Blumenthal Backs Vax

by Thomas Breen

Get a flu shot. Get a Covid shot. And get behind restoring federal funding for mRNA vaccine research.

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Yale School of Public Health Professor of Epidemiology Albert Ko, Yale immunobiology graduate researcher Sasha Tabachnikova, and Cornell Scott Hill Health Center CEO Michael Taylor delivered that message during a Thursday morning press conference at Hill Health’s headquarters at 400 Columbus Ave.

The presser took place more than a month after federal Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. scrapped nearly $500 million in federal grants and contracts for developing mRNA vaccines, which is the same technology used to develop Pfizer and Moderna’s Covid vaccines during the pandemic. It also came a week after a federal vaccine panel appointed by Kennedy voted to limit access to Covid vaccines.

“Healthcare is in the greatest jeopardy in my lifetime,” Blumenthal said about the impetus for Thursday’s press conference. That’s because of “resources denied” and “misinformation and disinformation” put forward by public officials, including President Donald Trump.

He lambasted Kennedy for firing the CDC director and for firing the members of an advisory committee on immunization practices and replacing them with “anti-vaxxers” and “people who are opposed to science.” He accused the Trump administration of “strangling research, essential medical research” by cutting tens of millions of dollars’ worth of grants that would have otherwise come to Connecticut. “The cuts in research must be reversed.”

Ko, a top public health advisor to Gov. Ned Lamont during the Covid-19 pandemic, described how alarmed he and his colleagues are by Kennedy’s cuts to funding for mRNA vaccine research. A majority of Connecticut residents received a mRNA Covid vaccine by June 2021, he said, a “remarkable public health success” that saved lives.

He said that people who lived in states with low Covid vaccine rates were three to four times more likely to die of Covid. And he noted that one billion people worldwide have received a Covid mRNA vaccine. “These vaccines are safe,” counter to Kennedy’s claims.

Ko urged members of the general public to get vaccinated against Covid, influenza, and RSV as the cold-weather season approaches.

During her time at the mic, Tabachnikova, a PhD candidate in immunobiology at Yale and a vice president of the Local 33 graduate student-worker union, said that she was working at Mt. Sinai hospital in New York City in 2020 when Covid hit.

She was working on cancer immunology research at the time. Her lab quickly pivoted to studying the immune response to Covid, including by collecting samples from patients at a nearby field hospital in Central Park.

In April 2021, she got her first dose of Moderna’s mRNA vaccine — a technology that has subsequently been “maligned and undermined” by Kennedy-pushed research funding cuts.

She said her lab is now working on trying to develop a nasal delivery of vaccines to fight Covid, influenza, and herpes. She called on her fellow scientists to “engage in the policy stakes of the work we do” to advocate for federal support for life-saving medical interventions like the mRNA Covid vaccines.

Blumenthal concluded his remarks Thursday by stating that there should be no extension of funding for the federal government — even through November, as Republicans have proposed — unless if Congress restores funding for Medicaid as well as for medical research into interventions like mRNA vaccines.