There are two ways to make a population healthy. You can either eliminate sick people through treatment, or eliminate sick people through death. I think this administration is picking the latter.
They are picking the “un-rich” latter. The rich can still have all the vaccines they want they just gotta pay for it. Same goes for healthcare. If you don’t have a job and arent independently wealthy well screw you dont care about you anyways. So its not just a purge of the sick people its a purge of the poor as well.
I dont think they have an endgame other than at the end they’ve accumulated all the wealth and power possible…nothing about making population healthy
You can also provide clean air and mandate such and such a turnover of fresh air, and you can have paid sick days, so that employees don't drag themselves in with respiratory illness and infect the rest of the staff. But it's America, can't have such.
These cuts have been in progress for months, and it’s a sad state of the world when scientific research and its products are called unscientific and not evidence based without any substantiation.
I’m reminded of this quote from Carl Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, as we creep closer and closer to future he describes.
> We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
Some of those in power do understand science and technology, and have responsible stances.
Some … understand …, and have intentionally-irresponsible stances.
Some do NOT understand, and choose positions either based upon bad information or other priorities entirely.
And those of us not in power are routinely lied to by all four groups, making us question the reputation of literally everything.
I think the end state of this is sort of the dragon eating its tail—not only do those in power no longer understand science and technology (or use their understanding to manipulate others), but the disease then spreads to most everyone else.
Slight addition: some understand that science is immutable (in the platonic sense, whether or not current knowledge is accurate) and therefore willingly work to destroy public belief in science because it's a threat to their own power to declare truth.
Closer to home, here on HN (and in SV generally) there is a lot of support for this regime.
It's infuriating that people who really should know better either remain willfully ignorant or simply view the loss to humanity as an acceptable price to pay for ending up with a lower marginal tax bracket.
Souter warned of the lack of civic education as well. We are just ignorant all around these days!
“An ignorant people can never remain a free people. Democracy cannot survive too much ignorance.”
“I don’t believe there is any problem of American politics in American public life which is more significant today than the pervasive civic ignorance of the Constitution of the United States and the structure of government.”
Theres such a huge focus on STEM yet i rarely see the scientific method or critical thinking and logic being taught. Its like forming your own ideas is no longer a thing and so long as you have the solution you wont need anything original
I see it growing worse in my job where newer staff rarely can come up with new ideas and the older staff are having to hand hold them. They have trouble even stating the problem at times just “i dont know how to fix any of it”. Eventually the solution is either crazy convoluted (a factory for a class for a static function that returns a string of static json) or just crazy in general (let me put this json into an env variable so its now its available global)
Partly this because there was never a focus on STEM there is a focus on a limited subset of T and E that businesses find profitable.
Even then, you need history and philosophy of science classes to actually contextualize and contrast "scientific thinking" to actually get people to go engage with science as an ongoing endeavor rather than a series of concepts from a text book that must be memorized and mastered.
I am citing past comments to demonstrate the individual has a pattern of disregarding basic hygiene measures. And that it's related to their current view on vaccines
And as you can see from their reply they don't mind talking about it.
Hacker News doesn't allow old threads to deprecate and doesn't allow you to delete your account. You choose to create a permanent public record of everything everyone has ever said on this forum, and I've seen mods go back months into a commenter's history to do exactly that.
What's good for the goose should be good for the gander.
Anyone can email us to have comments deleted if there are no replies, or anonymized/redacted if they no longer want the comment linked to their identity.
We cite past comments only to demonstrate a pattern when taking action against a user who has a history of guidelines breaches.
It's a long-established norm on HN that weaponizing historical comments in a present-day argument is not considered a fair debating tactic, as we have no idea if the person still agrees with what they posted a long while ago, nor whether the context of the historical comment is relevant to the present topic.
Geese and ganders have nothing to do with it and I don't know why you're using my efforts to uphold fair debating between community members as grounds to attack our moderation.
The energy of "highlight[ing] bad faith actors" is not what we're going for here. The guidelines ask us to "assume good faith", and there are valid reasons why someone's present-day position could (appear to) contradict a historical position. The best reason is that they have undergone some personal growth, which we would hope of most people over a year or more, and we definitely want to allow space for that on HN.
If they do have such evidence it would be worth while to justify their cuts with that evidence. Just because it was rushed out doesn’t mean it wasn’t used by billions of people tens of billions of times with an extraordinarily low incidence of side effects observed in situ. This is a situation of unparalleled prevalence, including probably everyone reading this now. If there were evidence of problem it would be globally observable and impossible to suppress. Even if the pharma industry would want to, all it would take is a single professor of medicine, statistician, epidemiologist, etc anywhere on earth looking for tenure to be able to produce a compelling and well structured survey and / or meta analysis that showed mRNA vaccines had any level of harm. But it didn’t happen. Because they are safe, and literally everyone who has had one - which is pretty much literally everyone - knows this. RFK Jr knows this too, but he is seeking something other than truth here.
No, what I said about masking policy during COVID was this:
> Reasonable at first. Once it was known that the virus is transmitted via aerosols then forcing masks was the wrong thing to do, specially on children. Useless and damaging.
I don't know why you wouldn't wear a mask to stop aerosols. Masks were a correct answer. The problem was pushing those pieces of crap made out of cut up t-shirts and other hopium, to help cope with the presidential dereliction of duty failing to address the shortage of real PPE P95/P100s.
> I don't know why you wouldn't wear a mask to stop aerosols.
Because the masks don't stop aerosols. They're too tiny for them. Then there's also the fact that being so light they accumulate in the air and last there for an hour or longer and can even infect people through the eyes.
That argument was always trotted out in the context of the hopium made out of t-shirts, or surgical masks with open flow paths around the filter. Everything I saw confirmed that P100's were quite effective at the relevant drop size (as you'd expect them to be, as they stop things like atomized and aerosolized paint spray). As far as the eyes, reducing viral load is worthy on its own. Or if you want the proper solution, that is a full face mask. But either way, not having a perfect solution certainly doesn't indicate going in the opposite direction and completely giving up on the idea.
> not having a perfect solution certainly doesn't indicate going in the opposite direction and completely giving up on the idea.
Having a so-so solution can in fact be worse than nothing since it makes people think they're safe, which leads to much greater exposure than if they thought they were in danger. Promoting ventilation and open-air interaction is a much more effective solutions but the latter was banned and even persecuted.
You didn't address my core point, and you're still pulling in this odd direction of pointing to the failings of the straightforward approach to justify contrarianism based around doing even less.
Ventilation and open-air interaction were also both widely promoted, and widely used for things like social gatherings in parks and outside of homes. There were plenty of situations (eg grocery stores) where they were inapplicable from an individual perspective, hence the masks.
I'm glad this is being done. Government funded research like this is just another financial engineering opportunity for these research companies/universities. I am not making this up, just check the other post about scientific fraud at scale which is currently on the front page of HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44796526
All we're doing is shifting your tax dollars to the military, which is another financial engineering opportunities for defense contractors.
If my money's going to go somewhere I'd rather it go to research universities/companies and get outputs that will save lives rather than destroy lives.
Privatizing vaccine development doesn't remove the incentives for scientific fraud. If anything, we trust the government with these incalculably valuable public-works projects because we cannot afford to write off the alternative. Not for COVID, not for the seasonal flu, and not for the next plague/ebola/malaria of your lifetime either.
> Privatizing vaccine development doesn't remove the incentives for scientific fraud.
Right it won't. My point however is that don't create an avenue, private or public, which has dedicated funds for such activities. It just ends up becoming an industry which tries to gain off those funds than doing any real research.
That's how all industry works. The side that invests most in innovative techniques is rewarded with larger margins and incentivized to wring out every last dollar they can.
The "if we don't look at the research then it doesn't exist" mentality is why TSMC is 5 generations ahead of Intel's fabs.
What's really crazy is that this is the same (?, 2.0) administration that championed the Project Warpspeed that led to this sequence of events. You'd think they'd be talking up how great they did and all the potential mRNA has to MAHA, yet here we are...
The virus didn't mutate into less aggressive strains, everyone got T-cells through vaccination or infection, which made subsequent infection less severe.
Which is borne out through the higher death rate in Republicans who didn't get vaccinated, compared to Democrats who did.
And we had situations like Hong Kong which got absolutely hammered by Omicron, even though that strain was supposedly "less severe", because of the low levels of prior infection and vaccination when Omicron hit there.
> Which is borne out through the higher death rate in Republicans who didn't get vaccinated, compared to Democrats who did.
Or because republicans never took the threat seriously and didn't took effective preventive measures like reducing social contact, increasing their exposure risk.
> And we had situations like Hong Kong which got absolutely hammered by Omicron, even though that strain was supposedly "less severe", because of the low levels of prior infection and vaccination when Omicron hit there.
Hong Kong focused all its efforts in preventing the virus to even get there. Once it broke through they were unprepared to deal with it, hence the bad outcome.
> Or because republicans never took the threat seriously and didn't took effective preventive measures like reducing social contact, increasing their exposure risk.
Everyone got exposed eventually. Republicans who didn't vaccinate died at a higher rate when they got exposed.
> Hong Kong focused all its efforts in preventing the virus to even get there.
Yes, that's why it produced a good example of an immunologically naive population, late in the pandemic.
> Once it broke through they were unprepared to deal with it, hence the bad outcome.
Which was Omicron, and it turned out to be just as deadly. Which completely falsifies your argument that mutation led to less deadly strains.
We can see in Hong Kong that it was just as deadly.
In the United States it wasn't, and the difference is due to immunity from vaccination and natural infection.
The problem is that this is so ideological for some people, damn the science and facts, lies and positioning are all that matter in the post-truth world
Imagine believing that in a world of billions, that the vaccine didn't save at least 2M lives through reductions in symptoms and spread. The same is true for virus mutations
It's perfectly reasonable to believe that when the vaccine in question is crap that doesn't prevent transmission, whatever limited positive effects it has last very little time and has severe side effects like heart inflammation.
> Not really, the virus mutating into less aggressive strains did.
This didn't happen. There was no selection pressure on the virus to mutate to a "less aggressive" form. To think there was is to fundamentally misunderstand the science here.
The incubation period was plenty long enough for the virus to spread before incapacitating the host. All the selection pressure was for the virus to become more virulent - and that is precisely what happened. We saw multiple strains appear which were harder to deal with.
This had a negligible impact. Patients were only put on ventilation when they were already very sick and at a high chance of death. Worldwide only a tiny proportion of deaths came about in this way. Even rich countries only had ventilators in the tens of thousands. Compare that to the billions who received vaccinations.
> The incubation period was plenty long enough for the virus to spread before incapacitating the host. All the selection pressure was for the virus to become more virulent - and that is precisely what happened. We saw multiple strains appear which were harder to deal with.
Is Omicron equally as deadly as Delta? No.
> This had a negligible impact. Patients were only put on ventilation when they were already very sick and at a high chance of death. Worldwide only a tiny proportion of deaths came about in this way. Even rich countries only had ventilators in the tens of thousands. Compare that to the billions who received vaccinations.
That's just one example. Not using effective antivirals is another one. With time, treatments improved and so did the outcomes, regardless of vaccination status.
It depends how you look at it. Omicron had a lower CFR, but higher transmissibility, so arguably worse.
There is no inherent selection pressure on viruses to mutate towards being less aggressive. Omicron had a transmission advantage that coincided with being a bit less lethal, but often being more transmissible correlates with being more lethal (e.g. delta variant).
We could have easily had a more lethal omicron variant emerge if it wasn't for vaccination effectively halting the pandemic.
Far more people were saved by vaccination than any luck on random mutation in the virus.
> With time, treatments improved
They did. Like the use of dextramethasone. Still a small improvement compared to the dramatic success of the vaccines.
> and so did the outcomes, regardless of vaccination status.
No. Vaccinated individuals were better off in pretty much every measurable statistic. By any reasonable measurement vaccination saved millions of lives.
To be clear, he’s saying the wildly successful mRNA covid vaccines, given to hundreds of millions of people, “don’t work”. Based on “science” without any actual citation* of a study to be seen.
It’s absurd this administration can now just say “we used science” and not be held accountable for the bald faced lies.
Absurd, but unsurprising. I've seen their voters, in bad faith, compare science to religion, either because the distinction between pure faith and a scientific process is too alien to them or because they pretend that it is. This is yet another manifestation of this "misunderstanding".
Yeah, it goes way back, but it has definitely flared up recently.
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'" - Asimov, 1980
1980 was barely the start of "celebration of the stupid." Reagan and Bush turbocharged it. "Yore stoopid? Well, good fer yew, yer what Murka's all about!!!"
To the people at large, a lot of "science" consists entirely of "hey look, a blessed paper says so; anyone who disagrees is a heretic", which is exactly what the atheists (and other-religion-ists) see for insert-religion-here.
Religion is dogmatic about its static, mutually exclusive, non falsifiable position(s) over extremely long periods of time.
The topics you are alluding to are usually novel, complex, changing, and subject to healthy debate. They are quite different.
I agree there is an aspect of belief amongst lay persons that they both share which i feel is the more subtle but valid aspect of your argument, but separating it from the initial part of my comment i feel invalidates its usefulness.
Nope. Experiments are the opposite of faith, and a collection of social mechanisms to encourage experimentation, long-form debate, and useful + correct results is fundamentally different from a collection of social mechanisms to encourage faith and obedience.
1. belief: a world view that exists without needing external validation (i.e., "faith")
2. belief: an understanding of some kind, based on some collection of evidence
Some of that confusion is just ignorance and lack of critical reasoning skills, but it's also done in bad faith to muddy the waters to discredit the other side.
Well, I would have suggested an experiment, but if we're still at the "idiot" phase that might be a bit premature.
Instead, I'll offer some general questions that can be answered without experiments, only research.
For each faith X:
0. Note that each line depends on previous lines.
1. Who and what defines X-ism?
2. How exactly do you determine if someone is an X-ist?
3. What immediate claims does X-ism make about you, me, X-ists, non-X-ists, people at large, the world in general, etc.
4. What are the greater (long-term, conceptual, metaphysical, etc.) implications of 3?
5. If X is true, what prior assumptions and values will I have to discard? Am I willing to do so?
6. What kind of signal-to-noise ratio can I expect due to uncertainties when calculating the above in practice?
Words can have different meanings dependent upon context and audience. Again, the point is just because the same word is used in different contexts doesn't mean the word means the same thing.
Let me try to clarify: I believe in lots of things, but I'm ready to change that belief when presented with compelling evidence. A person of faith believe things and that belief is not going to change despite plenty of evidence.
See, I used the same word but it meant something else. This whole exchange is about the false equivocation of science and religion; (good) science embraces the notion of falsification, because it wants to "believe" in whatever truth presents itself.
This distinction is paramount, because religious fundamentalists believe that their faith trumps science. And yes, there's a bitter irony in the wording I just used.
People posting astroturfed links on HN about new battery tech is not directly comparable to people refusing to vaccine their children against measles because of religious reasons.
University research grants that have the word "mRNA" present are currently being flagged and frozen, even though mRNA technology has been used for things like cancer vaccine research for years. Politicizing a technology is incredibly absurd and will have long-term repercussions on science & medicine.
I know of a professor at one university that had grants frozen due to being flagged as "woke" gender discourse. His lab researches...(wait for it)... immunotherapy treatments for breast cancer in women.
A podcast or tweet from RichNipples isnt an ACTUAL scientific citation??? Next you’ll tell me DogDookie69 isn’t the women’s reproductive specialist he’s made himself out to be.
At the very least, RFKJ either perjured himself during his confirmation hearing, or he's going back on his testimony. He claimed he wasn't going to do any of this. I think this is impeachable conduct.
Yeah, even beyond the complete lack of accountability, nothing will happen. "I meant it at that time. But on further reflection, I've updated my opinion."
Hey, welcome to 2025. Always nice having time travelers visit. Not sure why you picked this year to travel to from the past, but it was not a great decision.
Hell, they're not going to collect much in elevated pharmaceutical tariffs if they things the stuff is voodoo and won't import it. European and Asian companies don't have to worry about losing a market that's moving away from them.
Reducing public health by damaging and degrading systems that advance and preserve health - this might not be the best way to reverse a population decline.
Wait until you hear how they've criminalized maternal healthcare. There's really no other way to view this clown car of malcontent grifters besides societal suicide.
The rotters! It is out and out misogyny. But it is abortion and birth control they target, is it not? They could argue that they are acting to increase population?
Do not mistake me for in any way supporting these evil people. But being pedantic I wish to criticise them accurately
Are they criminalising some other aspect of maternity care?
You're certainly not going to increase the population when eager would-be mothers die of complications from trying to carry a nonviable fetus to term/miscarriage. This is the reality of "late term abortion" the cultists love to harp on. Their great bogeyman is actually a straw man.
You're also not going to increase the population by discouraging IVF while the economic treadmill keeps on pushing people to put off kids.
As far as what they might argue? They will certainly argue anything, but it's never in good faith. Any lofty values they invoke to defend one policy will immediately vanish when they're asked to apply them to a contradictory policy. And like the import taxes, or the spectacle deportations, or the cries about the debt, we certainly could have a group of well reasoned national policies that would encourage having kids. But one or two policies seemingly picked for their mechanics of hurting people is most certainly not that kind of constructive approach.
When the next pandemic comes and there's no plan or preparation, it will be dismissed as a "complete surprise" "no one could've predicted" and "hatched in a North Korean lab".
> BARDA is terminating 22 mRNA vaccine development investments because the data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.
when you think of scientific research, do you imagine someone having an immediate eureka moment in a vacuum and writing a paper without having ever considered a problem before? do you understand that scientific progress takes years of dedication, hard work, trial and error, and then finally (occasionally) success?
do you understand long-term survival and the necessity of planning for future generations, or are you just looking for the equivalent of this quarter's shareholder returns when it comes to advancing the species?
As a published researcher operating outside traditional academia, I find this rhetoric somewhat tiresome, as it overlooks the systemic interplay between public funding, academic training, and industrial commercialization in scientific advancement.
To address your query on long-term planning for the species versus short-term gains, consider the role of tax dollars allocated through NSF grants to universities. These grants primarily support basic research and graduate education in fields like chemistry and biotechnology, which inherently trains the next generation of skilled workers for industry. For instance, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) provides stipends and tuition support to outstanding graduate students pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees in STEM.
Similarly, the NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) program funds interdisciplinary training for graduate students, often in areas such as chemical ecology or bio-inspired technologies, equipping them with advanced skills through hands-on research and stipends of at least 12 months.
NSF accounts for approximately 25% of federal support for basic research at U.S. colleges and universities, much of which involves training students who subsequently enter the workforce.
Most of these NSF-supported graduates are hired by multinational corporations in pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and chemical manufacturing—entities like Pfizer, Moderna, or Dow Chemical, which are among the largest in history.
Once in industry, these professionals conduct proprietary research behind closed doors to protect intellectual property and competitive advantages. The resulting products, novel drugs or biotechnological therapies, are frequently priced at astronomical levels, often rendering them unaffordable without insurance subsidies or government interventions. This raises serious questions about the equity of public investment: taxpayers fund the foundational training and basic discoveries, yet the downstream benefits accrue disproportionately to private shareholders through high-margin sales.
In essence, while scientific progress indeed demands years of dedication, the current system subsidizes corporate profits via public education of the workforce.
It's a good thing Shockley gave up on the transistor, it never would've been able to switch as much current as a relay, or switch as quickly as a vacuum tube.
It's a good thing Benjamin Franklin gave up on electricity, we would've never been able to contain it safely.
It's a good thing Watts gave up the steam engine, it never would've put out as much power as a horse.
With the caveats that 1) I suspect that this isn't actually data-driven as RFK Jr. is an anti-vax nut and 2) personally I think the government should fund vaccine development:
Were Shockley, Franklin, or Watts funded by the US government? To the tune of half a billion dollars?
That's not a rhetorical question - I don't know to what extent their work received grants. But I think you need to connect those particular dots to effectively make the kind of comparison you're making.
The implication of your post (sort of) is that work on mRNA vaccination development either needs to be funded by the government or it'll be given up on. If it's the kind of breakthrough that it likely is (and already has been, really) I doubt that's really the case. It's just unfortunate for Americans and the world that the work will likely be done elsewhere, perhaps more slowly, and perhaps (?) with less public (rather than for-profit) interest.
AIUI early transistor research was funded by public (defense) grants. And Bell Labs was definitely government supported, if not outright government funded.
It’s tough to get a clear picture, but if you’ve been following the research closely, it’s obvious that there are better long-term candidates in the pipeline.
Project Next-Gen is highly data-driven, and the most promising candidates are rising to the top as some are already near Phase 3.
Redirecting funding toward these options isn’t as drastic as it may seem. In fact, it makes sense if we want the best outcomes.
I don’t really see where and how this is more promising than mRNA. My (very cursory) understanding was also that mRNA based vaccines can go far beyond just COVID and into all manner of promising options such as curing some of the viruses that cause the common cold entirely.
curing some of the viruses that cause the common cold entirely.
This was this kind of crazy hype from back in 2021/2022 that has helped fuel the backlash against MRNA vaccines. There has been nothing happening on the common cold virus with MRNA vaccines. In retrospect, it seems like CEOs pumping the stock price with wild promises.
> There has been nothing happening on the common cold virus with MRNA vaccines. In retrospect, it seems like CEOs pumping the stock price with wild promises.
So not true. There are numerous candidates for pan-flu and pan-coronavirus vaccines. mRNA and other vehicles.
If there are indeed better candidates why not compare the results of those candidates in field? Backing a hope versus a working solution with all your chips means that even if these end up being better the decision was still deeply wrong and we got lucky. Just abysmal risk mismangement.
Look, it’s not that BARDA is throwing science out the window in favor of some wishful thinking. It’s that they’re looking beyond what works now and toward what might work better, not just for today’s virus, but for the ones waiting in the wings.
Oral vaccines, nasal sprays, multi-antigen, multi-receptor approaches, these aren’t just buzzwords. They aim at mucosal immunity, they aim at T-cells, they aim at the places our current tools often miss. And when you learn that SARS-CoV-2 can persist in the body long after the sniffles are gone(i.e. Long COVID/MIS-C), you realize we need more than just antibodies.
So you trust RFK Jr at his word then when he lies right to your face? Because even if you honestly believe there are better long term candidates in the pipeline you would have to be immensely disingenuous to believe anything he says.
Yes, and this thread is very specifically about what the HHS is doing and what RFK Jr is saying. Where he is again, specifically, winding down mRNA vaccine development, redirecting funding and cancelling grants even if they contain a whiff of the word 'mRNA'. The 'messenger' in this case holds a loaded gun and has no qualms about using it to kill science he doesn't like.
A shift in the science doesn't translate into cancelled research contracts and abrupt termination of further research. This is RFK, not a shift in the science.
Not against researching other candidates as well. But mRNA has a proven track record and extending it to other diseases is a promising track.
You can fund research in those other areas without cutting mRNA. Sure it'll cost more $ but there's plenty of that - ffs we're spending $150 billion _more_ on "border security".
> Which after 5 years we have better science supporting how to combat them long term.
bird flu, not sure; but as for covid no other method has anywhere near the large scale data supporting it since mRNA was the only one deployed to millions. Do I don't really agree that we have "better science" that shows other methods are more effective.
There are two ways to make a population healthy. You can either eliminate sick people through treatment, or eliminate sick people through death. I think this administration is picking the latter.
They are picking the “un-rich” latter. The rich can still have all the vaccines they want they just gotta pay for it. Same goes for healthcare. If you don’t have a job and arent independently wealthy well screw you dont care about you anyways. So its not just a purge of the sick people its a purge of the poor as well.
I dont think they have an endgame other than at the end they’ve accumulated all the wealth and power possible…nothing about making population healthy
You can also provide clean air and mandate such and such a turnover of fresh air, and you can have paid sick days, so that employees don't drag themselves in with respiratory illness and infect the rest of the staff. But it's America, can't have such.
(I kinda was hoping that would fall under the former, heh)
That is less about treatement and more about prevention, which the UK NHS is planning on shifting focus to.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jun/29/nhs-health-p...
These cuts have been in progress for months, and it’s a sad state of the world when scientific research and its products are called unscientific and not evidence based without any substantiation.
I’m reminded of this quote from Carl Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, as we creep closer and closer to future he describes.
> We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
It’s more nuanced, I think.
Some of those in power do understand science and technology, and have responsible stances.
Some … understand …, and have intentionally-irresponsible stances.
Some do NOT understand, and choose positions either based upon bad information or other priorities entirely.
And those of us not in power are routinely lied to by all four groups, making us question the reputation of literally everything.
I think the end state of this is sort of the dragon eating its tail—not only do those in power no longer understand science and technology (or use their understanding to manipulate others), but the disease then spreads to most everyone else.
Slight addition: some understand that science is immutable (in the platonic sense, whether or not current knowledge is accurate) and therefore willingly work to destroy public belief in science because it's a threat to their own power to declare truth.
Closer to home, here on HN (and in SV generally) there is a lot of support for this regime.
It's infuriating that people who really should know better either remain willfully ignorant or simply view the loss to humanity as an acceptable price to pay for ending up with a lower marginal tax bracket.
Souter warned of the lack of civic education as well. We are just ignorant all around these days!
“An ignorant people can never remain a free people. Democracy cannot survive too much ignorance.”
“I don’t believe there is any problem of American politics in American public life which is more significant today than the pervasive civic ignorance of the Constitution of the United States and the structure of government.”
Theres such a huge focus on STEM yet i rarely see the scientific method or critical thinking and logic being taught. Its like forming your own ideas is no longer a thing and so long as you have the solution you wont need anything original
I see it growing worse in my job where newer staff rarely can come up with new ideas and the older staff are having to hand hold them. They have trouble even stating the problem at times just “i dont know how to fix any of it”. Eventually the solution is either crazy convoluted (a factory for a class for a static function that returns a string of static json) or just crazy in general (let me put this json into an env variable so its now its available global)
Partly this because there was never a focus on STEM there is a focus on a limited subset of T and E that businesses find profitable.
Even then, you need history and philosophy of science classes to actually contextualize and contrast "scientific thinking" to actually get people to go engage with science as an ongoing endeavor rather than a series of concepts from a text book that must be memorized and mastered.
+1. I learned more about what parent is talking about in my philosophy / epistemology courses than STEM ones.
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Please don't dig up comments from old threads to weaponize in current threads.
I am citing past comments to demonstrate the individual has a pattern of disregarding basic hygiene measures. And that it's related to their current view on vaccines
And as you can see from their reply they don't mind talking about it.
Hacker News doesn't allow old threads to deprecate and doesn't allow you to delete your account. You choose to create a permanent public record of everything everyone has ever said on this forum, and I've seen mods go back months into a commenter's history to do exactly that.
What's good for the goose should be good for the gander.
Anyone can email us to have comments deleted if there are no replies, or anonymized/redacted if they no longer want the comment linked to their identity.
We cite past comments only to demonstrate a pattern when taking action against a user who has a history of guidelines breaches.
It's a long-established norm on HN that weaponizing historical comments in a present-day argument is not considered a fair debating tactic, as we have no idea if the person still agrees with what they posted a long while ago, nor whether the context of the historical comment is relevant to the present topic.
Geese and ganders have nothing to do with it and I don't know why you're using my efforts to uphold fair debating between community members as grounds to attack our moderation.
>It's a long-established norm on HN that weaponizing historical comments in a present-day argument is not considered a fair debating tactic,
I think it's fair to use past comments to highlight bad faith actors.
The energy of "highlight[ing] bad faith actors" is not what we're going for here. The guidelines ask us to "assume good faith", and there are valid reasons why someone's present-day position could (appear to) contradict a historical position. The best reason is that they have undergone some personal growth, which we would hope of most people over a year or more, and we definitely want to allow space for that on HN.
If they do have such evidence it would be worth while to justify their cuts with that evidence. Just because it was rushed out doesn’t mean it wasn’t used by billions of people tens of billions of times with an extraordinarily low incidence of side effects observed in situ. This is a situation of unparalleled prevalence, including probably everyone reading this now. If there were evidence of problem it would be globally observable and impossible to suppress. Even if the pharma industry would want to, all it would take is a single professor of medicine, statistician, epidemiologist, etc anywhere on earth looking for tenure to be able to produce a compelling and well structured survey and / or meta analysis that showed mRNA vaccines had any level of harm. But it didn’t happen. Because they are safe, and literally everyone who has had one - which is pretty much literally everyone - knows this. RFK Jr knows this too, but he is seeking something other than truth here.
No, what I said about masking policy during COVID was this:
> Reasonable at first. Once it was known that the virus is transmitted via aerosols then forcing masks was the wrong thing to do, specially on children. Useless and damaging.
I don't know why you wouldn't wear a mask to stop aerosols. Masks were a correct answer. The problem was pushing those pieces of crap made out of cut up t-shirts and other hopium, to help cope with the presidential dereliction of duty failing to address the shortage of real PPE P95/P100s.
> I don't know why you wouldn't wear a mask to stop aerosols.
Because the masks don't stop aerosols. They're too tiny for them. Then there's also the fact that being so light they accumulate in the air and last there for an hour or longer and can even infect people through the eyes.
That argument was always trotted out in the context of the hopium made out of t-shirts, or surgical masks with open flow paths around the filter. Everything I saw confirmed that P100's were quite effective at the relevant drop size (as you'd expect them to be, as they stop things like atomized and aerosolized paint spray). As far as the eyes, reducing viral load is worthy on its own. Or if you want the proper solution, that is a full face mask. But either way, not having a perfect solution certainly doesn't indicate going in the opposite direction and completely giving up on the idea.
> not having a perfect solution certainly doesn't indicate going in the opposite direction and completely giving up on the idea.
Having a so-so solution can in fact be worse than nothing since it makes people think they're safe, which leads to much greater exposure than if they thought they were in danger. Promoting ventilation and open-air interaction is a much more effective solutions but the latter was banned and even persecuted.
You didn't address my core point, and you're still pulling in this odd direction of pointing to the failings of the straightforward approach to justify contrarianism based around doing even less.
Ventilation and open-air interaction were also both widely promoted, and widely used for things like social gatherings in parks and outside of homes. There were plenty of situations (eg grocery stores) where they were inapplicable from an individual perspective, hence the masks.
I'm glad this is being done. Government funded research like this is just another financial engineering opportunity for these research companies/universities. I am not making this up, just check the other post about scientific fraud at scale which is currently on the front page of HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44796526
All we're doing is shifting your tax dollars to the military, which is another financial engineering opportunities for defense contractors.
If my money's going to go somewhere I'd rather it go to research universities/companies and get outputs that will save lives rather than destroy lives.
Privatizing vaccine development doesn't remove the incentives for scientific fraud. If anything, we trust the government with these incalculably valuable public-works projects because we cannot afford to write off the alternative. Not for COVID, not for the seasonal flu, and not for the next plague/ebola/malaria of your lifetime either.
> Privatizing vaccine development doesn't remove the incentives for scientific fraud.
Right it won't. My point however is that don't create an avenue, private or public, which has dedicated funds for such activities. It just ends up becoming an industry which tries to gain off those funds than doing any real research.
Do you know how the Internet was created?
That's how all industry works. The side that invests most in innovative techniques is rewarded with larger margins and incentivized to wring out every last dollar they can.
The "if we don't look at the research then it doesn't exist" mentality is why TSMC is 5 generations ahead of Intel's fabs.
mRNA...
2021 - saved millions of lives
2023 - won a Nobel Prize
2025 - cancelled by an anti-vaxxer
May have gotten some of this wrong and probably missing a bunch, but...
Yea, there is a much longer history.
What's really crazy is that this is the same (?, 2.0) administration that championed the Project Warpspeed that led to this sequence of events. You'd think they'd be talking up how great they did and all the potential mRNA has to MAHA, yet here we are...
Good point! He gave the reigns to a nutter and fired the folks that actually did the project. Bonkers!
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> 2021 - saved millions of lives
Not really, the virus mutating into less aggressive strains did. Reducing counter-productive treatments (like ventilators) helped greatly too.
The virus didn't mutate into less aggressive strains, everyone got T-cells through vaccination or infection, which made subsequent infection less severe.
Which is borne out through the higher death rate in Republicans who didn't get vaccinated, compared to Democrats who did.
And we had situations like Hong Kong which got absolutely hammered by Omicron, even though that strain was supposedly "less severe", because of the low levels of prior infection and vaccination when Omicron hit there.
> Which is borne out through the higher death rate in Republicans who didn't get vaccinated, compared to Democrats who did.
Or because republicans never took the threat seriously and didn't took effective preventive measures like reducing social contact, increasing their exposure risk.
> And we had situations like Hong Kong which got absolutely hammered by Omicron, even though that strain was supposedly "less severe", because of the low levels of prior infection and vaccination when Omicron hit there.
Hong Kong focused all its efforts in preventing the virus to even get there. Once it broke through they were unprepared to deal with it, hence the bad outcome.
> Or because republicans never took the threat seriously and didn't took effective preventive measures like reducing social contact, increasing their exposure risk.
Everyone got exposed eventually. Republicans who didn't vaccinate died at a higher rate when they got exposed.
> Hong Kong focused all its efforts in preventing the virus to even get there.
Yes, that's why it produced a good example of an immunologically naive population, late in the pandemic.
> Once it broke through they were unprepared to deal with it, hence the bad outcome.
Which was Omicron, and it turned out to be just as deadly. Which completely falsifies your argument that mutation led to less deadly strains.
We can see in Hong Kong that it was just as deadly.
In the United States it wasn't, and the difference is due to immunity from vaccination and natural infection.
The problem is that this is so ideological for some people, damn the science and facts, lies and positioning are all that matter in the post-truth world
Imagine believing that in a world of billions, that the vaccine didn't save at least 2M lives through reductions in symptoms and spread. The same is true for virus mutations
It's perfectly reasonable to believe that when the vaccine in question is crap that doesn't prevent transmission, whatever limited positive effects it has last very little time and has severe side effects like heart inflammation.
> Not really, the virus mutating into less aggressive strains did.
This didn't happen. There was no selection pressure on the virus to mutate to a "less aggressive" form. To think there was is to fundamentally misunderstand the science here.
The incubation period was plenty long enough for the virus to spread before incapacitating the host. All the selection pressure was for the virus to become more virulent - and that is precisely what happened. We saw multiple strains appear which were harder to deal with.
> Reducing counter-productive treatments (like ventilators) helped greatly too.
This had a negligible impact. Patients were only put on ventilation when they were already very sick and at a high chance of death. Worldwide only a tiny proportion of deaths came about in this way. Even rich countries only had ventilators in the tens of thousands. Compare that to the billions who received vaccinations.
> The incubation period was plenty long enough for the virus to spread before incapacitating the host. All the selection pressure was for the virus to become more virulent - and that is precisely what happened. We saw multiple strains appear which were harder to deal with.
Is Omicron equally as deadly as Delta? No.
> This had a negligible impact. Patients were only put on ventilation when they were already very sick and at a high chance of death. Worldwide only a tiny proportion of deaths came about in this way. Even rich countries only had ventilators in the tens of thousands. Compare that to the billions who received vaccinations.
That's just one example. Not using effective antivirals is another one. With time, treatments improved and so did the outcomes, regardless of vaccination status.
> Is Omicron equally as deadly as Delta? No.
It depends how you look at it. Omicron had a lower CFR, but higher transmissibility, so arguably worse.
There is no inherent selection pressure on viruses to mutate towards being less aggressive. Omicron had a transmission advantage that coincided with being a bit less lethal, but often being more transmissible correlates with being more lethal (e.g. delta variant).
We could have easily had a more lethal omicron variant emerge if it wasn't for vaccination effectively halting the pandemic.
Far more people were saved by vaccination than any luck on random mutation in the virus.
> With time, treatments improved
They did. Like the use of dextramethasone. Still a small improvement compared to the dramatic success of the vaccines.
> and so did the outcomes, regardless of vaccination status.
No. Vaccinated individuals were better off in pretty much every measurable statistic. By any reasonable measurement vaccination saved millions of lives.
It was a combination of these factors that saved lives. mRNA vaccines played an important part.
Everyone can calm down now.
> Not really,
Yes, really
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To be clear, he’s saying the wildly successful mRNA covid vaccines, given to hundreds of millions of people, “don’t work”. Based on “science” without any actual citation* of a study to be seen.
It’s absurd this administration can now just say “we used science” and not be held accountable for the bald faced lies.
Absurd, but unsurprising. I've seen their voters, in bad faith, compare science to religion, either because the distinction between pure faith and a scientific process is too alien to them or because they pretend that it is. This is yet another manifestation of this "misunderstanding".
Sagan called this in the 90s if not before.
Yeah, it goes way back, but it has definitely flared up recently.
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'" - Asimov, 1980
1980 was barely the start of "celebration of the stupid." Reagan and Bush turbocharged it. "Yore stoopid? Well, good fer yew, yer what Murka's all about!!!"
To be fair, there often isn't as much a distinction as we'd like. Even ignoring soft sciences ...
how often is there an HN post linking to a paper about some great new battery technology?
When the in-group fails to police itself sufficiently, it is inevitable that the out-group will do so coarsely.
This comment is too indirect to be useful. Can you be more explicit?
To the people at large, a lot of "science" consists entirely of "hey look, a blessed paper says so; anyone who disagrees is a heretic", which is exactly what the atheists (and other-religion-ists) see for insert-religion-here.
Religion is dogmatic about its static, mutually exclusive, non falsifiable position(s) over extremely long periods of time.
The topics you are alluding to are usually novel, complex, changing, and subject to healthy debate. They are quite different.
I agree there is an aspect of belief amongst lay persons that they both share which i feel is the more subtle but valid aspect of your argument, but separating it from the initial part of my comment i feel invalidates its usefulness.
Their schooling taught them better than that. They choose to forget.
Nope. Experiments are the opposite of faith, and a collection of social mechanisms to encourage experimentation, long-form debate, and useful + correct results is fundamentally different from a collection of social mechanisms to encourage faith and obedience.
The weasel wording around "belief" doesn't help.
The two use cases of the words are not the same:
Some of that confusion is just ignorance and lack of critical reasoning skills, but it's also done in bad faith to muddy the waters to discredit the other side.A believer might say there's no difference at all: "just because there's not enough proof that you will accept doesn't mean there's no evidence."
Though I'd actually use a different definition still:
So a sufficiently confident idiot is equivalent to https://xkcd.com/54/ ?
Well, I would have suggested an experiment, but if we're still at the "idiot" phase that might be a bit premature.
Instead, I'll offer some general questions that can be answered without experiments, only research.
For each faith X:
Words can have different meanings dependent upon context and audience. Again, the point is just because the same word is used in different contexts doesn't mean the word means the same thing.
Let me try to clarify: I believe in lots of things, but I'm ready to change that belief when presented with compelling evidence. A person of faith believe things and that belief is not going to change despite plenty of evidence.
See, I used the same word but it meant something else. This whole exchange is about the false equivocation of science and religion; (good) science embraces the notion of falsification, because it wants to "believe" in whatever truth presents itself.
This distinction is paramount, because religious fundamentalists believe that their faith trumps science. And yes, there's a bitter irony in the wording I just used.
People posting astroturfed links on HN about new battery tech is not directly comparable to people refusing to vaccine their children against measles because of religious reasons.
University research grants that have the word "mRNA" present are currently being flagged and frozen, even though mRNA technology has been used for things like cancer vaccine research for years. Politicizing a technology is incredibly absurd and will have long-term repercussions on science & medicine.
I know of a professor at one university that had grants frozen due to being flagged as "woke" gender discourse. His lab researches...(wait for it)... immunotherapy treatments for breast cancer in women.
This administration and the congress to go with it are going to end up being recorded as more damaging to human progress than covid or the GFC.
And here I thought the right liked boobs, smh
They apparently only like boobs when they're heads of federal agencies.
A podcast or tweet from RichNipples isnt an ACTUAL scientific citation??? Next you’ll tell me DogDookie69 isn’t the women’s reproductive specialist he’s made himself out to be.
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At the very least, RFKJ either perjured himself during his confirmation hearing, or he's going back on his testimony. He claimed he wasn't going to do any of this. I think this is impeachable conduct.
Yeah, even beyond the complete lack of accountability, nothing will happen. "I meant it at that time. But on further reflection, I've updated my opinion."
Hey, welcome to 2025. Always nice having time travelers visit. Not sure why you picked this year to travel to from the past, but it was not a great decision.
Hell, they're not going to collect much in elevated pharmaceutical tariffs if they things the stuff is voodoo and won't import it. European and Asian companies don't have to worry about losing a market that's moving away from them.
Reducing public health by damaging and degrading systems that advance and preserve health - this might not be the best way to reverse a population decline.
Wait until you hear how they've criminalized maternal healthcare. There's really no other way to view this clown car of malcontent grifters besides societal suicide.
> criminalized maternal healthcare.
The rotters! It is out and out misogyny. But it is abortion and birth control they target, is it not? They could argue that they are acting to increase population?
Do not mistake me for in any way supporting these evil people. But being pedantic I wish to criticise them accurately
Are they criminalising some other aspect of maternity care?
You're certainly not going to increase the population when eager would-be mothers die of complications from trying to carry a nonviable fetus to term/miscarriage. This is the reality of "late term abortion" the cultists love to harp on. Their great bogeyman is actually a straw man.
You're also not going to increase the population by discouraging IVF while the economic treadmill keeps on pushing people to put off kids.
As far as what they might argue? They will certainly argue anything, but it's never in good faith. Any lofty values they invoke to defend one policy will immediately vanish when they're asked to apply them to a contradictory policy. And like the import taxes, or the spectacle deportations, or the cries about the debt, we certainly could have a group of well reasoned national policies that would encourage having kids. But one or two policies seemingly picked for their mechanics of hurting people is most certainly not that kind of constructive approach.
When the next pandemic comes and there's no plan or preparation, it will be dismissed as a "complete surprise" "no one could've predicted" and "hatched in a North Korean lab".
RFK Jr. should be called the Angel of Death of the 21st century.
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Winder when we'll all be sick enough of the lunacy to permanently boot these right wing extremists. ...
Well why should the US lead in medical advancements. Glad we have an administration that has no problem handing medical advancements to China.
I am sure China will thank us some day. How stupid can Trump and his people be, every day they do something even more stupid than the day before.
Who is downvoting these en masse?
Welcome to the Chinese Century.
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I agree
I think the pharmaceutical companies should be nationalised so that the mRNA vaccines can be developed as a community good
We can in entices novel research with prizes, grants and bounties, rather than using markets
Markets are good for some things, but not good at allocating resources for drug research
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neglected_tropical_diseases#... for example
LOL! Downvoted and flagged by big pharma bots
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> BARDA is terminating 22 mRNA vaccine development investments because the data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.
The problem is that I don’t believe RFK jr and therefore I don’t believe HHS. How accurate is their data? Was it manipulated?
They didn’t trust the government and wanted you to stop trusting the government too.
They know that their own public statements are not trustworthy (they are peddling weird bullshit for profit in their private lives, after all).
They got themselves elected and so now you don’t trust the government.
Mission accomplished.
Good questions to always ask. But better late than never. Welcome to the matrix.
when you think of scientific research, do you imagine someone having an immediate eureka moment in a vacuum and writing a paper without having ever considered a problem before? do you understand that scientific progress takes years of dedication, hard work, trial and error, and then finally (occasionally) success?
do you understand long-term survival and the necessity of planning for future generations, or are you just looking for the equivalent of this quarter's shareholder returns when it comes to advancing the species?
As a published researcher operating outside traditional academia, I find this rhetoric somewhat tiresome, as it overlooks the systemic interplay between public funding, academic training, and industrial commercialization in scientific advancement.
To address your query on long-term planning for the species versus short-term gains, consider the role of tax dollars allocated through NSF grants to universities. These grants primarily support basic research and graduate education in fields like chemistry and biotechnology, which inherently trains the next generation of skilled workers for industry. For instance, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) provides stipends and tuition support to outstanding graduate students pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees in STEM.
Similarly, the NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) program funds interdisciplinary training for graduate students, often in areas such as chemical ecology or bio-inspired technologies, equipping them with advanced skills through hands-on research and stipends of at least 12 months.
NSF accounts for approximately 25% of federal support for basic research at U.S. colleges and universities, much of which involves training students who subsequently enter the workforce.
Most of these NSF-supported graduates are hired by multinational corporations in pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and chemical manufacturing—entities like Pfizer, Moderna, or Dow Chemical, which are among the largest in history.
Once in industry, these professionals conduct proprietary research behind closed doors to protect intellectual property and competitive advantages. The resulting products, novel drugs or biotechnological therapies, are frequently priced at astronomical levels, often rendering them unaffordable without insurance subsidies or government interventions. This raises serious questions about the equity of public investment: taxpayers fund the foundational training and basic discoveries, yet the downstream benefits accrue disproportionately to private shareholders through high-margin sales.
In essence, while scientific progress indeed demands years of dedication, the current system subsidizes corporate profits via public education of the workforce.
It's a good thing Shockley gave up on the transistor, it never would've been able to switch as much current as a relay, or switch as quickly as a vacuum tube.
It's a good thing Benjamin Franklin gave up on electricity, we would've never been able to contain it safely.
It's a good thing Watts gave up the steam engine, it never would've put out as much power as a horse.
With the caveats that 1) I suspect that this isn't actually data-driven as RFK Jr. is an anti-vax nut and 2) personally I think the government should fund vaccine development:
Were Shockley, Franklin, or Watts funded by the US government? To the tune of half a billion dollars?
That's not a rhetorical question - I don't know to what extent their work received grants. But I think you need to connect those particular dots to effectively make the kind of comparison you're making.
The implication of your post (sort of) is that work on mRNA vaccination development either needs to be funded by the government or it'll be given up on. If it's the kind of breakthrough that it likely is (and already has been, really) I doubt that's really the case. It's just unfortunate for Americans and the world that the work will likely be done elsewhere, perhaps more slowly, and perhaps (?) with less public (rather than for-profit) interest.
it will be government funded, but just not our government, and not in our universities
AIUI early transistor research was funded by public (defense) grants. And Bell Labs was definitely government supported, if not outright government funded.
Which data?
Citations please.
It’s tough to get a clear picture, but if you’ve been following the research closely, it’s obvious that there are better long-term candidates in the pipeline.
Project Next-Gen is highly data-driven, and the most promising candidates are rising to the top as some are already near Phase 3.
Redirecting funding toward these options isn’t as drastic as it may seem. In fact, it makes sense if we want the best outcomes.
https://medicalcountermeasures.gov/nextgen
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/79/1/115/7607231
I don’t really see where and how this is more promising than mRNA. My (very cursory) understanding was also that mRNA based vaccines can go far beyond just COVID and into all manner of promising options such as curing some of the viruses that cause the common cold entirely.
curing some of the viruses that cause the common cold entirely.
This was this kind of crazy hype from back in 2021/2022 that has helped fuel the backlash against MRNA vaccines. There has been nothing happening on the common cold virus with MRNA vaccines. In retrospect, it seems like CEOs pumping the stock price with wild promises.
> There has been nothing happening on the common cold virus with MRNA vaccines. In retrospect, it seems like CEOs pumping the stock price with wild promises.
So not true. There are numerous candidates for pan-flu and pan-coronavirus vaccines. mRNA and other vehicles.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/clinical-trial...
> CEOs pumping the stock price with wild promises.
There is a big problem
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=thenerdhead#44805721
So long as they don't have a targeting mechanism and can turn any of your tissues into antigen factories they can't be deemed safe for use.
Just like carbon nanotubes were all the rage until it was discovered they are as toxic as asbestos.
Yea, no.
If there are indeed better candidates why not compare the results of those candidates in field? Backing a hope versus a working solution with all your chips means that even if these end up being better the decision was still deeply wrong and we got lucky. Just abysmal risk mismangement.
Look, it’s not that BARDA is throwing science out the window in favor of some wishful thinking. It’s that they’re looking beyond what works now and toward what might work better, not just for today’s virus, but for the ones waiting in the wings.
Oral vaccines, nasal sprays, multi-antigen, multi-receptor approaches, these aren’t just buzzwords. They aim at mucosal immunity, they aim at T-cells, they aim at the places our current tools often miss. And when you learn that SARS-CoV-2 can persist in the body long after the sniffles are gone(i.e. Long COVID/MIS-C), you realize we need more than just antibodies.
What evidence do you have that anyone at BARDA made this decision?
> Look, it’s not that BARDA is throwing science out the window in favor of some wishful thinking.
Yes, it is. And in favor of just wishful thinking, but outright quackery.
So you trust RFK Jr at his word then when he lies right to your face? Because even if you honestly believe there are better long term candidates in the pipeline you would have to be immensely disingenuous to believe anything he says.
There are legitimate scientific efforts underway to explore next-gen vaccine platforms like mucosal and T-cell-based strategies.
That shift is happening regardless of what RFK Jr. says or doesn’t say. Let’s separate the messenger from the actual science for a moment.
Yes, and this thread is very specifically about what the HHS is doing and what RFK Jr is saying. Where he is again, specifically, winding down mRNA vaccine development, redirecting funding and cancelling grants even if they contain a whiff of the word 'mRNA'. The 'messenger' in this case holds a loaded gun and has no qualms about using it to kill science he doesn't like.
A shift in the science doesn't translate into cancelled research contracts and abrupt termination of further research. This is RFK, not a shift in the science.
Not against researching other candidates as well. But mRNA has a proven track record and extending it to other diseases is a promising track.
You can fund research in those other areas without cutting mRNA. Sure it'll cost more $ but there's plenty of that - ffs we're spending $150 billion _more_ on "border security".
Yes and those are being funded well. Look at HIV and cancer mRNA breakthroughs. Those aren’t being cut.
This is specifically about COVID-19 and flu. Which after 5 years we have better science supporting how to combat them long term.
I think a lot of people miss that nuance because of who the message is coming from.
> Which after 5 years we have better science supporting how to combat them long term.
bird flu, not sure; but as for covid no other method has anywhere near the large scale data supporting it since mRNA was the only one deployed to millions. Do I don't really agree that we have "better science" that shows other methods are more effective.
Have you heard of Novavax or any of the intranasal vaccines in late trials?