Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Tuesday that the Department of Health and Human Services will cancel $500 million worth of contracts for vaccine development projects that are using mRNA technology.

Experts have said the decision is "unfathomable."

This particular type of vaccine, short for "messenger ribonucleic acid," is credited with slowing the 2020 coronavirus pandemic and has been described as "miraculous" by some experts in the field of medicine.

According to Dr. Richard Besser, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and current president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the technology was developed over the last two decades — long before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Penn Medicine is home to the technology behind the development of this

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