Recent Episodes
Attack on RNA Vaccines
One way to gauge the value of the COVID-19 vaccines is to calculate how many people would have been sickened and died without them. Just in the US, we would have had one and a half times more infections, nearly 4 times more people hospitalized, 4 times more deaths, and more than $1 trillion in added medical costs.
And yet, today, the number of people getting COVID-19 vaccine boosters has plummeted, due mostly to conspiracy theories, politics, and misinformation . And the federal government has cut funding for mRNA research by $500 million.
That’s important because the technology behind the COVID vaccines is mRNA, which can be used to make effective and safe vaccines.
mRNA is also being used to create personalized cancer vaccines. Before COVID and the success of mRNA vaccines became politicized, federal funding supported mRNA vaccine research for nearly 3 decades at a total cost of $1.5 billion. That’s partly why the COVID vaccines were ready in a relatively short time and made in time to save millions of lives around the globe. Defunding it now will stifle the near limitless potential of this technology.
The potential of personalized mRNA cancer vaccines to be produced at just $20 a dose could put a big dent in the $200 billion we now spend on traditional cancer treatments each year. We would all benefit by keeping politics out of these decisions and let science experts make.
More Information
RNA vaccine funding cuts threaten decades of scientific progress
Federal investment in RNA vaccine research has supported nearly three decades of scientific work spanning infectious diseases, cancer, and vaccine development, but recent and proposed funding cuts threaten to stall that progress, according to a cross-sectional study published yesterday in JAMA Network Open.
Report: COVID-19 vaccines saved US $1.15 trillion, 3 million lives
A Commonwealth Fund study estimates that, through November 2022, COVID-19 vaccines prevented more than 18.5 million US hospitalizations and 3.2 million deaths and saved the country $1.15 trillion. The modeling study estimated hospitalizations and deaths averted through the end of November 2022, at a time when 80% of the US population had received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine.
