U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has canceled 22 federally funded projects aimed at advancing messenger-RNA vaccines, immediately terminating about $500 million in contracts managed by BARDA. Kennedy said the money will be redirected to “safer, broader vaccine platforms,” arguing that mRNA shots do not adequately protect against upper-respiratory infections such as Covid-19 and influenza. The decision drew sharp criticism from former Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams, who told CBS News the rollback will “cost lives” and noted studies attributing roughly two million U.S. lives saved to mRNA vaccines during the pandemic. An international statement from the Global Virus Network warned that scrapping the research would hobble pandemic readiness and accelerate China’s progress in the field. Internal dissent quickly followed. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, speaking on a podcast, offered a different explanation—public distrust in the technology—while Alastair Thomson, chief data officer at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, resigned in protest, calling the cut “the single most stupid thing” HHS could do. Separately, Vaxart and other developers received stop-work orders, and industry analysts said the abrupt shift may chill private investment in next-generation vaccines. Kennedy’s announcement came days after a gunman fired on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Atlanta campus on Aug. 8, killing a police officer. The secretary condemned the violence and visited the site but declined to link vaccine misinformation to the attack, a stance that frustrated some CDC staff during a brief, technically troubled all-hands meeting led by new director Susan Monarez.