Project 2025 vs. The Public’s Health, Part III

Part III: The NIH

In 2023, the Heritage Foundation published a 900-page document titled Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. The introduction states, “The 2025 Presidential Transition Project is the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025.” Should Donald Trump be elected president, this document provides a blueprint for government agencies, including those responsible for the public’s health. In the third part of this three-part series, we will examine Project 2025’s prescriptions for the National Institutes for Health (NIH).

The authors of Project 2025 state, “Funding for scientific research should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid and unaccountable insiders at the NIH, many of whom stay in power for decades. The NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken…More recently, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Anthony Fauci’s division of the NIH, owns half of the patent for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine and several NIH employees receive [annual royalties] from Moderna vaccine sales…That would be the same experimental mRNA vaccine that the CDC now wants to force on children, who are at little to no risk from COVID-19 but at great risk from public health officials.” (For the record, far from “little to no risk,” about 1,700 children in the United States have died from COVID-19.)

COVID entered the United States in early 2020. In only 11 months, vaccine manufacturers had made two mRNA vaccines that were safe and effective. These vaccines have saved the lives of about 3 million Americans. NIH was directly responsible for this remarkable achievement. Beginning about 30 years before COVID-19 entered the United States, NIH had invested hundreds of millions of dollars in basic and translational scientific studies necessary for the development of mRNA vaccines. For example:

First, if not properly modified, mRNA sets off a massive inflammatory response that detracts from the desired immune response. In a collaboration that began in 1997, Drew Weissman, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, and Katalin Karikó, who worked at the German company BioNTech, solved the problem by replacing the nucleotide pseudouridine for uracil in mRNA, eliminating the unwanted inflammatory response. In 2023, Weissman and Karikó won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their seminal work.

Second, SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is inherently unstable, constantly changing shape, which makes it less effective as a vaccine. The spike protein had to be stabilized, fixed into a more rigid structure. Jason McLellan, a structural biologist at the University of Texas at Austin, solved that problem by adding two stiff amino acids. Again, from research funds provided by NIH.    

Third, mRNA had to be protected from immediate breakdown after injection. This problem was solved by Pieter Cullis, who encased the mRNA into a lipid nanoparticle. Again, supported by research grants.

Finally, Barney Graham and Kizzmekia Corbett at NIH, who had been studying mRNA vaccines in response to the pandemic coronavirus MERS beginning in 2012, put these findings into action by creating mRNA-1273, the vaccine that would later be mass produced and distributed by Moderna. Before companies like Moderna make vaccines, they need to ensure that the technology is protected (i.e., patented). Because researchers at NIH were inventors on the patent, both they and NIH received royalties, which the agency devoted to more research. According to the authors of Project 2025, this was an unforgivable sin.

Thanks to NIH, the United States was well positioned to create a COVID-19 vaccine. The remarkable speed of this effort was directly related to many years of basic science research funded by NIH—an effort that should be applauded not vilified by Project 2025.

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