By Zachary Stieber
Contributing Writer
The Department of Health and Human Services has canceled funding for Moderna’s vaccine against avian influenza, also known as the bird flu, the department confirmed on Thursday.
“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 wrote in an 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.
Moderna said in a statement that there were positive interim results from a “Phase 1/2” clinical study for the bird flu vaccine. The company said it had planned to further test the vaccine before receiving notification that HHS would be terminating funding for its development.
“While the termination of funding from HHS adds uncertainty, we are pleased by the robust immune response and safety profile observed in this interim analysis of the Phase 1/2 study of our H5 avian flu vaccine and we will explore alternative paths forward for the program,” Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said.
“These clinical data in pandemic influenza underscore the critical role mRNA technology has played as a countermeasure to emerging health threats.”
Just before President Donald Trump took office, HHS announced it was going to provide $590 million to Moderna to accelerate the development of bird flu vaccines.
Moderna said in 2024 that it received $176 million in funding to speed up the development of its influenza vaccine candidates.
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 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.
All birds in affected flocks are typically slaughtered, a practice known as “stamping out” in international standards promulgated by the World Organization for Animal Health. Both Kennedy and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins have suggested that farmers could keep alive exposed birds that survive, and the USDA said in February that it was going to work with farmers and scientists to “develop innovative strategies to limit the extent of depopulations.”
