The current attack, there is no other accurate description, on the National Science Foundation will devastate American physical sciences (physics, chemistry, earth and planetary sciences, astronomy) and non-medical biological sciences such as botany, ecology, and evolutionary biology. "Reorganization" of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA, which includes the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center) and the Environmental Protection Agency will be devastating to earth and planetary sciences and industrial toxicology as human impacts on the ecosphere continue unabated (and unseen - probably the point - if dedicated scientists and their coworkers are not "on the job," as is often said of another group of essential public servants).
Running accounts of current developments can be found in Nature and at STAT News, although much of this material is paywalled. Here we will concentrate on one object lesson, the recent announcement by the current Secretary of Health and Human that cancelled mRNA vaccines. Much of the following is based on What do mRNA vaccines, Synthroid, and pharmaceuticals have in common (according to MAHA)?, which was published at Science-Based Medicine (SBM) on August 18, 2025.
But first a word about SBM from SBM itself:
Science-Based Medicine is dedicated to evaluating medical treatments and products of interest to the public in a scientific light and promoting the highest standards and traditions of science in health care. Online information about alternative medicine is overwhelmingly credulous and uncritical, and even mainstream media and some medical schools have bought into the hype and failed to ask the hard questions.
Good science is the best and only way to determine which treatments and products are truly safe and effective. That idea is already formalized in a movement known as evidence-based medicine (EBM). EBM is a vital and positive influence on the practice of medicine, but it has limitations and problems in practice: it often overemphasizes the value of evidence from clinical trials alone, with some unintended consequences, such as taxpayer dollars spent on "more research" of questionable value. The idea of SBM is not to compete with EBM, but a call to enhance it with a broader view: to answer the question "what works?" we must give more importance to our cumulative scientific knowledge from all relevant disciplines. [2]
SBM's authors are all medically trained and have spent years writing for the public about science and medicine, tirelessly advocating for high scientific standards in health care.
In my view, SBM should be a regular stop to find out what is going on in biomedical research and especially "Alternative Health" as defined by MAGA/MAHA. The authors at SBM are very good at describing what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his associates Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makary, and Vinay Prasad are up to. It seems that Dr. Prasad's recent Loomerization was only temporary, and he is back at FDA, perhaps once again as the Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. SBM polemics are well founded and very sharp but sometimes cross a line. [3] But they also remind me more than a little of the scientists who taught me science as it should be done, both in the laboratory and the library and as a vocation: Your work is to be taken very seriously, but yourself not so much.
Getting back to mRNA vaccines, here is what RFKJr said in his announcement on X, formerly known as Twitter.
We reviewed the science, listened to the experts, and acted. BARDA (Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, the biomedical DARPA) is terminating twenty-two (22) mRNA vaccine development investments because the data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu. We're shifting that funding toward safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate.
Most of these shots are for flu or COVID, but as the pandemic showed us mRNA vaccines don't perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract.
Dr. David Gorski of SBM begs to differ, as does Dr. Paul Offit of the University of Pennsylvania:
One wonders which "experts" RFK Jr. listened to, given that the reaction to this decision among real vaccine experts has been uniformly negative. The reasons are obvious. First, as Dr. Offit discussed, RFK Jr. is very wrong (when he says the mRNA vaccines basically did not work).
Wrong. The vaccines performed quite creditably against COVID-19. One wonders what he means by "do not perform well." Remember, the primary function of a vaccine against a disease like COVID is not necessarily to completely (emphasis in original) prevent infection (although it's fantastic when a vaccine can accomplish that). It's to prevent serious infections that land people in the hospital, infections that necessitate mechanical ventilation in an ICU, infections that kill. We know from a number of studies (e.g., a CDC study in 2022) that the vaccines were highly effective in decreasing ICU admissions requiring mechanical ventilation. Even a study by someone whom we might call a COVID contrarian, Dr. John Ioannidis, that was recently published found that the vaccines saved more than 2.5 million lives.
This requires some unpacking. RFKJr's antivax default position is a given. This is what he does and no amount of biomedical and clinical evidence that vaccines work will convince him, despite his halfhearted declarations to the contrary . But for Dr. Gorski to write that the mRNA vaccines performed "quite creditably" against COVID-19 is also a stretch. This section can only be described as revisionist in a very real sense:
It is quite true that the "the primary function of a vaccine against a disease like COVID is not necessarily to completely prevent infection (although it's fantastic when a vaccine can accomplish that). It's to prevent serious infections that land people in the hospital, infections that necessitate mechanical ventilation in an ICU, infections that kill."
Yes. Although influenza viruses are different from coronaviruses such as SARS-CoV-2, this is the common understanding of annual flu vaccines. They do not necessarily prevent the disease or its transmission, but they can prevent the worst outcomes, especially in those most vulnerable to influenza, e.g., the old or unhealthy. The COVID-19 vaccines were not "sold" this way. This statement from SBM is also another way of admitting that it has been known for seventy years or more that vaccines against coronaviruses do not elicit long-term immunity in vertebrates and therefore were never likely to work as they were advertised against COVID-19.
That this was found to be true in chickens (the lethal Infectious Bronchitis Virus, IBV) is irrelevant. The pathobiology of SARS, MERS, and SARS-CoV-2 is similar in humans, too. [4] Politicians and the medical establishment, non-profit and corporate, went all-in on COVID-19 vaccines, especially those based on the "revolutionary" mRNA platform as soon as they became available. They saved lives, but they did not work as people have come to expect of diseases for devastating illnesses such as smallpox and polio, and previously common but generally less dangerous (in the Global North) diseases such as chickenpox and measles. That vaccines (e.g., Gardasil) against human papilloma virus (HPV, the primary cause of cervical cancer) are likely to be caught up in this nonsense is a tragedy of the first magnitude. The failure of COVID-19 vaccines to prevent disease and its transmission is a key to our current situation.
Moreover, it will never be known how many lives would have been saved if instead of "going for the win" using this new, and very lucrative for Big Pharma, technology, the worldwide biomedical community had truly tried to stop COVID-19 in its tracks, by immediately recognizing that this lethal virus is airborne and implementing effective mask mandates, contact tracing, quarantine, and improved ventilation and air handling in the public, built environment. Subsequent development of a transnational "warp speed" effort to identify anti-viral drugs against SARS-CoV-2 should have been the next step. The precedents were there. HIV is a completely different virus, but after 44 years there is still no vaccine. For the past thirty years antivirals have rendered HIV a manageable chronic condition for all but a few HIV/AIDS patients with access to the drug cocktail. That these drugs are not readily available the world over is another matter altogether.
It is most important that we also remember that it was not only the antivaxxers who got it wrong about COVID-19. While I was working on this post earlier this month my email produced an useful gloss on this, with a link to The Sentinel Intelligence (Jessica Wildfire):
It wasn't just the anti-vaxxers. Plenty of mainstream "journalists" will lay the blame solely on the shoulders of RFK Jr. and his band of minions. That's half the story. A full understanding requires nuance. As some of us know, a lot of public health officials dropped the ball big time. It's a story worth retelling, since 90 percent of the public still doesn't know. First off, the previous CDC did mislead the public about vaccines
For example, from this paper in The Lancet - Infectious Diseases:
Vaccine effectiveness studies have conclusively demonstrated the benefit of COVID-19 vaccines in reducing individual symptomatic and severe disease, resulting in reduced hospitalisations and intensive care unit admissions. However, the impact of vaccination on transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 needs to be elucidated. A prospective cohort study in the...regarding community transmission of SARS-CoV-2 among unvaccinated and vaccinated individuals...showed that the impact of vaccination on community transmission of circulating variants of SARS-CoV-2 appeared to be not significantly different from the impact among unvaccinated people. The scientific rationale for mandatory vaccination in the USA relies on the premise that vaccination prevents transmission to others, resulting in a "pandemic of the unvaccinated". Yet, the demonstration of COVID-19 breakthrough infections among fully vaccinated health-care workers (HCW) in Israel...requires a reassessment of compulsory vaccination policies leading to the job dismissal of unvaccinated HCW in the USA...A recent investigation by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of an outbreak of COVID-19 in a prison in Texas showed the equal presence of infectious virus in the nasopharynx of vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. Similarly, researchers in California observed no major differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals in terms of SARS-CoV-2 viral loads in the nasopharynx, even in those with proven asymptomatic infection. Thus, the current evidence suggests that current mandatory vaccination policies might need to be reconsidered, and that vaccination status should not replace mitigation practices such as mask wearing, physical distancing, and contact-tracing investigations, even within highly vaccinated populations.
This is old news, but it seems to have been largely forgotten, and:
The CDC would abandon any attempt to protect the public during the winter of 2021-2022, caving to corporate pressure to ease quarantine and testing guidelines. Anthony Fauci didn't even try to hide the real reason for the decision. It had nothing to do with science or medicine. Instead, he said, "We want to get people back to the jobs," even if they were unwell.
The list is long and there is much more at the link, including the observation (once again) that public health got privatized (more than it had been) and Democrats also tolerated misinformation, intentionally, during the previous Administration:
The story isn't that RFK Jr. canceled effective (but not perfect; vaccines never are) mRNA vaccines for no reason. The story is that almost nobody cares he's doing it (a stretch), because our politicians and media have engaged in a bipartisan effort to condition public apathy (and hopelessness).
The story is that mRNA Covid vaccines fell short of their original promises (because Big Medicine and Big Pharma did not follow the settled science of coronavirus pathology when confronted with the third lethal coronavirus in less than twenty years). Instead of admitting that and funding better vaccines and treatments, our leaders decided to double down on their own brand of misinformation. They chose to follow the advice of consultants who told them to "take the win."
It ruined countless lives.
When we lose the rest of our vaccines, we'll know why. Anti-vaxxers found the perfect opportunity in this massive failure of public health. They manipulated it for their benefit. They used the silence on Long Covid to blame vaccines. They rode a wave of public mistrust into power. If our leaders, our friends, our coworkers, and our neighbors had done a better job, this wouldn't have ever happened. It's not just on the anti-vaxxers. It's on them (us), too.
And this is where we have entered what I fear is the doom loop of American science. On the one hand we have an Administration fixated on their fetish that is "gold-standard science." These latter day berserkers are taking Thor's hammer, a devastating weapon and their divine instrument, to American science because they can and because their view of science is that it must be amenable to an agenda that "effectuates agency priorities." On the other hand, members of my tribe take the view that we are absolutely blameless in this course of events, forgetting our hubris as members of Barbara Ehrenreich's self-regarding and oblivious Professional Managerial Class (PMC). [5] We have been wrong. We lost our way as scientists and public servants, especially during the pandemic. The consequences are serious. It is a very dark time for scientists, but a dim light illuminates a path forward. Perhaps.
Notes
[1] This list is not complete. Osamu Shimomura (1928-2018) shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008 with Martin Chalfie of Columbia University and Roger Tsien of the University of California-San Diego. Dr. Shimomura (PhD, Nagoya University, 1960) was Japanese but he performed his research while a research associate in the laboratory of Professor Frank H. Johnson in the Department of Biology at Princeton University and during summers at the University of Washington Marine Laboratory in Friday Harbor, Washington, where I knew him from 1979 to 1985 as a quiet, hard-working scientist. When the prize was awarded he was at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. MBL was the pioneer biological research laboratory in the United States and is now a division of the University of Chicago. Bless their largesse.
[2] A congruent view of EBM was the subject of my first contribution here in a discussion of The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the crisis of credibility in clinical research. The key to understanding any product of EBM the is question, "Whose evidence and for what purpose?" This can be statins and the so-called "natural" thyroid hormone concoction described in the first part of the SBM article at the August 18 link, and everything in between.
[5] Also recently described at length by another term (symbolic capitalists) in We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite by Musa al-Gharbi (2024).