Experts condemn the defense of the Director of NIH of research on the Vaccination Cup | American policy

When the director of the National Institutes of Health this week said that the financing of the development of mRNA vaccines – the backbone of Cèvres vaccines – was underway because they had not “gained public confidence”, it was encountered, publicly and in private, with exasperated disbelief.

Critics say that few have done more than Jay Bhattacharya and other senior health officials of the Trump administration to sow doubts about public health institutions and, by extension, the value of vaccines that have saved millions of lives around the world.

“It is amazing that Bhattacharya has the audacity to claim to know that the Biden era policies are responsible for distrust of mRNA vaccines, while he and his associates have done so much to reduce the appreciation of these important medical achievements,” said Jeremy Berg, the former director of the goalkeeper.

The comments of Bhattacharya appeared in an editorial in the Washington Post in which he defended a recent announcement by the Secretary of Health, Robert F Kennedy Jr, who is anti-vaccine, to end $ 500 million in federal funding for research on mRNA vaccines, which Kennedy justified by claiming that he had “examined science”. Experts say that the evidence that Kennedy examined did not support the end of the research.

While the mRNA platform was “promising” and could potentially provide breakthroughs in cancer treatment and other diseases, Bhattacharya said he had failed the test of use of public health because it had not won public confidence.

“No matter how elegant science is, a platform that lacks credibility among the people it seeks to protect cannot fulfill its public health mission,” he wrote.

But the approach, say the experts, is wrong. This also seemed to be minimizing an important point: namely that the ceremonial vaccines had finally managed to stop symptomatic and serious illnesses, even if they had not stopped infections.

Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and attending physician in the infectious disease division of the Philadelphia children’s hospital, said the question was not whether the vaccines had won in public trust, but if they worked and were safe. What, he said, the answer was “clearly yes”.

“The vaccine does not present itself for a public service. We do not need to vote to determine whether it is necessary to use it. We must do a better job by explaining the science that supports the use of the vaccine,” said Offer.

Bhattacharya’s criticisms were targeting the Biden administration squarely, even if the coasty vaccines were developed under the operation of Warp during the first Trump administration, a feat that the president himself presented as a major achievement. Bhattacharya said that the Biden administration “had not managed public confidence in coronavirus vaccines” and “did not correctly recognize the growing concerns of Americans concerning security and efficiency”.

Doctors and scientists interviewed by the Guardian challenged this story.

Jonathan Howard, a doctor whose next book, everyone is lying to you, examines how the medical establishment has standardized “coal” during the pandemic cocodes and saped public health, says that Bhattacharya was “omnipresent” in the media at the start of the pandemic, publication of the articles that generally tried to limit the covid.

Bhattacharya also wrongly declared in March 2020 that estimates of the Covid mortality rate “can be too high in order of magnitude”.

The NIH chief’s approach to vaccines, alleged Howard in his new book, was to spread “disinformation”.

“Dr. Bhattacharya has spent years dealing with rare, light and temporary vaccine side effects 1755272527 Use “distrust” as a pretext to destroy a whole field of scientific research, “he said.

Bhattacharya said he was a victim of censorship during the pandemic and defended what he called his dissident opinions.

Joshua Weitz, professor of biology at the University of Maryland and author of Asymptomatic, on how the asymptomatic transmission has led the global spread of COVID, said that the arguments of Bhattacharya had not recognized the role of the current management of the Ministry of Health and Social Services and Anti-Vaccin influencers.

“The success of vaccination campaigns depends on both the effectiveness of diseases against diseases and the number of people vaccinated in a timely manner,” said Weitz.

“The sows with hawks doubt the number of lives saved due to the vaccines stuck, promoting a recent study which claims approximately 2.5 million lives has been saved in the world rather than 10 million or more as estimated elsewhere. Even the low estimate of around 2.5 million saved lives testifies to this the ability of these vaccines to make a large -scale massive public health difference. ”

The NIH did not respond to a request for comments.

Bhattacharya’s opinion was worrying to certain experts who saw him as a sign that the NIH happens again from rhetoric against arnm vaccines as part of a disturbing model. Before his confirmation as a health secretary, Kennedy had already expressed reserves on the technology of mRNA vaccines. Once confirmed, the researchers would have been invited to clean the references to the technology of mRNA vaccines from subsidy requests.

In May, the Ministry of Health and Social Services canceled $ 776 million in Moderna to develop, test and license vaccines for influenza subtypes that could trigger future pandemics, and then came from Kennedy’s decision to reduce the development of research on mRNA vaccines. Opinion this week was another cause of panic.

“The fear is that it is only the tip of the iceberg,” said Jeff Glass, professor of biology and RNA therapy at Johns Hopkins University. Collery said that he had found that opinion was both shocking and disappointing, in part because the data around the coated vaccines were “probably some of the most convincing data for any vaccination program that we have ever had in human history”, from its 95% efficiency rate in two FDA trials.

“Can we continue to maintain the promise of this revolutionary technology in this climate?” He does not take much foresight to see that this model will probably manifest itself in politics changes. ”