US cancels funding for Moderna bird flu vaccine

Re:US cancels funding for Moderna bird flu vaccine by pengaru on Thursday May 29, 2025 @11:39AM (#44127123)

  > The vaccines were developed during the first Trump administration. Trump himself wanted credit for developing them.

No. They were produced at scale during his administration to combat the pandemic, but were developed well before that, with support from a government actually funding vaccine R&D:

Moderna was also awarded a $25,000,000 grant by DARPA through a program Autonomous Diagnostics to Enable Prevention and Therapeutics: Prophylactic Options to Environmental and Contagious Threats (ADEPT-PROTECT). Its stated goal was to develop an mRNA vaccine with the capability to suppress a global pandemic within 60 days. (2013)

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Re:US cancels funding for Moderna bird flu vaccine by ethbr1 on Thursday May 29, 2025 @12:47PM (#44127811)

The history of DARPA funding mRNA vaccine platforms should be more widely known, because it's exactly what the government should be doing.

DARPA identified novel pathogens with pandemic potential as a key threat to the US (and everyone else), identified mRNA vaccine platforms as something that would allow more rapid responses to novel pathogens, and invested in it.

And then when exactly that happened -- there were mRNA vaccine platforms ready.

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Re:US cancels funding for Moderna bird flu vaccine by pengaru on Thursday May 29, 2025 @01:05PM (#44127995)

When the crackpots learn DARPA funded Moderna's development of mRNA vaccines ahead of COVID19, all they hear is the government caused the pandemic.

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