Moderna awarded $590M to help accelerate development of mRNA-based bird flu vaccine: HHS
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(NEW YORK) — Moderna has been awarded approximately $590 million from the federal government to help speed up the development of an mRNA-based bird flu vaccine, alongside other influenza vaccines, health officials announced Friday.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said in a press release that the funding will allow the pharmaceutical company to accelerate the development of an H5N1 mRNA influenza vaccine “that is well matched to strains currently circulating in cows and birds and expands the clinical data supporting the use of mRNA vaccines that may be needed if other influenza strains emerge with pandemic potential.”
Moderna said the funding will support the expansion of clinical studies “for up to five additional subtypes of pandemic influenza.”
The U.S. government previously awarded the vaccine manufacturer $176 million in July 2024 to help expedite the development of an mRNA vaccine that could be used for bird flu.
mRNA technology is the same type that was used in the development of some COVID-19 vaccines. While some vaccines use a weakened or inactive virus to stimulate an immune response, mRNA vaccines teach the body how to make proteins that can trigger an immune response and fight off an infection.
Researchers can often design mRNA vaccines more quickly than they can produce the live or weakened pathogens needed for a live-attenuated or inactivated vaccine.
The federal government already has two bird flu vaccine candidates, which use traditional vaccine technology, available in the nation’s stockpile. Officials previously noted they’d have 10 million ready-to-use doses within the beginning of 2025. Vaccines were being stockpiled as a precaution.
“Avian flu variants have proven to be particularly unpredictable and dangerous to humans in the past. That is why this response has been a top priority for the Biden-Harris Administration and HHS,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement on Friday. “Accelerating the development of new vaccines will allow us to stay ahead and ensure that Americans have the tools they need to stay safe.”
Bird flu cases in humans have been spreading across the country since April 2024 with 67 confirmed cases as of Friday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The first death of a human bird flu patient was reported in Louisiana earlier this month. The patient was over the age of 65 and had underlying medical conditions, according to health officials.
Most human cases have occurred after coming into contact with infected cattle, infected poultry farms or other culling operations.
The CDC and other public health officials say there is currently no evidence of human-to-human transmission and the risk to the general public is low.
ABC News’ Mary Kekatos contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — In his first public comments on the measles outbreak hitting West Texas and New Mexico, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent vaccine skeptic whose first steps in combatting the outbreak will be closely watched, said his department was monitoring the situation daily but called it “not unusual.”
“Incidentally, there have been four measles outbreaks this year in this country. Last year there were 16. So, it’s not unusual, we have measles outbreaks every year,” Kennedy said Wednesday at the White House.
However, some public health experts were quick to point out that the outbreak in Texas has defied America’s recent history with highly contagious disease.
Prior to this outbreak, the U.S. had not seen a death from measles since 2015. And in 2000, years after the U.S. implemented a two-dose vaccine schedule, measles was declared eliminated from the U.S., meaning that the disease had stopped spreading within the country.
Only in recent years have cases and outbreaks been rising, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The outbreak in West Texas and New Mexico is already drawing close to the halfway mark of total cases seen nationally last year, when there were at least 285 cases of measles – which were also the highest numbers since 2019, according to the CDC’s latest figures.
And while there were 16 outbreaks last year, that was a four-time increase from the number of outbreaks in 2023, when there were just four outbreaks. The U.S. has nearly hit that 2023 number already, just two months into 2025.
Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, called Kennedy’s comments about measles cases happening “every year” an attempt to normalize an outbreak that has been anything but normal.
“First of all, we eliminated measles from this country by the year 2000. The reason measles have come back is because a critical percentage of parents have chosen not to vaccinate their children, because they’ve gotten misinformation and disinformation from people like him and his Children’s Health Defense,” Offit told ABC News.
Children’s Health Defense, a group founded by Kennedy, advocates against the recommended vaccine schedule for children.
“It’s unconscionable enough that he’s done that, but that he sort of glibly says, well, measles outbreaks occur every year — the point is they don’t have to occur at all, because we’ve shown we could eliminate this disease,” Offit said.
ABC News has reached out to HHS about RFK Jr.’s comments.
The increase in cases and outbreaks over the last few years coincides with decreasing vaccination coverage for measles among kindergarteners nationally from 95.2% during the 2019-2020 school year to 92.7% in the 2023-2024 school year – leaving about 280,000 kindergartners at risk, according to the CDC.
Kennedy, prior to taking his role as HHS secretary, said the measles vaccine is effective at preventing measles, but has also suggested that it’s not necessary because people who die from measles are typically malnourished or have other comorbidities.
“The measles vaccine definitely eliminates measles, or, you know, close to eliminates it,” Kennedy said in 2022.
But he went on to question the deadliness of the disease.
“In 1963, it was killing only 400 kids a year. Mainly, they were kids who had malnutrition, or had some other devastating co-morbidity,” Kennedy said. “Those were the kids who were dying.”
Kennedy has also questioned that the deaths of 83 people – mostly young children – in Samoa in 2019 were caused by measles, despite widespread evidence that the deaths were due to an outbreak of the disease caused by under-vaccination in the American territory.
“Nobody died in Samoa from measles. They were dying from a bad vaccine,” Kennedy told an interviewer last year.
20% of kids with measles in the U.S. require hospitalization, said Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, often for measles pneumonia, measles diarrhea, measles encephalitis or deafness from measles otitis, an ear infection — many of which can be life-threatening conditions.
“This is a bad, bad actor. And I’m really concerned that this thing is continuing to accelerate and expand,” Hotez said Wednesday night in an interview on MSNBC.
Doctors in West Texas have described shock and feaver-treating a disease they thought was something of the past.
“This is the first time I’ve had any professional experience with a measles outbreak,” Dr. Lara Johnson, pediatrician and Chief Medical Officer at Covenant Children’s and Covenant Health in Lubbock, who is currently treating measles patients from the outbreak in West Texas, told ABC news.
“I saw one travel-related case when I was in medical school, very briefly, but at that time, back in around 2000, we really thought that we’d eradicated measles from the United States and didn’t have any anticipation of seeing any outbreaks here,” she said.
The outbreak in Texas is a prime example of the risk posed to unvaccinated communities. Vaccine exemptions among children in Gaines County, the epicenter of the outbreak, have grown dramatically in the past few years. Roughly 7.5% of kindergarteners had filed an exemption for at least one vaccine in 2013. 10 years later, that number rose to over 17.5% – one of the highest in all of Texas, state health data shows.
As the response to the outbreak in Texas and New Mexico continues, with cases expected to significantly rise, public health experts like Hotez and Offit say they’re watching Kennedy, as leader of the nation’s health department, to encourage swift surveillance and widespread vaccination.
“I want him to say to the American public that there’s a safe way to prevent these outbreaks from happening so that we don’t have the tragedy like what just happened in West Texas,” Offit said. “There’s so much in medicine you don’t know. There’s so much we can’t do. This we know. This we can do.”
(WASHINGTON) — Five years ago, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak to be a pandemic, leading to stay at-home orders and shutdowns across the U.S. and world.
The nation looks much different since then, and scientists and researchers have learned a lot about the virus, including how it infects people, the best forms of treatment and what puts someone at risk for long COVID.
There are still many questions, however. Health care professionals are working to find answers, such as how many people have truly died, how long the virus spread undetected in the U.S. and its origins.
“We know this emerged in China, around the city Wuhan. That’s very clear,” Dr. Cameron Wolfe, an infectious diseases specialist and a professor of medicine at Duke University School of Medicine, told ABC News. “We know when [the] medical community identified it, but we don’t know quite how long it was circulating before then. I think it’s caused some of the consternation.”
How many people have died of COVID-19?
As of March 6, at least 1,222,603 Americans have died of COVID-19, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The U.S. currently has the highest number of deaths of any country in the world, according to the WHO.
Experts, however, believe the true death toll is higher.
“More than a million people is a tragedy into itself, let’s start with that obvious fact,” Wolfe said. “I think the numbers are really hard to pin down for one key reason.”
Determining the exact cause of death can be complicated, Wolfe explained. Someone could die of COVID pneumonia — a lung infection caused by the virus — or die from a heart attack after contracting COVID.
Another example is an older adult who contracts COVID-19. They may become dehydrated, break a bone — because dehydration negatively impacts bone health — and suffer fatal complications, Wolfe said.
“How you count those outcomes is really important because, to me, that person wouldn’t have had their heart attack or that person wouldn’t have become dehydrated and fallen over and landed in the hospital if not for COVID triggering that event in the first place,” he said. “So, I actually think it’s really important to count those as COVID-associated mortalities, but they’re hard to count. They’re hard to track.”
Globally, more than 7 million people have died due to COVID-19, WHO data shows, although the agency says the pandemic caused an estimated 14.83 million excess deaths around the world in 2020 and 2021.
What is the mechanism behind long COVID
Scientists are not sure what causes long COVID but have identified certain risk factors such as an underlying health condition. Long-COVID symptoms can last for weeks, months or even years and can include — but are not limited to — fever, fatigue, coughing, chest pain, headaches, difficulty concentrating, sleep problems, stomach pain and joint or muscle pain, according to the CDC.
Research has found that patients with long COVID tend to have lower cortisol levels and lower testosterone levels.
“There are several questions that we still do not have answers for. What is the mechanism of the disease? Why do some people get more sick than others?” Dr. Fernando Carnavali, an internal medicine physician and a member of the team at Mount Sinai’s Center for Post-COVID Care, told ABC News.
Carnavali said scientists are using machine learning to study groups of long COVID patients in an attempt to determine the mechanisms that cause the condition.
“Do we have a single answer? Not as of yet, and most likely, perhaps we’ll have more than one answer,” he said.
Carnavali said the mechanism may not be the same for every long COVID patient. Additionally, people may have different symptoms due to different genetic predispositions.
“Some of the deficits that we have five years ago still remain, but I think that we should all understand and be hopeful that … researchers using machine learning will [provide] us some of the answers that we need as clinicians,” he said.
When did COVID enter the United States?
It’s still not exactly clear when the virus first entered the U.S. The first confirmed case in the country was Jan. 20, 2020, in a man in his 30s in Washington state, who developed symptoms after a trip to Wuhan.
However, studies have suggested the virus may have been circulating undetected for months beforehand.
Although the WHO was first notified on Dec. 31, 2019, about the mysterious pneumonia-like illness that originated in Wuhan, experts say it is likely that in an age of global travel, the virus was in the U.S. before then.
“It’s more likely circulated before Jan. 1 [2020]. It doesn’t seem unreasonable, November, December,” Dr. Lisa Olson-Gugerty, an associate teaching professor for Syracuse University and practicing family nurse practitioner in emergency medicine, told ABC News. “COVID masquerades itself as a flu-like illness, upper respiratory-like illness, like many other viral illnesses. It’s not easy to say, ‘Hey, I think this must be a new thing, and I’m going to tell everyone.'”
She went on, “I think it takes a bit of collective time to recognize a new viral strain, and it doesn’t seem unreasonable [there were] cases that could have been recognized as COVID before the date of release of information.”
Where did the virus come from?
There are two theories about where the virus, known as SARS-CoV-2, originated.
At least four U.S. agencies believe the virus was a result of natural transmission and that the virus jumped from animals to humans at a wet market.
The FBI, the CIA and the Department of Energy – the latter with “low confidence” — believe the COVID-19 pandemic “most likely” was the result of a laboratory leak in China.
Additionally, an April 2023 report from Senate Republicans conceded that “both hypotheses are plausible” but that the evidence points to the virus emerging from an accidental lab leak in Wuhan — and there may even have been multiple leaks.
If the virus did come from an animal, there are questions about which species may have spilled the virus over from animals to humans.
“I’ve seen a lot of conflicting information,” Olson-Gugerty said. “Did it come from a bat? Did it get into raccoon dogs or civet cats? Or was it a lab-created virus in Wuhan, China There does seem to be a jury that’s out.”
Wolfe said we may never know the true origins of SARS-CoV-2, but trying to answer the question helps scientists and public health professionals learn how to mitigate the spread so a pandemic — or even widespread illness — doesn’t happen again.
“This was the same question that happened during the Ebola pandemic, when we had to say, ‘Where did this come from? How can we educate people to minimize this future risk?'” he said. “It was important to examine where COVID-19 came from to try and put things in place that would stop that happening.”
He added, “We certainly, I would say, have better safety mechanisms now in place … so there are some good things that have come out of this.”
(WASHINGTON) — New research shows the far-reaching effects of the abortion bans that have proliferated the United States since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Three new studies have provided some of the first nationwide data on the effects of those bans in the states where they are currently active — revealing more births but also a rise in infant deaths.
The impact of those bans have even spread to states where abortion is still legal, the studies showed.
In the first study, Johns Hopkins researchers found that birth rates rose 1.7% in states with abortion bans. It showed that the bans primarily affect racial minorities, younger individuals and those with lower income or education, especially in the South.
“Those experiencing the greatest structural disadvantages and in the states amongst the worst in maternal and child health outcomes experience the greatest impact of these abortion bans on the number of live births,” Suzanne Bell, PhD, MPH, the paper’s lead author and an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told ABC News.
“Many of these occurred in states with among the weakest social services and worst outcomes, potentially deepening existing disparities and placing additional burdens on already strained resources,” she said.
At the same time, infant deaths rose in states with abortion bans, according to another Johns Hopkins study. Analyzing birth and death records from 2012 to 2023, Bell’s team noted 478 more infant deaths than expected in 14 states with the bans. The highest increases were seen in Black infants (about an 11% higher death rate), infants in Southern states and infants born with severe medical conditions.
“When you look at Texas’ contribution to the overall findings, we see that Texas is responsible for 73% of the additional births and 80% of the excess infant deaths,” Bell said.
But states without bans have also felt the effects.
Abortion also rose in Colorado, a state that maintained access to abortion with no gestational limits, according to a research letter recently published in JAMA Network Open.
Colorado State University researchers found that abortions for out-of-state residents in Colorado rose from 13% in 2020 to 30% in 2023. Abortions among Colorado residents also peaked six months after Texas’ abortion ban, with an 11% increase in first-trimester abortions and an 83% increase in second-trimester abortions compared to before the ban.
The surge in demand led to delays, possibly raising costs, emotional toll and procedure complexity, the authors said. However, second-trimester abortions have since stabilized, possibly due to expanded telehealth, self-managed abortions and access in other states, they added.
Currently, abortion is illegal in 12 states, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and 29 states have some sort of abortion limitation based on gestational age. Nine states have no restriction on abortion.
“The literature we have demonstrates that not being able to obtain an abortion has negative physical, mental and economic implications for birthing persons, their children and their families — and undermines achieving health equity,” Bell said. “These bans are deepening or worsening some of these existing population health disparities that exist.”
Jessica Yang, DO, is a family medicine resident at Main Line Health Bryn Mawr Hospital and a member of the ABC News Medical Unit.
