U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced last week that his department would slash about $500 million in mRNA vaccine contracts, a hit to an industry already reeling from other public funding cuts.

Those impacts are being felt in Vermont, experts say.

Kennedy and other vaccine skeptics in President Donald Trump’s administration have espoused distrust of mRNA technology. But experts say the criticism is by and large inaccurate and the vaccines are safe and effective, having saved millions of lives during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We are now at a point where the most efficacious of technologies, because it’s new, is causing fear, and that fear has found a political outlet,” said Dev Majumdar, an immunologist at the University of Vermont’s Larner College o

See Full Page