Noteworthy News

[Angrboda]

IMAGINE BEING HANDED the ultimate weapon to win a future war and throwing that weapon away.

That’s a fair description of what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did last week when he canceled a $766 million government contract to develop a new bird flu vaccine.1

The contract was with Moderna, the Massachusetts-based biotech company that developed and continues to produce one of the original COVID-19 shots. The Biden administration awarded the contract last year, through a special government program designed to fund preparation for future public health threats.

Moderna was trying to use its know-how from COVID to invent a vaccine platform it could deploy rapidly against several types of influenza, including the H5N1 bird flu—a version of which, if you haven’t heard, has spread to the United States and is ravaging poultry farms. But it’s not the price of eggs keeping infectious-disease doctors up at night. It’s the possibility that a strain mutates, jumps species, and ends up in humans, who then start transmitting it to each other.

It’s happened before, in mostly isolated outbreaks, with mortality rates that reached 50 percent. That dwarfs the comparable figure for COVID-19, which in most countries was in the low single digits and yet still killed more than 7 million people around the world, including more than a million in the United States.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/rkf-jr-kenn...osters-cdc