Response to National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya's Aug. 13 op-ed, "Why NIH is pivoting from mRNA vaccines":
Jay Bhattacharya asserted in his op-ed that the mRNA "platform has failed a crucial test: earning public trust. No matter how elegant the science, a platform that lacks credibility among the people it seeks to protect cannot fulfill its public health mission." However, it did fulfill its mission in the face of the worst infectious-disease threat to public health in recent years. Several coronavirus vaccines were created, distributed and widely administered within a year — the fastest in history.
In October 2020, Bhattacharya was one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which was a widely condemned proposal that urged a "focused protection" approach to covid-19 rather than broad lockdowns and restrictions. Medical practitioners and public health officials argued that it underestimated covid's risks to younger people, overestimated the feasibility of shielding vulnerable groups, and would lead to unnecessary illness and death.
Bhattacharya claimed that the Biden administration spent a large amount of money on advertising that "misinformed the American public that the vaccine would protect them from contracting and spreading covid." But the public information campaign did not misinform the public that the vaccine would protect people from infection. For example, as the Food and Drug Administration described in its summary of the Moderna mRNA vaccine's clinical trials to its vaccines advisory committee for its December 2020 meeting, the very stringent criteria for "efficacy" clearly defined prevention of infection, and the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines easily met them, with efficacy greater than 90 percent.
(It was only later, after the coronavirus mutated and evolved, that the vaccines no longer effectively prevented infection — although they did, and do, continue to prevent severe illness, hospitalization and death.)
There is, without question, vaccine hesitancy in much of the U.S. population today, but it is not because of the lifesaving vaccine mandates of the Biden administration. It is due largely to anti-vaccine advocates including Bhattacharya and his boss, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Henry I. Miller, Redwood City, California