To scientists who study it, mRNA is a miracle molecule. The vaccines that harnessed it against Covid saved an estimated 20 million lives, a rapid development that was recognized with a Nobel Prize. Clinical trials show mRNA-based vaccines increasing survival in patients with pancreatic and other deadly cancers. Biotechnology companies are investing in the promise of mRNA therapies to treat and even cure a host of genetic and chronic diseases, including Type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis.
But to some state legislators, mRNA therapies are “weapons of mass destruction” and a public health threat. They argue that these vaccines are untested and unsafe, and will be pumped into the food supply to “mass medicate” Americans against their will. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official, has inaccurately called the mRNA shots against Covid “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”
Short for messenger RNA, mRNA exists naturally in every cell of every living organism — its discovery in 1961 was also celebrated with a Nobel Prize. But its association with Covid has thrust it to the center of a political storm, buffeted by vaccine hesitancy and misinformation, anger over lockdowns and mandates, and the ascendance of the Make America Healthy Again movement in the Trump administration.
States and federal health agencies are playing on public wariness about vaccines to cancel research into mRNA more broadly, indicating how much the lingering politicization of Covid is fueling the new attacks on science.
The National Institutes of Health, which historically has funded the research behind almost every drug on the market, this month announced that it would shift money that had been spent studying mRNA vaccines to pay for a $500 million grant to study a universal vaccine using traditional, non-mRNA technology. Jay Bhattacharya, a leading critic of the Covid response and the new director of the N.I.H., called it a “paradigm shift.”
The N.I.H. had already canceled or paused many grants studying mRNA vaccines, and asked for an accounting of all other research it funds on mRNA, which scientists fear is a step toward terminating federal funding — especially as the N.I.H. has slowed grants and President Trump has proposed cutting its budget by $18 billion.
Dozens of bills in legislatures from Montana to New York would regulate or ban products that contain mRNA, beyond Covid shots and including products that are not on any market.
Scientists and biotech leaders say the demonization of mRNA will cut short research into promising treatments and cures, and send it to other countries where health authorities and investors are rolling out a welcome mat.
“The consequences are enormous,” said Drew Weissman, director of the Institute for RNA Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania and a 2023 Nobel laureate in medicine for the discoveries that enabled the mRNA Covid vaccines. “It has so much potential for other therapies.”
Dr. Weissman saw one of his federal grants canceled, and said hundreds of others that study vaccine hesitancy have been terminated, including a half-dozen at Penn, because they mentioned mRNA.
“The research is going to continue, but it’s going to continue in Europe and Asia and China,” he said. “I agree with President Trump that it would be great to bring manufacturing back to the U.S.; what the U.S. is good at is medical therapies, creativity, new medical inventions. They’re driving that away.”
As proof of the promise of mRNA therapies, many scientists point in particular to results published in February showing their success in pancreatic cancer. The disease has a five-year survival rate of 13 percent; in an ongoing study, an mRNA vaccine has prevented the cancer from returning after four years in some patients.
Some scientists said they had hoped that President Trump would embrace this promise, since his first administration was responsible for Operation Warp Speed, the project that developed and distributed the mRNA vaccines.
At the White House ceremony in January where Mr. Trump announced Stargate, a $500 billion public-private partnership to develop artificial intelligence, Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, hailed the potential to use A.I. to create personalized mRNA cancer therapies.
But Mr. Trump’s supporters among a network of anti-vaccine activists immediately denounced the president. Del Bigtree, who with Mr. Kennedy co-founded the Make America Healthy Again Action Network, titled an episode of his podcast: “Stargate to Hell?”
“It baffles my mind because the mRNA technology has been around for decades, but Donald Trump introduced it to the world — he should be taking a victory lap,” said Jeff Coller, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins and a co-founder of the Alliance for mRNA Medicines, a trade group started in 2023 in part to counter public misunderstandings about mRNA. “But somehow it got warped into mask mandates and shutdowns and the debates over the origins of Covid. These things have become so blurred that people can’t separate it.”
A spokeswoman for the N.I.H. said the request for a list of work being done on mRNA was simply a “data call.” But scientists say they do not trust that it is that simple, given the other signals from Washington.
Dr. Bhattacharya, the new N.I.H. director, once praised the mRNA vaccines, but in an interview last year doubted the safety of all mRNA platforms, saying “it’s going to take two or three more Nobel Prize-winning discoveries before this is ready for prime time.”
Even scientists whose mRNA work does not involve vaccines say they are scrubbing their grants of any mention of it, for fear of tripping up the filters that have been used to cancel grants with other problematic words, like “diversity.”
“The sort of reverse engineering of a problem with mRNA because somebody didn’t like the way Covid was handled is bizarre,” said Dr. Phillip Zamore, the chairman of the RNA Therapeutics Institute at UMass Chan Medical School. “If they don’t like the way a particular cancer treatment is going, we’re not allowed to work on whatever protein causes that cancer?”
The role of mRNA is to carry the genetic messages from DNA to the ribosomes, instructing them to make the proteins that are the building blocks of any organism.
Used in a vaccine, mRNA delivers a message to make proteins that fight disease, essentially instructing the body to make its own medicine. The proteins can turn on an immune response, to fend off Covid or bird flu or stop cancers from growing. They can also tamp down the overactive immune responses that cause diseases like Type 1 diabetes and Crohn’s. Scientists are also exploring mRNA therapies that treat genetic diseases by delivering a correct copy of the flawed gene.
For decades, scientists worried that the technology would not deliver as promised — not because it is not safe but because mRNA breaks down quickly. Would it stick around long enough to set off the intended immune response? Covid proved that it could, and supercharged research into using the same technology to fight other diseases, especially cancers that have resisted traditional therapies.
But the pandemic also supercharged misinformation about the technology. Changing guidance on masks and the spread of the virus fed distrust of science and public health authorities, including those who approved the vaccines. Many of the legislative proposals across the country reflect that.
Proposed bans on mRNA therapies in Montana and South Carolina, for instance, falsely claim that the vaccines are “gene therapies” that can change the human genome and pass on random genetic variations to the next generation, that they are “contaminated” with DNA and other particles, and that they can “shed” to infect others.
Bills in New York would ban mRNA vaccines until studies could determine that the benefits “outweigh the risks.” A proposed moratorium on mRNA use in Idaho is named for a rancher who, the bill says, “was severely injured immediately after receiving a genetic immunization” — though the rancher testified that he was partially paralyzed after receiving a traditional, non-mRNA vaccine.
Utah and Tennessee passed laws requiring foods containing vaccines to be classified as drugs, even though no such foods are on the market. Legislators pointed to a University of California study that is investigating whether it is possible to put vaccines in lettuce.
“You eat a bunch of this lettuce, take a bunch of these mRNA vaccines, and you go back and get your DNA tested again, it’s going to be a little different, it’s not going to be the same as it was that you were born with, that you got from your parents,” Frank Niceley, a Tennessee Republican state senator, said during the debate last year, arguing that the legislature should ban mRNA entirely. “This is dangerous stuff.”
In fact, mRNA vaccines cannot change the genetic code, because they cannot access the nucleus of the cells, where DNA resides. Small amounts of DNA are in all vaccines — often, as with the flu vaccine, because they are made from eggs — but the Food and Drug Administration enforces strict limits, and the levels are so small that they are negligible. Scientists had been conducting clinical trials on mRNA vaccines against infectious diseases and cancer ?as=webp” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>for years, well before Covid: on mice in the 1990s and in humans starting in the early 2000s. While no vaccine is without side effects, including deadly ones, the mRNA vaccines often have fewer side effects than traditional vaccines that insert a small amount of live virus.
“mRNA is not some foreign substance, it’s something that you’re exposed to all the time,” said Melissa Moore, who was chief scientific officer at Moderna when it produced the Covid vaccines. “Every time you’re eating whole foods, meat or vegetables, you are consuming lots of mRNA and your body is breaking it down and creating its own.”
Even if the bills do not pass, their proponents say they are playing a long game. Last month, Republicans in Minnesota proposed a ban that would classify mRNA products as weapons of mass destruction, adding it to a list that includes smallpox, anthrax and mustard gas. The ban copied the language of a bill written by a Florida hypnotist, Joseph Sansone, who says he wants to try to get the ban passed in every state and in Congress. In his newsletter, Mr. Sansone praised local Republican organizations that have adopted resolutions in favor of the bans, and encouraged his followers to start showing up at political events to challenge politicians.
It’s “poking them in the eye,” he wrote, “which has an important psychological effect.”
Kate Zernike is a national reporter at The Times.
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