The Vaccine Industry Is Troubleshooting Its Future Existence

You know the attendees of an international vaccine conference are on edge when the head of Moderna’s U.S. medical division spends half an hour on stage debunking conspiracy theories about mRNA vaccines.

No, research has not found a link between mRNA vaccines and cancer, Wendy Sohn, who oversees the Massachusetts-based pharmaceutical company’s vaccine strategies, said in her presentation. No, Operation Warp Speed didn’t skip steps when it came to safety testing the Covid-19 vaccines. No, mRNA vaccines do not integrate into the human genome.

“The weight of the data needs to be weighed in making policy decisions,” said Sohn.

Pharmaceutical companies, vaccine manufacturers and public health leaders gathered in Washington, D.C., this week for the World Vaccine Congress to take stock of the public health landscape. For obvious (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-related) reasons, the United States’ changing approach to vaccines was the all-consuming topic of discussion.

The pharmaceutical industry is taking the Make America Healthy Again movement very seriously – and vaccine producers aren’t quite sure how to engage with a government that has elevated vaccine skeptics.

“Open to ideas,” Sohn told the audience when asked how to communicate with an increasingly powerful anti-vaccine movement.

Vaccine development leaders are actively trying to figure out how to engage a Department of Health and Human Services and grassroots movement that has become hostile to vaccines and the pharmaceutical industry.

“We need to communicate transparently what we know when the vaccine is launched and the real-world evidence,” said Alejandro Cané, head of vaccines at Pfizer. “Sometimes we forget about that.”

What does it look like when an industry is troubleshooting its future existence?

This week, executives from Pfizer, GSK, Sanofi, BioNTech, AstraZeneca, Moderna and other major companies publicly outlined areas in the vaccine space in which they still see opportunities for growth.

Vaccines that prevent chronic diseases, like those caused by the Epstein-Barr virus, could be an area of potential consensus, said a Moderna executive. Their reasoning: The MAHA movement has made reducing chronic disease a key element of its platform.

Sanofi vice president Sally Mossman highlighted combination flu-Covid vaccines, which could increase Covid vaccination rates — with the added benefit of not being an mRNA vaccine.

“Where there is mRNA hesitancy, here is a non-mRNA option,” she said.

A BioNTech representative talked about novel delivery mechanisms for vaccines, like patches placed on the skin, subdermal implants or nasal sprays as ways to bring vaccinations out of the doctor’s office and into people’s homes.

But all the industry leaders acknowledged a crucial truth: Innovation in the vaccine industry will be meaningless if vaccination rates continue to decline — and if the industry is unable to counteract the vaccine skepticism sown by Kennedy and others in the MAHA movement.

Several industry leaders called on pharmaceutical companies to promote vaccination more generally, not just their individual products.

“Alignment starts, first of all, within the industry,” said Francesca Ceddia, the chief medical affairs officer at Moderna.

Others urged their peers to tout the potential off-target benefits of vaccines like those of GSK’s shingles shot, which research has suggested might prevent Alzheimer’s.

“As of today, we continue to invest in studies to really understand a little bit more of what we can uncover here,” Temi Folaranmi, a GSK vice president, said when Mossman asked him to talk about data on Shingrix, the company’s shingle’s vaccine.

Nicole Lurie, a former health agency leader and now an executive director at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, said the pharmaceutical industry should be doing more to get the wider business community on their team.

“There are businesses large and small, domestic and global, in every single country and corner of the world, that benefit from the work we do to prevent outbreaks,” Lurie said. “We ought to talk about the benefit provided to them.”

Other executives and vaccine-access advocates said the industry should also do more to connect with grassroots pro-vaccine activists who have rallied around the health agencies.

It was an acknowledgement that the industry has work to do when it comes to communicating the importance of vaccinations — especially at a moment when the Trump administration appears to recognize the political unpopularity of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine agenda.

“We should not dismiss the intelligence of the people in our communities,” said Galit Alter, a vice president at AstraZeneca. “People are hungry for science.”