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Oh now it makes sense.
Good morning, and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Friday, the eighth of August.
I'm Sam Kazlowski, I'm Billy Fitzsimon's.
This week, US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Junior announced he's canceling twenty two vaccine development projects worth five hundred million US dollars, specifically targeting mRNA technology used in COVID nineteen vaccines. The decision has sparked concern from infectious disease experts, who say could leave a man Erica vulnerable to future pandemics.
On today's podcast, we're going to dive into what these cuts actually mean, why we're seeing such dramatic changes in US health policy and where the similar changes could actually come to Australia.
So, Sam, this story all centers around RFK Junior, who is now in charge of America's health policy. For anyone who's not familiar with him, do you want to just give us a quick overview about who is RFK Jr.
Yeah, So this is the main character of this story, I'd say so. Robert F. Kennedy Junior is Donald Trump's Secretary of Health and Human Services.
He's kind of like our Minister for health exactly.
So it's the Mark Butler of America. He's from the famous Kennedy political dynasty. He's the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy. Now, before entering politics, RFK was an environmental lawyer, but over the past twenty years he's become a really prominent vaccine skeptic. He's repeatedly questioned vaccine, particularly during the COVID pandemic, and he linked vaccines to autism
despite overwhelming scientific evidence showing no connection there. He founded an organization called the Children's Health Defense that spreads what experts say is vaccine misinformation. And what's really significant now is, as you said, he is in charge of America's health system, so he oversees multiple health agencies. The ones that we would know and be familiar with would be the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, and the FDA, which regulate and recommend vaccines and medications.
I remember the CDC, the Center of Disease Control, was very prominent during the pandemic, so I think maybe a lot of us would know it from.
There Doctor Anthony Fauci, he was the figurehead.
Yes, so this was a pretty dramatic move from RFK Junior to cut funding for a lot of vaccines in the US. Do you want to just break down exactly what that announcement was this week?
Sure? So it was on Tuesday US time and RFK got up and announced that the Department of Health and Human Services will cancel contracts and pull funding for twenty two projects. And when you bundle all of those projects together, the total amount of funding being pulled is five hundred million US dollars, which is about seven hundred and seventy million Australian dollars.
And is this funding into the rollout of vaccines or funding into the research of future vaccines.
It's more in that second bucket, So it's more about the development of vaccines, particularly the ones that use mRNA technology to fight respiratory viruses.
Remind me what that is.
So mRNA technology I'll get to in a sect. But the respiratory viruses that we would know about from a vaccine context would be COVID nineteen, the flu and bird flu. Familiar, yes, And so the contracts being canceled, they involve some of America's biggest pharmaceutical companies. We're talking about Pizer and Maderna, and those are the companies that we know develops the
COVID nineteen mRNA vaccines. And so Kennedy comes out with this video exp blaming his decision, and he says, to replace the troubled mRNA programs, we're prioritizing the development of safer, broader vaccine strategies like whole virus vaccines and novel platforms that don't collapse when viruses mutate.
And to translate that into US non scientific yes, folk.
So basically what he's saying there is they're putting energy and money into developing a universal vaccine. So what's one vaccine that can adapt on the fly within the human body and fight any virus? That comes along the weakness with the mRNA vaccine. In Kennedy's view is that with every iteration of a virus like COVID, you need a new modification to the vaccine. And so he's looking for this idea of a universal vaccine, a one stop shot.
Do you like that, I get it, instead of a vaccine that when a virus mutates, isn't useful anymore.
Okay, that makes sense. And to go back to my earlier question, what exactly is MRNS technology?
So basically, it's a type of technology where scientists create a snippet of genetic code that carries instructions for how the body can make a protein that can fight a virus. So they pick a protein to target from a virus, they inject the instruction manual into the code of the vaccine, and your body then makes enough of that protein to trigger a protection from the virus. So it basically helps
your body produce its own vaccine dose. Now, the big advantage to mRNA technology is the speed at which it can be developed, and that's something we talked a lot about during the pandemic because mRNA vaccines were developed in record time and in the early stages of the pandemic. When we were talking about traditional vaccines, we were talking about years of development time needed. mRNA vaccines can potentially
be created in months now. Infectious disease experts say that the technology could be crucial for responding to future pandemics, especially in current concerns around bird flow in the US where it's potentially spreading to humans. Don't tell us that, I'm sorry.
That you can't tell us there's another pandemic on the way.
Well, I mean this has been a really interesting legacy from the pandemic is looking at pandemic preparedness, and there's a really interesting perspective for countries now of how ready is a country if another pandemic was to arrive on our doorstep.
So what I'm hearing about mRNA technology is that the value of it, its prime value is how speedy it can be in responding to any new viruses that emerge. But now RFK Junior has pulled funding from it. Now, neither you or I are vaccine experts. So what have the experts said about this?
It's such an in depth area of science. Let's talk about what the people who actually not going to talk about are saying. So I mean, the basic concern is that America could be caught unprepared for the next pandemic, and experts argue that the rapid development capability of the mRNA vaccines could be the difference between containing a new
virus quickly or facing another health crisis. So Jerome Adams, who was the surgeon General for the bulk of Donald Trump's first term, he wrote on X this week that while he has tried to be objective and non alarmist about recent decisions made by RFK jor, quite frankly, this move is going to cost lives. And that's somebody who was appointed by a Trump administration, which I thought was
really interesting. There's a leading academic expert on infectious diseases, Mike Osterholm, and he said, I don't think I've seen a more dangerous decision in public health in my fifty years in the business. Wow.
And obviously, Donald Trump, the US President, is the person who appointed RFK Junior, so I imagine that he's in support of this.
He is, so he gave Kennedy really significant freedoms to reshape American health policy. He's previously said he wants RFK to quote go wild on health and food policy. It's interesting with Trump because during his first presidency, Trump actually horted the development of mRNA technology. It was called Operation Warp Speed, and it was this big investment in funding to develop COVID vaccines really quickly. At the time, Trump
called mRNA vaccines a medical miracle. Now, in recent years, especially after the pandemic, he has expressed increasing skepticism about vaccines, and we can, I guess, look to the fact that he has appointed RFK Junior in this position as an indication of where he stands on the issue. There's one
really interesting comment I wanted to tell you about. So in the press conference this week with RFK Junior, when asked whether Trump is satisfied with his performance in the role in the first six months, RFK Junior said Trump calls him multiple times a week, always with the same question, why aren't people healthier?
Yet?
That was kind of cool. I mean, that's that very blunt question, one way to describe it. Very interesting. I would yeah, yeah, I can only imagine the conversation those two are having.
Yeah, And I want to go back to something you said earlier, because what you're sa said is that RFK Junior is not saying that we should cut vaccines all together. From what you said, you're saying that he thinks that there should be a universal vaccine. What does that look like and is that possible?
Well, it's largely theoretical at this stage. That's according to scientists and experts in the field. Scientists have been trying to develop an idea of a universal vaccine, even just a universal flu vaccine, for decades and they haven't been able to be successful in that. Essentially, a universal vaccine would mimic natural immunity and it would then be effective against both coronavirus and flu, but also any other virus that we might not even know about yet, and it
essentially would stimulate the body's natural immunity function. As I said, it's a promising idea, but scientists have no timeline on how this can be developed and if and when it could be available in the wider market.
And if we were to bring this back to an Australian context, is there any signal from the Australian government that they will move in a similar direction at all in line with the US.
No signal at all, really, I mean, there hasn't been a direct response to rfk's policy changes this week. But we can look to the investment in vaccine research and roll out as a pretty safe it's bipartisan as it's supported by everyone, it's part of our health framework, So I can pretty safely say that the government would not be looking to follow this path in Australia.
It's bipartisan, I meaning it's supported by basically both sides of Parliament or all sides of Parliament.
Yes, But what I did think was interesting is that there has been a number of stories that have come into the news over the last couple of months about the changing attitudes of Australians towards the flu vaccine. For example, there's been a steady decline in the percentage of adults in Australia who are getting the flu vaccine, and hospital admissions from flu have spiked this year by up to
fifty percent in some states. And at twenty twenty four survey published in the Media Journal of Australia found that about one in five said they would not get a government offered vaccine in a future public health emergency, while another seventeen percent said they were uncertain whether they would or wouldn't. So we can kind of say that about forty percent of Australians are either hesitant or outright against a government offered vaccine.
It would be interesting to know what those stats were prior to the pandemic and to kind of look at how it's changed since. But I think from everything that you've said, it's clear that they kind of are seemingly changing attitudes about.
Vaccinations definitely, and there's a clear delineation from pre pandemic attitudes to post pandemic attitudes, particularly in children. And that was something that our Health Minister Mark Butler touched on in June when he got up and released a new national immunization strategy.
Do you mean children getting vaccinations or the attitudes of children?
No, so I don't the type of age of children we're talking about here probably don't have vaccine attitudes just yet at six months to three, right, But the attitude of their parents to be getting children vaccinated has changed and it's kind of going down about one or two percent a year. So Mark Butler got up in June and released this new national strategy, and part of that strategy was a direct opposition to another move that RFK did.
RFK had announced a couple of weeks before that that America would withdraw its funding for GAVY, which is the Global Vaccine Alliance in Mark Butler's strategy. He announced a three hundred and eighty six million boost in funding to that body between twenty twenty six and twenty thirty. One interesting angle that we can talk about in terms of the effect of rfk's decision this week is actually the opportunities it presents in terms of Australia's capabilities to make
and even one day export mRNA vaccines. So CSL and Maderna they're the two biggest producers of mRNA vaccines in Australia. They've got large vaccination facilities now in the country. Experts say that Australia wouldn't be quite prepared today if there was another pandemic to roll out rapidly and universally a vaccine program. So we're not quite at the stage where
we would look at exporting it to other countries. But if you think about how much America produces in this space, if that was all cut, there would be some openings in the global export landscape, which is a quirky way to look at it, but an interesting to take.
So interesting such a topical story at the moment, Sam, thank you for explaining it to us. Thanks Billy, and thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Daily os. We'll be back this afternoon with your evening headlines, but until then, have a great day. My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bungelung
Caalcuttin woman from Gadigol Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first people of these countries, both past and present.