Anyone who was around when seatbelts were mandated will know that dying for a political statement has always been a thing for a sadly large chunk of the population.
Extreme loathing of the mRNA Covid vaccine in particular is a hallmark of the anti-vaxxer community. I personally know two very Liberal ladies in this category, with whom I agree on nearly everything else under the sun. EXCEPT for mRNA vaccines; which to these folks are irredeemably evil, cancer-causing, dementia-causing, DNA-corrupting and utterly despicable in every way.
"For the right, the biggest lie was always that climate change isn’t happening, or isn’t caused by humans."
There was the thing about the Earth being six thousand years old. It's out of fashion to talk about it loudly on social media now, but still almost half of the US population believes it, and there was a huge cottage industry of books, movies, museums, fake experts and fake journals to bolster it, and a big legislative push to teach it in public schools.
I'd argue that climate change denial has its roots in creationism, that at bottom they're the same thing. The core of the belief is that God created the planet for humanity, and humanity is incapable of seriously damaging or altering such a grand creation, because that requires God-like power.
I remember when tv programs had to add trigger warnings if the following program mentioned evolution or that humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor
I commented separately before reading your post. I don't think it delays anything. The US biopharma market is too large for companies not to be pursuing new cancer treatments. Europe already has companies doing mRNA research (BioNTech, one of the pioneers, is German based). China was late to this game and all their Covid vaccines were based on existing technologies and were less effective.
Could the FDA be reluctant to approve cancer vaccines for political reasons? And if so, would that discourage overseas investment in the technology? The US market is huge because of high prices and high utilization, and accounts for a large fraction of global revenue for the most expensive treatments, even if the product is made by a European company. The FDA can dramatically shrink the global revenue potential of a new cancer treatment if they declare that they don't like the technology categorically.
If an effective mRNA vaccine for any deadly cancer is developed and not approved by the FDA it will probably get licensed in some other country and I’m sure that clinics offering it to Americans in Mexico, Europe or Asia ( I leave out Canada since they probably won’t let Americans get it because of how Trump has treated them ) will pop up and do great business. This would look so bad for the FDA that Congress could impeach RFK for malfeasance and mass manslaughter, but I don’t have much faith in Congress doing anything to rein in the executive branch.
We’re going to have trouble sooner than that Trumps threats of 200% tariffs on drugs, stacked on the 50% tariffs on India — where most of our generics come from, and which now is the only pharmaceutical sector that is cheaper in the US than other countries. And if you have children, when RFKj cancels recommendations for all childhood vaccines, then you need to be prepared for them no longer being covered by insurance.
Good points. So the pharma companies may plow ahead and sell their vaccines to non-US countries. Wealthy Americans will still be able to get their cancer vaccines by traveling to a foreign country and paying more for it. However, this will be another example of Trump and RFK screwing their less wealthy supporters.
While I like 99% of all Noah's posts, this one I don't. I spent my entire working career in basic research and then regulatory and drug safety in the biopharma industry. RFK, who is unhinged, cannot prevent biopharma companies from pursuing research into new cures. He can stop Federal funding of basic research which is utterly stupid for obvious reasons. Will this delay things? We don't know.
Most of the biopharma companies who are working with mRNA are looking at therapeutic uses. If they come up with a cancer cure, it will be developed and marketed. End of story.
Among the questions I would ask are “does delaying development mean ceding the lead to other companies in other countries” and “will that hamper availability or affordability for americans?” And of course Noah implies that such treatments would face strong headwinds from an FDA run by Trump or his lunatic successor(s) which seems pretty obvious to me. You can’t really separate these from each other. The point is to drive away research from this topic by depriving funding, threatening approvals, and scaring insurers from covering them.
Isn't "will it delay things" the whole question? My assumptions are that (1) there has to be some syngergistic bleed-over between the different research projects (easier question to answer) and (2) $500m is a lot of money. So while I can't answer the question, I'd be inclined to agree with Noah that it's a legitimate concern.
Plus (and I'm less confident on this) but the nature of public vaccine projects is that they often add manufacturing and production requirements, which might not be *instantly* relevant but can advance the state of the art in areas that wouldn't be immediately addressed by laboratory research, speeding up later delivery when a cancer vaccine is developed.
I said this above. The pharma companies may plow ahead and develop and sell their vaccines to non-US countries. But US insurance companies may not cover it. In fact, there might be questions of whether the CDC and FDA would even approve it because they are so politicized.
Wealthy Americans will still be able to get their cancer vaccines by traveling to a foreign country and paying more for it. However, this will be another example of Trump and RFK screwing their less wealthy supporters.
So, while pharma companies may plow ahead, the less wealthy American may not have access.
Not to put words in his mouth but Noah is a fan of the "just move" argument of housing affordability - which is technically true, but probably unhelpful for making anyone feel less existential about it.
Let's say I contend that the cost of going to Disneyland has shot up in price astronomically.
Then someone shows that the average price of food and drinks and toys and such inside the park has stayed the same since 1985 in inflation adjusted terms.
Then they also show that a day ticket was 13 dollars in 1985 (40Usd inflation adjusted to now) and that a day ticket now is 200 dollars.
So the price of spending time in the park has stayed the same.... But the price of getting in the door has increased 5x.
That would still support the "cost is going up astronomically" contention.
That last paragraph is key. People won't notice that they're dying from vaccines which weren't developed. That's going to be true of all the things Trump & #MAGA are doing: people won't notice that they're poorer because of tariffs, ending immigration, destroying govt capacity, & ending Pax Americana until it's too late to change course.
I recall 15+ years of NIH, Fauci specifically, refusing to fund mRNA. And then only because of COVID. Foundations, venture capital and pharma funds the breakthrough work. NIH Funding has little to do with FDA approvals. FDA approvals are done by teams in disease class, not technology. Though Ancel Keys and others have caused FDA to wipe out areas of work for decades. Perhaps to make America Healthy we should reform approvals so that politics does not get in the way.
"I recall 15+ years of NIH, Fauci specifically, refusing to fund mRNA"
I would want to understand the details of this. In my field (mostly NSF-funded research), the actual funding decisions are made by panels of scientists. The agency head mostly rubber-stamps them. This system isn't perfect, but it's kind of the best you'd hope from a system where "politics does not get in the way."
In any case, this doesn't look anything like what RFK Jr. is doing right now, so other than expressing a fantasy of how politics might work in a different Universe, not sure what this comment is bringing to the table.
There is no evidence Fauci "refused to fund" mRNA. mRNA was considered risky and unstable for years. The idea of injecting fragile RNA molecules into the body and expecting them to produce proteins reliably was viewed as speculative.
As head of NIAID, Fauci didn’t block mRNA funding, but it wasn’t a central focus of NIH’s vaccine strategy until COVID hit. Traditional platforms like protein subunits and viral vectors were more established and received more attention.
So it is unfair to say he "refused to fund." As with any investment in new technology, there are no unlimited budgets and tradeoffs had to be established. There was no critical use case for mRNA until COVID hit.
Well, what else can I say. Red meat eating, cancer, floods, low efficiency diesel engines are all very manly. Much better than living a safe, clean but emasculated modern life.
Yeah, but don’t forget you can also now manhandle a big bowl of Froot Loops without artificial dyes (drenched in unpasteurized milk FTW) and later manguzzle a new retro Coke made with cane sugar.
I really do hope that Europe’s recent success with Ozempic (well, Denmark’s success) is a signal that it’s still possible to build things and advance science in the regulatory hellhole that is the modern EU where innovation is generally a 4 letter word. I’m hopeful that means “we” will eventually get those mRNA cancer treatments RFK hates, just in a more roundabout and likely expensive-to-us way. But it’s a very circumscribed hope. Having to fly to another continent to get a banned and ruinously expensive lifesaving treatment is hardly the win against cancer we need.
Unfortunately Novo-Nordisk is loosing their future earnings now because they mismanaged their production of Ozempic and Wegovy and lost marketshare to Eli Lily’s Mounjaro and Zepbound that work better and are not in shortage ( and who has a pill form GLP1RA in trials now ) as well as compounding pharmacies who use generic semaglutide from China. There are several online places that describe in detail how you can DIY these for less than $300 a year
Given that mRNA technology is universally recognized as so promising, shouldn't it easily attract investment? If the government is going to subsidize research, shouldn't it be allocating resources to more speculative research that would have difficulty attracting private investment?
When people argue that we shouldn't subsidize solar because it is commercially successful, you point out that there are still national defense reasons to do it. There isn't really a national defense argument for subsidizing mRNA tech.
That begs the obvious questions: If renewables are so cheap, why have rates gone up so much everywhere that they have become the dominant form of generation?
The answer is externalities. Renewables generate at the wrong time and they provide no inertia to the grid. The cost of building a stable power grid with renewables needs to be factored into the price for a real world comparison rather than the fairytale cost that renewable energy only fans want to believe.
Only then can we have a real analysis of cost/benefit of different power types.
(For the record, I’d prefer a mix of nuclear and renewable as the primary generation types).
RFK always looks like he's constipated. Maybe he's redirecting all the research funds into a cure for that. The leaders always know what's in their own best interests, even if their followers don't.
So what's the total value of federal contract dollars that would need replacing here and over what time horizon? All the stories say $500M, which is small enough that the Gates Foundation could step up and replace it, or a consortium of merely-extremely-rich folks. But is there some large less direct resource drain here that the $500M figure doesn't capture? Or is the real issue that it imperils the whole next ~decade of basic research funding that would be required to realize the promise of cancer containment?
My biggest concerns are less about the pharma companies and more about the availability of vaccines they come up with. It seems like between the CDC, FDA, HHS, they could put barriers into place that prevent Americans from taking advantage of these technologies.
1. Will insurance companies pay for vaccines which the US government has not approved?
2. Can the US government prevent access to vaccines in the USA if they choose to?
3. Will the only way for Americans to get these vaccines be to fly to another country?
This will be much worse than the COVID vaccine deniers. At least with that, the only people they were hurting were themselves. The rest of us sane people could still get vaccines.
With this, though, RFK Jr is condemning everyone to die from cancer. This will affect a much larger group of people and people who are not willing to die for a cause. If communicated properly, this could be used to show that both RFK Jr and Trump are merchants of death.
Anyone who was around when seatbelts were mandated will know that dying for a political statement has always been a thing for a sadly large chunk of the population.
Extreme loathing of the mRNA Covid vaccine in particular is a hallmark of the anti-vaxxer community. I personally know two very Liberal ladies in this category, with whom I agree on nearly everything else under the sun. EXCEPT for mRNA vaccines; which to these folks are irredeemably evil, cancer-causing, dementia-causing, DNA-corrupting and utterly despicable in every way.
Go figure.
Too true. It's 'costly signaling' gone haywire.
"For the right, the biggest lie was always that climate change isn’t happening, or isn’t caused by humans."
There was the thing about the Earth being six thousand years old. It's out of fashion to talk about it loudly on social media now, but still almost half of the US population believes it, and there was a huge cottage industry of books, movies, museums, fake experts and fake journals to bolster it, and a big legislative push to teach it in public schools.
I'd argue that climate change denial has its roots in creationism, that at bottom they're the same thing. The core of the belief is that God created the planet for humanity, and humanity is incapable of seriously damaging or altering such a grand creation, because that requires God-like power.
I remember when tv programs had to add trigger warnings if the following program mentioned evolution or that humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor
Spot on. As a clinical researcher investigating lung and head neck cancers, I imagine pointless suffering resulting from this turn of policy.
I would like to know your thoughts on Europe and potentially China stepping in to fill the void, grab the talent, etc.
I commented separately before reading your post. I don't think it delays anything. The US biopharma market is too large for companies not to be pursuing new cancer treatments. Europe already has companies doing mRNA research (BioNTech, one of the pioneers, is German based). China was late to this game and all their Covid vaccines were based on existing technologies and were less effective.
Could the FDA be reluctant to approve cancer vaccines for political reasons? And if so, would that discourage overseas investment in the technology? The US market is huge because of high prices and high utilization, and accounts for a large fraction of global revenue for the most expensive treatments, even if the product is made by a European company. The FDA can dramatically shrink the global revenue potential of a new cancer treatment if they declare that they don't like the technology categorically.
If an effective mRNA vaccine for any deadly cancer is developed and not approved by the FDA it will probably get licensed in some other country and I’m sure that clinics offering it to Americans in Mexico, Europe or Asia ( I leave out Canada since they probably won’t let Americans get it because of how Trump has treated them ) will pop up and do great business. This would look so bad for the FDA that Congress could impeach RFK for malfeasance and mass manslaughter, but I don’t have much faith in Congress doing anything to rein in the executive branch.
We’re going to have trouble sooner than that Trumps threats of 200% tariffs on drugs, stacked on the 50% tariffs on India — where most of our generics come from, and which now is the only pharmaceutical sector that is cheaper in the US than other countries. And if you have children, when RFKj cancels recommendations for all childhood vaccines, then you need to be prepared for them no longer being covered by insurance.
Good points. So the pharma companies may plow ahead and sell their vaccines to non-US countries. Wealthy Americans will still be able to get their cancer vaccines by traveling to a foreign country and paying more for it. However, this will be another example of Trump and RFK screwing their less wealthy supporters.
Trump and RFK Jr: both merchants of death.
While I like 99% of all Noah's posts, this one I don't. I spent my entire working career in basic research and then regulatory and drug safety in the biopharma industry. RFK, who is unhinged, cannot prevent biopharma companies from pursuing research into new cures. He can stop Federal funding of basic research which is utterly stupid for obvious reasons. Will this delay things? We don't know.
Most of the biopharma companies who are working with mRNA are looking at therapeutic uses. If they come up with a cancer cure, it will be developed and marketed. End of story.
Among the questions I would ask are “does delaying development mean ceding the lead to other companies in other countries” and “will that hamper availability or affordability for americans?” And of course Noah implies that such treatments would face strong headwinds from an FDA run by Trump or his lunatic successor(s) which seems pretty obvious to me. You can’t really separate these from each other. The point is to drive away research from this topic by depriving funding, threatening approvals, and scaring insurers from covering them.
Isn't "will it delay things" the whole question? My assumptions are that (1) there has to be some syngergistic bleed-over between the different research projects (easier question to answer) and (2) $500m is a lot of money. So while I can't answer the question, I'd be inclined to agree with Noah that it's a legitimate concern.
Plus (and I'm less confident on this) but the nature of public vaccine projects is that they often add manufacturing and production requirements, which might not be *instantly* relevant but can advance the state of the art in areas that wouldn't be immediately addressed by laboratory research, speeding up later delivery when a cancer vaccine is developed.
I said this above. The pharma companies may plow ahead and develop and sell their vaccines to non-US countries. But US insurance companies may not cover it. In fact, there might be questions of whether the CDC and FDA would even approve it because they are so politicized.
Wealthy Americans will still be able to get their cancer vaccines by traveling to a foreign country and paying more for it. However, this will be another example of Trump and RFK screwing their less wealthy supporters.
So, while pharma companies may plow ahead, the less wealthy American may not have access.
I notice there wasn't a link debunking "Houses have become unaffordable for the middle class".
A basic look in the "growth in income" vs. "growth in house prices" over the past 3 decades would seem to suggest that this the unvarnished truth.
Noahpinion is a huge abundance advocate... But somehow the biggest justification for upzoning just isn't true?
That seems odd.
Not to put words in his mouth but Noah is a fan of the "just move" argument of housing affordability - which is technically true, but probably unhelpful for making anyone feel less existential about it.
That's certainly part of it and "unaffordability" varies from place to place, but it's telling that this is the one "lie" where he neglected citation.
He retweeted this yesterday, which shows that monthly mortgage payments are pretty much stable as a percentage of income
https://x.com/BenGlasner/status/1953502173188214925
But that is only half the story by its own chart.
Let's say I contend that the cost of going to Disneyland has shot up in price astronomically.
Then someone shows that the average price of food and drinks and toys and such inside the park has stayed the same since 1985 in inflation adjusted terms.
Then they also show that a day ticket was 13 dollars in 1985 (40Usd inflation adjusted to now) and that a day ticket now is 200 dollars.
So the price of spending time in the park has stayed the same.... But the price of getting in the door has increased 5x.
That would still support the "cost is going up astronomically" contention.
That last paragraph is key. People won't notice that they're dying from vaccines which weren't developed. That's going to be true of all the things Trump & #MAGA are doing: people won't notice that they're poorer because of tariffs, ending immigration, destroying govt capacity, & ending Pax Americana until it's too late to change course.
I recall 15+ years of NIH, Fauci specifically, refusing to fund mRNA. And then only because of COVID. Foundations, venture capital and pharma funds the breakthrough work. NIH Funding has little to do with FDA approvals. FDA approvals are done by teams in disease class, not technology. Though Ancel Keys and others have caused FDA to wipe out areas of work for decades. Perhaps to make America Healthy we should reform approvals so that politics does not get in the way.
"I recall 15+ years of NIH, Fauci specifically, refusing to fund mRNA"
I would want to understand the details of this. In my field (mostly NSF-funded research), the actual funding decisions are made by panels of scientists. The agency head mostly rubber-stamps them. This system isn't perfect, but it's kind of the best you'd hope from a system where "politics does not get in the way."
In any case, this doesn't look anything like what RFK Jr. is doing right now, so other than expressing a fantasy of how politics might work in a different Universe, not sure what this comment is bringing to the table.
There is no evidence Fauci "refused to fund" mRNA. mRNA was considered risky and unstable for years. The idea of injecting fragile RNA molecules into the body and expecting them to produce proteins reliably was viewed as speculative.
As head of NIAID, Fauci didn’t block mRNA funding, but it wasn’t a central focus of NIH’s vaccine strategy until COVID hit. Traditional platforms like protein subunits and viral vectors were more established and received more attention.
So it is unfair to say he "refused to fund." As with any investment in new technology, there are no unlimited budgets and tradeoffs had to be established. There was no critical use case for mRNA until COVID hit.
Well, it’s certain that gain of function research, even outsourced to China was one of the things Fauci definitely did not refuse to fund.
😆 cool story but now back to the plot 😆
Well, what else can I say. Red meat eating, cancer, floods, low efficiency diesel engines are all very manly. Much better than living a safe, clean but emasculated modern life.
Yeah, but don’t forget you can also now manhandle a big bowl of Froot Loops without artificial dyes (drenched in unpasteurized milk FTW) and later manguzzle a new retro Coke made with cane sugar.
I really do hope that Europe’s recent success with Ozempic (well, Denmark’s success) is a signal that it’s still possible to build things and advance science in the regulatory hellhole that is the modern EU where innovation is generally a 4 letter word. I’m hopeful that means “we” will eventually get those mRNA cancer treatments RFK hates, just in a more roundabout and likely expensive-to-us way. But it’s a very circumscribed hope. Having to fly to another continent to get a banned and ruinously expensive lifesaving treatment is hardly the win against cancer we need.
Unfortunately Novo-Nordisk is loosing their future earnings now because they mismanaged their production of Ozempic and Wegovy and lost marketshare to Eli Lily’s Mounjaro and Zepbound that work better and are not in shortage ( and who has a pill form GLP1RA in trials now ) as well as compounding pharmacies who use generic semaglutide from China. There are several online places that describe in detail how you can DIY these for less than $300 a year
Given that mRNA technology is universally recognized as so promising, shouldn't it easily attract investment? If the government is going to subsidize research, shouldn't it be allocating resources to more speculative research that would have difficulty attracting private investment?
When people argue that we shouldn't subsidize solar because it is commercially successful, you point out that there are still national defense reasons to do it. There isn't really a national defense argument for subsidizing mRNA tech.
"There isn't really a national defense argument for subsidizing mRNA tech."
Are you absolutely sure?
Of all the screwups this administration is making, this one is way down the list. Morons gonna moron.
You keep saying that renewables are cheap.
That begs the obvious questions: If renewables are so cheap, why have rates gone up so much everywhere that they have become the dominant form of generation?
The answer is externalities. Renewables generate at the wrong time and they provide no inertia to the grid. The cost of building a stable power grid with renewables needs to be factored into the price for a real world comparison rather than the fairytale cost that renewable energy only fans want to believe.
Only then can we have a real analysis of cost/benefit of different power types.
(For the record, I’d prefer a mix of nuclear and renewable as the primary generation types).
RFK always looks like he's constipated. Maybe he's redirecting all the research funds into a cure for that. The leaders always know what's in their own best interests, even if their followers don't.
So what's the total value of federal contract dollars that would need replacing here and over what time horizon? All the stories say $500M, which is small enough that the Gates Foundation could step up and replace it, or a consortium of merely-extremely-rich folks. But is there some large less direct resource drain here that the $500M figure doesn't capture? Or is the real issue that it imperils the whole next ~decade of basic research funding that would be required to realize the promise of cancer containment?
My biggest concerns are less about the pharma companies and more about the availability of vaccines they come up with. It seems like between the CDC, FDA, HHS, they could put barriers into place that prevent Americans from taking advantage of these technologies.
1. Will insurance companies pay for vaccines which the US government has not approved?
2. Can the US government prevent access to vaccines in the USA if they choose to?
3. Will the only way for Americans to get these vaccines be to fly to another country?
This will be much worse than the COVID vaccine deniers. At least with that, the only people they were hurting were themselves. The rest of us sane people could still get vaccines.
With this, though, RFK Jr is condemning everyone to die from cancer. This will affect a much larger group of people and people who are not willing to die for a cause. If communicated properly, this could be used to show that both RFK Jr and Trump are merchants of death.