{"id":10074,"date":"2025-08-20T13:14:51","date_gmt":"2025-08-20T18:14:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=10074"},"modified":"2025-08-20T13:14:54","modified_gmt":"2025-08-20T18:14:54","slug":"america-is-abandoning-one-of-the-greatest-medical-breakthroughs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2025\/08\/20\/america-is-abandoning-one-of-the-greatest-medical-breakthroughs\/","title":{"rendered":"America Is Abandoning One of the Greatest Medical Breakthroughs"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"panel body-content\"><div class=\"panel__container\">\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/08\/18\/opinion\/mrna-vaccines.html\">NYT Opinion<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In early 2020, when the first genetic sequence of the new coronavirus was posted online, scientists were ready. Within hours, they began designing a vaccine. Within weeks, clinical trials were underway. That unprecedented speed, which saved millions of lives, was possible only because years earlier, the United States invested in a vaccine technology called mRNA. Today that work is being sidelined and, with it, our best chance to quickly respond when the next threat emerges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Department of Health and Human Services recently announced it would wind down 22 mRNA vaccine development projects under the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, halting nearly $500 million in investments. This decision undercuts one of the most significant medical advances in decades, technology that could protect millions more people from the threats ahead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I know the stakes because I was BARDA\u2019s director when the United States made the decision to invest heavily in mRNA. That investment did not begin with Covid-19. It began in 2016, when we faced the Zika virus outbreak. We needed a way to design a vaccine in days, not years, to protect pregnant women and their babies from devastating birth defects. Older vaccine approaches were too slow. The solution was mRNA: a flexible, rapid-response technology that could be reprogrammed for any pathogen once its genetic sequence was known. That early investment laid the groundwork for the lightning-fast Covid-19 response four years later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/08\/18\/opinion\/mrna-vaccines.html\">Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NYT Opinion In early 2020, when the first genetic sequence of the new coronavirus was posted online, scientists were ready. Within hours, they began designing a vaccine. Within weeks, clinical trials were underway. That unprecedented speed, which saved millions of lives, was possible only because years earlier, the United States invested in a vaccine technology [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-vaccine-headlines"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10074"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10074\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10075,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10074\/revisions\/10075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}