Keeping the money in place ‘was not scientifically or ethically justifiable,’ a spokesperson for the department said.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has canceled funding for Moderna’s vaccine against avian influenza, also known as the bird flu, the department confirmed on May 29.
“After a rigorous review, we concluded that continued investment in Moderna’s H5N1 mRNA vaccine was not scientifically or ethically justifiable,” HHS communications director Andrew Nixon told The Epoch Times via email.
“The reality is that mRNA technology remains under-tested, and we are not going to spend taxpayer dollars repeating the mistakes of the last administration, which concealed legitimate safety concerns from the public.”
Moderna’s bird flu vaccine utilizes messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA), the same technology that’s part of COVID-19 shots from Moderna and Pfizer.
Those vaccines have been linked to side effects such as heart inflammation, an issue that was, for a period of time, known to health officials but not revealed to the public. A recent Senate report found that officials at one point planned to warn people with the inflammation not to undertake rigorous activity for at least three months, but ultimately did not issue that warning.
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The H5 strain of bird flu has been spreading in the United States, with cases of more than 173 million birds affected since 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
USDA officials said recently that they were going to invest up to $100 million in products aimed at preventing and treating the bird flu, including “novel vaccines.”
HHS also said earlier in May that it was pouring funding into a non-mRNA platform to create universal vaccines that will target, among other viruses, the bird flu.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has in the past expressed opposition to bird flu vaccinations.
“All of my agencies have advised against vaccination of birds because if you vaccinate with a leaky vaccine—in other words, a vaccine that does not provide sterilizing immunity, that does not absolutely protect against the disease—you turn those flocks into mutation factories,” Kennedy said on Fox News in March.
HHS agencies include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration.
