Reuters – US cancels more than $700 million funding for Moderna bird flu vaccine By Patrick Wingrove May 29, 2025 Bird flu has infected 70 people, most of them farm workers, over the past year as it has spread aggressively among cattle herds and poultry flocks. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has questioned the use of vaccines and earlier this year drew censure from some in the U.S. Congress after he suggested in a television interview that poultry farmers should let the bird flu spread unchecked through their flocks to study chickens who did not contract it. Moderna said it plans to explore alternatives for late-stage development and manufacturing of the vaccine. The company has been banking on revenue from newer mRNA shots, including its bird flu vaccine and experimental COVID-flu combination vaccine, to make up for waning post-pandemic demand for its COVID vaccine.
The demand for vaccines is down because there have been no real campaigns to get people vaccinated, and yet there have been huge and well funded disinformation campaigns scaring people about vaccines so that they are not making clear-headed risk benefit decisions. The irony is that these campaigns have come from a small number of people misinforming people, before and during the pandemic. The demand for vaccines is down also partly because of the lie that’s been told that we’re “post-pandemic” which can be interpreted to mean “the pandemic is over” (rather than “after the pandemic started”). People need to stop saying post-pandemic, because it’s not good communication, people are often not even talking about the same thing and don’t even realize it. The reason for vaccine uptake lagging has definitely been affected by orchestrated disinformation campaigns! Maybe we should actually promote vaccines instead of allowing or even doing taxpayer funded operations against vaccines.