US cancels funding for Moderna bird flu vaccine

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The other problem with the cancellation: Budgets are likely already set, personnel hired, and roadmaps planned based on the expectation of secured funding and secured funding _sources_. Funding doesn't just mean cash being deposited, it usually on this level is additionally knowledge funding and sharing between organizations.

Cancelling funding, like this, also reduces input from the funder, the knowledge share, and expectations.

Now, you will have legions of [1]technicians, scientists, researchers, testers, legal, business, marketing, safety, regulation experts, engineers, hiring, and even HR,[/1] that are going to have to rework likely _months_ of planning and expectations.

One side is that now everything is in chaos and there are a lot of people that were part of this without a roadmap forward. Second side is that now you have a authority or expectations vacuum based on uncertainty and now there will be an internal 'war' between ideological camps and ideas on how to move forward, meaning loss of internal communication. The third part? Now, you have legions of *[^1] who are exhausted and feel like their time has been wasted and now are just frustrated.

This isn't even discussing that multi-year budgets and quotas have been set, and now to supplement the funding and knowledge drop, they will have to pull from other areas, causing a cascading effect.

Although this will be interpreted on the left as a partisan move (with the administration lying under duress or something), it's likely that they're telling the truth about why it was cancelled. Trump after all was a big supporter of the Moderna vaccines. But mRNA tech just doesn't work when normal safety standards are re-imposed. I wrote about the problem here a couple of weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44003338

It's easy to forget that the COVID vaccines were an emergency measure. The way they were judged wasn't how pharma products are normally judged.

There's what should be a glaringly obvious lesson about ends and means here but nobody will learn it.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciimmunol.adg7327

and related papers. Is the propensity to generate IgG4 antibodies specific to mRNA vaccines? Is it a problem? It seems entirely plausible that an mRNA flu vaccine would look amazing for one season and less amazing years later. Or not.

The COVID vaccine trials were very focused on the efficacy of a 1-3 dose series, in people with no previous immunity, at preventing disease or reducing its severity over a period of weeks to months after the vaccine series. This is not at all the situation with influenza or the situation now with COVID.

Compare to vaccines like MMR or Varicella, which were, and still are, studied over a period of many years.

Then COVID hit, and suddenly we decided to rush MRNA [1] vaccines into mass production without those protocols. Moreover, at one point they wanted to force [2] them on the population.

The thing that bothered me most is the government passed a law to prevent people from suing for damages if they're hurt by COVID vaccines [3]. If the vaccine really is safe and effective, why was the waiver necessary?

[1] If the made the COVID vaccine the same way they've been making them since polio, I'd be less uneasy -- if you made 25 vaccines with the process and they all worked okay, saying "it should be fine" for the 26th one is backed by some evidence.

But given MRNA vaccines were brand-new with the COVID ones, until then they'd made 0 vaccines with the process; saying "it should be fine" for the 1st one seems to be rather irresponsible.

[2] In my opinion, "you're being forced to do X" is a fair description of the situation if you have to show proof you did X if you want to get a job, get an education, or get on an airplane. Around the time of the first vaccines getting rolled out, these policies were being discussed very seriously.

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-c...

Because it's patently counterproductive -- modern medical science saves lives.

So what you really have is a bunch of people getting riled up about something because they don't currently need it, then making dumb choices at critical moments, then denying their actions caused consequences if they have bad luck.

A partner was a critical care nurse during COVID, and said she had people dying in beds who still denied COVID existed. Mind-boggling.

As soon as you tell an anti-vaxxer something like "there are risks, but..." all they hear is "aha!! I knew it was poison!".

Nobody on planet Earth said that the vaccine was 100% safe, nor that it was 100% effective. Because no vaccine, and no medicine, is. But we allowed people to revel in their own fear and anti-establishment mentality, and because of that, a lot of people died that did not need to.

DARPA identified novel pathogens with pandemic potential as a key threat to the US (and everyone else), identified mRNA vaccine platforms as something that would allow more rapid responses to novel pathogens, and invested in it.

And then when exactly that happened -- there were mRNA vaccine platforms ready.