The scientific breakthroughs against cancer that Trump and RFK Jr. want stopped

Jonathan Cohn on the agony and the ecstasy of cancer research in 2026:

This past Wednesday, Moderna and Merck announced positive results from a major clinical trial using a cancer vaccine of the kind Wu and her team had envisioned. The target was melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. Using the vaccine in combination with a common cancer drug—rather than relying on the cancer drug alone—significantly reduced the recurrence of melanoma after tumor removal, according to the companies.

Merck and Moderna did not release the actual data, saying they would do so at an upcoming medical meeting. Until that happens, it’s impossible to be sure exactly what their tests show, or how significant the outcome is. But the reported findings from the large trial appear to be consistent with the outcome of a previous, much smaller trial. “This looks like a home run,” Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist and vice provost at the University of Pennsylvania, told me in a phone interview.

Emanuel’s reaction was not unusual. Scientists across the country and the world have been buzzing about the news because, if the results hold up, they will be proof of concept for the kind of cancer vaccines researchers have long hoped to create. “This could be revolutionary,” Catharine Young, a biomedical scientist and former Biden administration official who is now a senior fellow at Harvard’s School of Public Health, told me.

Yet behind all the joy there has been concern and even alarm—not about the treatment itself, but about the threat Donald Trump poses to the research ecosystem that made its creation possible.

The Trump administration’s broad attack on America’s scientific enterprise includes cuts and rule changes affecting precisely the sorts of grants that financed the work of Wu and many other scientists whose research laid the scientific foundation for the vaccine’s development.

The administration has also attacked this specific type of vaccine. The Moderna-Merck treatment uses mRNA technology—as did two of the COVID vaccines—and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has singled out mRNA for particular vilification. Last year, he canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for the research and development of mRNA technology, including Moderna’s work on what was supposed to be a new platform for vaccines against influenza.

Kennedy’s animus toward mRNA vaccines, which is based on wild, unsupported conspiracy theories tying COVID shots to harm and death, has so far not led him to meddle with mRNA funding outside of the context of infectious disease. But scientists say his hostility is bound to have—and is already having—a chilling effect on research into mRNA for other purposes, including cancer. The same goes for the broader cuts the administration has made to research funding, despite claims from officials and their allies that truly important experiments into diseases like cancer haven’t taken a hit.

The backstory of the melanoma vaccine is in many ways a perfect case study in what’s at stake. It illustrates vividly how medical breakthroughs depend on generous, sustained support of basic research that the private sector will never provide on its own—and on freedom from interference from politicians, especially those like Kennedy who routinely traffic in scientific nonsense.

The whole story is worth reading. But the key is that the success of the research — we’re also seeing promising treatments for pancreatic cancer, for example — won’t persuade Trump, RFK Jr., and Vought to turn the spigots back on because 1)they hate science and scientists in principle and 2)they’re eugenicists who think diseases represent just deserts. It’s unfathomable the amount of damage that a couple hundred thousand voters who couldn’t pass a Grade 6 civics test in a few arbitrarily selected states can do.