Trump administration cancels multi-million dollar bird flu vaccine contract with Moderna
The pharmaceutical giant was awarded the multi-million dollar contract by the Biden administration last year, as the H5N1 virus began to ravage US dairy and poultry farms.
It has since infected more than 70 people in America, killing one, and experts say it is only a matter of time before it starts to spread between humans – an event that could trigger a new pandemic.
Just yesterday, an 11 year old boy died in Cambodia after becoming infected, the fifth H5N1 death in the region this year.
A spokesperson for the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said that after an internal review, the agency had decided to cancel the Moderna contact.
Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a long time vaccine sceptic, has repeatedly expressed concern over the safety of mRNA vaccines despite them having saved millions of lives during the Covid-19 pandemic.
This week Mr Kennedy also announced that mRNA Covid vaccines would no longer be recommended for healthy children or healthy pregnant women.
Currently, the US lacks sufficient bird flu vaccine stockpiles, with only 0.82 doses available per person, according to disease analytics firm Airfinity.
The agreement with Moderna was intended to strengthen the country's pandemic preparedness by diversifying its emergency H5N1 vaccine stocks.
It is thought mRNA vaccines can be developed and produced more rapidly than traditional flu vaccines which are grown in chicken eggs – a method that is both slow and difficult to scale.
The cancellation of the contract came on the same day Moderna announced positive results for the jab from its first preliminarily clinical trials: testing of 300 people found the H5N1 vaccines to be 98 per cent efficacy, and 'generally well tolerated.'
'The cancellation [of the contract] means that the government is discarding what could be one of the most effective and rapid tools to combat an avian influenza outbreak,' Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security told Reuters.
The European Union has secured 450 million doses of bird flu vaccines – enough for one dose per EU resident – from multiple manufacturers, including CSL Seqirus, GSK, and Pfizer.
Moderna, founded just 11 years ago and based in Massachusetts, received over $30 billion in US government funding during the Covid-19 pandemic under the leadership Dr Anthony Fauci, which allowed it to quickly develop and deploy millions of doses of its vaccines.
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