In an era of fast-paced scientific advancements, it’s easy to take medical gains for granted. We expect breakthroughs to occur on a regular basis, and 2025 delivered; successful trials of gene therapies for diseases that have no treatments, for example, filled scientists and the public with hope. But bright spots like these were overshadowed by a series of political decisions in the U.S. that have already started to set public-health care back instead of pushing it forward.
The White House and the nation’s top health agency, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), took a number of unprecedented actions in fundamental areas of public health. They kicked off the year with the dismantling of USAID, shutting down programs that provide life-saving global-health interventions including childhood vaccinations. The Administration then slashed budgets and personnel at the National Institutes of Health, one of the world’s premier biomedical research centers and the springboard for innovations like the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and immunotherapies for cancer. Meanwhile, despite the lack of any new data to justify skepticism, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is now sowing doubt about the long-established safety of vaccines, which public-health researchers say could lead to spikes in infectious diseases. The profound consequences of this year’s retrenchments will be felt for years to come.
Vaccines in the crosshairs
Many of the changes revolve around the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda and a mistrust of vaccines led by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic. In the spring, HHS withdrew important investments in research into new mRNA vaccines, and Kennedy also announced on social media that the CDC would no longer recommend the yearly COVID vaccine for most Americans, which led some states to make their own guidelines—continuing to recommend these shots for residents and reimbursing the cost.
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In June, Kennedy fired members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee and replaced them with people who question the safety of vaccines, and in August, President Trump fired the CDC’s newly appointed head, Susan Monarez, when she clashed with Kennedy over his vaccine strategy.
The Administration also reinstated a previously disbanded task force to reinvestigate the safety of childhood vaccines, even though data show that the shots are safe. Toward the end of the year, the CDC’s website changed to state that “the claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim.”
Threats to future progress
Public-health experts are vocally pushing back, citing decades of strong scientific evidence showing that vaccines are safe and do not cause autism. The source of much of the evidence on which experts like these rely—not just about vaccines, but about every aspect of medicine—is scientific research funded by NIH. What’s at stake when this foundation’s resources are eroded—and trust in science crumbles—is the scientific knowledge that drives many medical decisions in the U.S., as well as the pipeline of innovative treatments for all types of diseases. Immunotherapies that save so many lives from cancer began with funding from the NIH, for example, as did several gene therapies that reported positive results for the first time this year in treating Huntington’s disease, a rare genetic disease in newborns, and high cholesterol. These therapies and others could one day cure people of their conditions.
Without the basic research that made advances like these possible, the stream of innovative treatments that could save both lives and health care costs could be reduced to a trickle in coming years, experts worry. And as people live longer, the protection from therapies scientists haven’t even dreamed up yet may be more urgently needed than ever.
