Lack of federal support means vaccine makers are investing less in R&D

Uncertainty is a fact of life these days, and therefore of the economy. It's affecting consumers, business owners, investors, and vaccine makers, who are investing less in research and development because the rules have been changing under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Junior.

The federal government has rescinded funding for vaccine research, changed recommendations for who should get vaccines and when — and just last week, the FDA refused to review Moderna’s new mRNA flu vaccine.

Developing new vaccines is extremely expensive, and Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician at Johns Hopkins University, said it takes years.

“This is sometimes a decades-long process, or even longer,” he said. “And there are many failures.”

Even once a company does have success, Adalja said vaccines have never been a “major money maker” for pharmaceutical companies. That’s why, he said, investment and support from the federal government is critical for vaccine research and development.

“Many companies are dependent on that money, and they are also dependent upon the fact that they have access to a market in the United States,” he said.

Now, both are in question.

Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said the regulatory environment for vaccine approvals is shifting, too.

“Vaccine companies need to have one set of rules to play by,” he said. “If they’re constantly changing, the companies will decide that doing business here just doesn’t make financial sense.”

That’s already happening. Moderna has said it’s no longer planning to invest in new late-stage vaccine trials. And Jason Schwartz, associate professor of health policy at Yale University, said he’s worried other companies are making early-stage decisions about whether to prioritize vaccine research at all.

“Earlier-stage decisions may not make headlines, but they ultimately will set back vaccine R&D in ways that we'll continue to see for decades,” he said.

David Dodd, CEO of GeoVax Labs, a small biotech company in Georgia, said his company isn’t completely moving away from vaccines. But while the company previously had two priorities — a better COVID-19 vaccine for people who are immunocompromised and a vaccine for mpox and smallpox — it has now decided it’s less risky to focus primarily on the mpox vaccine.

“We may be setting priorities that are different than what we had in the past, that is for sure,” Dodd said.

Schwartz said he’s concerned about lots of companies shifting their priorities.

“We saw during the COVID pandemic just how transformative a vaccine can be, and there was momentum there, both for influenza and other potential pandemic diseases,” he said.

Now, Schwartz said that momentum has been lost.