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 of Medicine who focuses on RNA biology. “There’s no question that mRNA vaccines work.”

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“What we’re dealing with here is a fundamental loss in critical thinking skills,” he said. “If people continue to outsource their decisions to politicians of all stripes, we’re going to continue to struggle with technology and where it should fit into our lives.”

Majumdar fears cuts to vaccine research may harm the industry in ways that won’t become fully clear for a decade or more.

“It’s hurt morale a lot among the people who spend 60 to 80 hours per week working on these things,” he said. “I really, really worry that we’re looking at the precipice of a lost generation of young people that really wanted to go into this, that wanted to cure cancer and fight disease.”