The Department of Human Health and Services (HHS, in English) will cancel the contracts and withdraw the financing of some vaccines that are being developed to combat respiratory viruses such as COVID-19 and flu.
The Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a critic of vaccines for a long time, announced in a statement on Tuesday that vaccine development projects will be held worth 500 million dollars, all of them based on RNA technology.
The projects, in total, are led by some of the main pharmaceutical companies in the country, such as Pfizer and Modern, to prevent flu, COVID-19 and H5N1 virus infections.
MRNA vaccines are attributed to having stopped the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic.
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Kennedy said in Tuesday’s statement that he wants the Department of Health to move away from RNM vaccines and asked the department to start “invest in better solutions.” He did not give details about what these technologies could be.
On June 25 it was announced that an independent expert committee that advise the government on vaccines plans to review both the children’s vaccination calendar and the injections they have been approved for decadeswhich fed the concern that the panel can make changes in some of the recommendations for the public that have been in force for a long time.
The newly appointed Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP, in English) met for the first time that day. At the beginning of the month, RFK Jr., fired the 17 members of the panel and appointed eight people, many of whom have expressed their skepticism about the value and safety of vaccines.
The independent expert panel recommendations to the centers for disease control and prevention (CDC, in English) on who should receive certain vaccines, which in turn can influence that vaccines are covered by public and private health insurance.
The new president of the committee, Martin Kulldoff, a bioestadistic that He criticized the confinements During the pandemic and said he was fired from Harvard for refusing to vaccinate against COVID-19, he adopted a combative tone at the beginning of the meeting.
