The US Department of Health and Human Services is terminating a contract with drugmaker Moderna to develop a vaccine to protect against bird flu amid the agency’s broader efforts to reevaluate therapies that use mRNA technology.
The contract, which was worth $590 million, was announced in mid-January, just before President Donald Trump’s second term.
Moderna said Wednesday that an early-phase trial of its mRNA-based vaccine against H5 bird flu in about 300 healthy adults showed “a rapid, potent and durable immune response.”
“While the termination of funding from HHS adds uncertainty, we are pleased by the robust immune response and safety profile … and we will explore alternative paths forward for the program,” Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said in a statement. ”These clinical data in pandemic influenza underscore the critical role mRNA technology has played as a countermeasure to emerging health threats.”
However, HHS said Wednesday that the project doesn’t meet scientific or safety expectations for continued investment.
“After a rigorous review, we concluded that continued investment in Moderna’s H5N1 mRNA vaccine was not scientifically or ethically justifiable,” HHS Communications Director Andrew Nixon said in a statement. “The reality is that mRNA technology remains under-tested, and we are not going to spend taxpayer dollars repeating the mistakes of the last administration, which concealed legitimate safety concerns from the public.”
MRNA technology is already used in Moderna’s and Pfizer/BioNTech’s currently licensed Covid-19 vaccines, which have been found to be safe and effective. But public health experts have expressed concern that increasing anti-vaccine sentiments in general – and anti-mRNA sentiments specifically – may block people from accessing vaccines.
“The attack on mRNA vaccines is beyond absurd,” Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health and the White House Covid-19 response coordinator in the Biden administration, said Wednesday on social media. “It was President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed that gave us mRNA vaccines. These vaccines have been administered nearly 2 billion times to hundreds of millions of people around the world – making it one of the most widely used and widely studied vaccines in human history. They are safe and work well.
“If Bird Flu starts spreading from people to people, we will come to regret this as the day we decided to put the lives of the American people at grave risk.”
Avian influenza, or bird flu, is a broad term that refers to several types of influenza that normally infect birds. The H5N1 virus has raised concern among health officials because it has sickened dozens of people in the United States and killed one.
The US does have vaccines against H5 viruses in its Strategic National Stockpile, but they are made with older technology.
In February, Bloomberg News reported that US health officials were reevaluating the Moderna contract.
“So we worked very closely with industry to try and find ways to fund research and clinical trials and make sure that we had a variety of options available if this virus became more dangerous,” he said. “Because we just don’t know what’s going to happen next with this virus.”