Many aspects of Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services are troubling, but one that has not received enough attention is his opposition to research on vaccines.
During his presidential run, Kennedy went so far as to say that vaccine research has “created some of the worst plagues in our history.”
He thus claimed, with no evidence, that Lyme disease and West Nile virus were created by the military at a federal research facility and that HIV and the Spanish flu that killed millions of people after World War I were by-products of vaccine research.
To be clear, in the last 50 years, vaccines have saved over 150 million lives worldwide. Vaccines have consequently had the greatest impact on reducing numbers of deaths of any type of healthcare intervention. And yet based on the conspiracy theories he has espoused, Kennedy has spoken about reducing the size of the National Institutes of Health and giving “infectious disease a break for about eight years.”
Needless to say, infectious diseases will not observe Kennedy’s proposed moratorium. A changing climate, closer contact between people and animals, and increasing world travel are accelerating the evolution and spread of new pathogens, highlighting the need for more, not less, vaccine research.
The NIH is a crucial driver of vaccine research, providing on average about $2.7 billion per year of research funding in this area in 2021–2023. Kennedy’s position is therefore terrifying, and Trump’s picks to head key agencies within HHS, including the NIH, are equally concerning.
But declaring a moratorium on vaccine research will not only exacerbate the threat of infectious diseases. It will also undermine a very promising area of cancer research: cancer vaccines, which aim to train the body’s immune response to recognize and battle cancer. Cancer vaccines fall into two broad categories: preventative — those preventing cancers from developing in the first place, and therapeutic — those designed to eliminate or limit the growth of cancers that do develop.
Since some cancers are caused by viruses, vaccines that prevent infection by these viruses also prevent the resulting cancers. Research on infectious diseases has therefore led directly to the development of successful preventative cancer vaccines.
For example, infection with the common human papillomavirus (HPV) is associated with the development of cervical cancer, head and neck cancers, and other cancers. Several HPV vaccines have been developed that are essentially 100% effective in preventing HPV infection — and consequently any resulting cancer.
Likewise, chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection is one cause of liver cancer, and HBV vaccines have proven highly effective at preventing HBV infection, with consequent reductions in the rates of developing subsequent liver cancer. Because women infected with HBV can transmit the virus during childbirth, with a significant risk to the child of both chronic infection and development of liver cancer, the American Association of Pediatrics recommends that all infants be vaccinated with the HBV vaccine in the first 24 hours of life.
Vaccines also have promise in preventing cancers that are not associated with viral infection. For example, vaccines are being tested to prevent or delay the onset of cancer in people with Lynch syndrome, a hereditary condition that greatly increases the risk of developing cancers, especially colon cancer.
The enormous strides that have been made in understanding cancer biology and immunology over the last couple of decades have also accelerated research into and development of therapeutic cancer vaccines.
Therapeutic vaccines have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for cancers of the prostate and bladder as well as for melanoma. They are being investigated as treatment for triple-negative breast cancer, which tends to be aggressive and resistant to therapies effective for other types of breast cancer. A host of different vaccine technologies are being developed and tested for a wide range of solid tumors and blood cancers, and at least 150 clinical trials of therapeutic vaccines were underway in the U.S. as of January 2025.
A recent advance in this field that holds great promise is personalized cancer vaccines, particularly when these are used in combination with other existing immunotherapies. This strategy involves tailoring a vaccine to the individual patient’s cancer tissue using DNA sequencing technology, a development that is a direct outcome of the NIH-funded Human Genome Project.
Cancer is an extraordinarily complex disease: indeed, it is a multitude of diseases that are, in certain respects, as unique as the individual patient. Decades of research and untold dollars of funding have transformed some cancers from death sentences into chronic diseases and cancer drugs from toxic cudgels into precision tools.
Along the way, NIH researchers and NIH funding have played a critical role in this success story.
As a microbiology PhD who spent two decades writing about cancer research, I have been a witness to this progress. But there is so much further to go, and research on cancer vaccines is a route that is highly active and has great potential.
The promise of successful cancer vaccines, both alone and in combination with other types of cancer treatments, speaks to the continued need for vigorous financial support for basic and clinical research in this field and extensive collaboration among researchers in academia, biotech, pharma — and government.
Like infectious diseases, cancer will not observe a moratorium, and a halt in government vaccine research funding will ultimately yield more cancers and more cancer-related deaths than would otherwise be the case. It would be unconscionable to put in place a government official who would call such funding to a halt.
Wendy Sacks lives in West Hartford.