RFK Jr is wrong about RFK Jr is wrong about mRNA vaccines – a scientist explains how they make COVID less deadlyRFK Jr is wrong about

©️The Conversation
7th August 2025
Deborah Dunn-Walters

US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr has announced he is cancelling US$500 million (£374 million) of research into mRNA vaccines, citing unproven concerns about their safety and long-term effects.

Kennedy has claimed that mRNA vaccines “encourage new mutations and can actually prolong pandemics” – a misleading statement that contradicts the scientific consensus on viral evolution and effects of vaccination.

But scientific research shows that mRNA vaccines have saved millions of lives.

As an immunologist, I’ve spent years studying how the body responds to SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory viruses. Let’s be clear: there is no credible evidencethat mRNA vaccines cause viral mutations – genetic changes that occur as a virus copies itself – or that they’re ineffective against respiratory infections like COVID-19 or flu. These claims misrepresent both how viruses evolve and how vaccines actually work.

Unlike traditional vaccines, which introduce weakened or inactive parts of a virus to trigger immunity, mRNA vaccines work by delivering genetic instructions that teach our cells to produce a harmless piece of the virus (usually a protein found on its surface). This gives the immune system a preview of what to fight, so it’s ready if the real virus shows up.

Our bodies are constantly fighting off infectious organisms – viruses, bacteria and other pathogens – that rely on us as hosts to survive and reproduce. As part of this ongoing battle, viruses naturally mutate over time. This process happens with or without vaccines.

Each time a virus replicates, small copying errors can occur in its genetic material. Some of these mutations have no impact; others give the virus a competitive advantage, helping it spread more efficiently. That’s how new variants arise.

In the case of COVID-19, scientists observed that the virus was mutating from the start. Variants appeared both within individuals (“intra-host variation”) and between them (“inter-host variation”). Every so often, one version would gain a competitive advantage – spreading faster, evading immunity, or becoming more infectious – and take over. These are the variants you might remember: alpha, delta, omicron.

This is how evolution works: organisms reproduce and change, and some changes help them thrive.

The immune system’s defence

Now, let’s look at the other side of the battle: our immune system.

Some parts of our immune defence are always on: physical barriers like skin, and innate immune responses that are ready to fight anything unfamiliar. But our most powerful defence is adaptive immunity: a specialised response that targets a specific invader once it’s been identified.

This is where vaccines come in. When a virus invades the body for the first time, it can cause serious illness before our adaptive immune system knows how to respond. But vaccines, including mRNA vaccines, act like a rehearsal. They introduce a harmless piece of the virus (often a single protein) so the immune system can learn to recognise it and respond faster in the future.

mRNA vaccines work by delivering a snippet of genetic instructions to our cells, which then produce the viral protein temporarily. Our immune system then builds a response to it. This means we get all the immune training with none of the illness – unlike actual infection, which can be dangerous.

Vaccines don’t cause viruses to mutate. The mutations already exist – they emerge randomly and constantly during viral replication. What vaccines (and our immune systems) do is filter which variants survive.

When the original COVID-19 virus encountered a population with strong immune defences – built through vaccination or past infection – it was effectively stopped. That virus lost its competitive edge. But other, naturally occurring variants with slightly different surface proteins (the “outer coat”) could sometimes sneak past these defences. That’s how new variants emerged.

Importantly, neither vaccines nor natural immunity created those mutations – they simply selected which ones became dominant.

The good news

There’s a silver lining. Even when a variant partially evades immune defences, our bodies often still recognise parts of it. This is called cross-reactivity – and it can mean we get less sick, even with a new strain.

Over time, as we’re exposed to more variants through infection or updated vaccines, our immune system refines its response. It becomes better prepared to fight future versions of the virus – just like it’s done with flu and other infectious diseases.

COVID-19 hasn’t disappeared, but thanks to mRNA vaccines and our growing immune memory, it’s far less deadly than it was in 2020.

Despite the claims of high-profile figures like RFK Jr, mRNA vaccines do not cause viruses to mutate. Mutations are part of viral evolution: a natural process that happens regardless of our intervention.

What vaccines do is give us a fighting chance. They’ve saved millions of lives by reducing severe illness, hospitalisations and death. They remain one of the most powerful tools we have in the ongoing battle against infectious disease.

James Randi in Australia – 45th Anniversary Edition

This wonderful programme is a digitally restored version of a 45 year old skeptic analysis on water divining, conducted under the auspices of James Randi.

Listen more to how this came about via The Skeptic Zone Episode 870.

YouTube Synopsis:

In 1980 James “The Amazing” Randi was flown to Australia by Dick Smith to conduct the definitive test of the claims of Water Diviners or Dowers. This event helped to launch the Australian Skeptics. The original documentary of the event commissioned by Dick Smith and broadcast on Australian television, has been lost for decades, with the only known copy being one recorded via a VCR in 1980. To celebrate the 45th anniversary of the event, the documentary has been digitally restored to sparkling clarity, including a sound remix, from the VCR version. Keep watching after the credits to see some of the improvements in this new upscaled version.

The UFO Movie THEY Don’t Want You to See

When it comes to UFO documentaries, The UFO Movie THEY Don’t Want You To See offers in depth answers from the relevant scientific disciplines that help us understand, “exactly what we know and how we know it” on the topic of UFOs, or if you prefer, UAPs.

Suffice it to say these in depth answers don’t include the beliefs of journalist Ross Coulthart, winner of The Australian Skeptics 2023 Bent Spoon Award. Executive officer Tim Mendham helps us understand in noting:

Coulthart won for his recent espousal of UFO conspiracy theories and claims that alien bodies and wrecked spacecraft are being held in secret by various government across the world – claims he makes based on hearsay with no evidence, no bodies, no space junk.

The UFO Movie THEY Don’t Want You To See is a feature length indie documentary produced and directed by science writer Brian Dunning. You likely know Brian from the award winning Skeptoid podcast, appearances at numerous Skeptic conferences – including Skepticon Australia – articles in The Skeptic magazine, Skeptical Inquirer or guest spots on other Skeptic media, such as The Skeptic Zone podcast. A great deal of work has gone into making and producing this movie, so let’s get to it.

In an age when misinformation, alternative facts, and conspiracy theories have become mainstream, UFOs have risen to become one of the most-talked about pop culture phenomena. With all of this noise, how can we expect anyone to know how much of this is true? What is in our skies? What do we know, and how do we know it? And most importantly: Are we being visited?

Science does have most of these answers, and we’re working on answering the rest of them. The film features experts in:

  • Physics & relativity
  • Exobiology
  • Exoplanetary spectral analysis
  • Image analysis
  • Pilot training and air traffic control
  • Defense

For more information about the movie, there’s an FAQ page here. If you’ve seen it you no doubt want to watch again. If you haven’t seen it pop the kettle on, draw the curtains and enjoy…

Ongoing Trove funding to be announced in federal Budget

If you regularly listen to The Skeptic Zone podcast, you’ll be familiar with the segment A Dive into a Trove. Host, Richard Saunders takes listeners on a “wander through the decades of digitised Australian newspapers on a search for references to [insert topic]”.

It might be the paranormal, ghosts, “therapeutic touch”, Nostradamus, “fake cures” or even Canberra Skeptics, to name a few. It’s one of my favourite parts of the show and always leaves me wiser as to the historical Australian context around issues that skeptics are constantly drawn to.

What you may not be aware of is the uncertainty the very existence of Trove has faced, and that the genesis of that uncertainty goes back to Budget cuts in 2016. Launched by the National Library of Australia in 2009, Trove had by then, grown to a world renowned digital archive with millions of records, growing by several million items per week.

Known as a GLAM Service, Trove hosts content from galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. Yet that year, a $20 million budget cut to the National Library of Australia meant that ongoing aggregation of material would cease. This was part of the Turnbull government’s “efficiency dividend”.

Turnbull’s “efficiency dividends” had been announced months earlier, and awareness of Trove’s peril led to a #fundTrove campaign on Twitter. A February 2016 article in The Conversation by Mike Jones and Deb Verhoeven makes a compelling argument as to the unprecedented value of Trove. Tweets presented, succinctly capture the value of Trove, such as this from librarian and “history hunter”, Kyla Stephan.

Another tweet notes that in 2014 over 120,000,000 lines of text were corrected by volunteers at Trove. Regarding Trove’s collation of content from multiple sources, the authors write:

As of February 25 2016, this includes information on over 374,419,217 books, articles, images, historic newspapers, maps, music, archives, datasets and more, expressing the extraordinarily rich history of Australian culture.

The campaign for funds resulted in a Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) boost of $16.4 million, over four years, announced in December of 2016. In December 2021 the National Film and Sound Archive was funded with $41.9 million over four years to save at-risk items. Trove would get $5.7 million over two years but its future, and the fate of (by then) billions of records remained uncertain.

By December 2022 the #saveTrove Twitter campaign was in full swing, in the wake of an update to Trove Strategy [archive] in which the NLA announced that without secure funding, Trove would be unable to operate beyond July 2023. A change.org petition to Greens arts spokesperson Sarah Hanson-Young, and a parliament e-petition attracted ample support. News articles were expansive in reporting the need for funds. Pay-for-view options were ruled out by the NLA.

Jones and Verhoeven again penned a piece in The Conversation, calling for “radical overhaul”. A resource the quality of Trove, they argued, cannot be sustained by ad hoc funding. That such was the case, suggested Trove was seen as an “optional extra”. More so:

What is currently a Frankenstein’s monster of dead and mouldering technologies and systems needs more than just cosmetic surgery. It needs to be rebuilt from the ground up as an essential component of national library services.

By January 2023 the government hinted that relief may be on the horizon. There are currently over 14 billion digital items in Trove and it plays a key role in research for PhD theses, history classes, family research, the shaping of Australian identity and of course, informing skeptics about all manner of woo from our ever-receding past. In February, Teal MP Dr. Monique Ryan, the member for Kooyong, informed federal parliament that Trove had “democratised knowledge” and called on the government to provide the NLA with the necessary funding.

Ultimately, it came to pass. On 2 April this year it was announced that the Albanese government would provide $33 million over four years, in addition to $9.2 million in indexed ongoing annual funding beyond that time frame. The media release Securing The Future of Trove, from Arts Minister, Tony Burke stated that the funding helps restore strong cultural infrastructure, which is a “key pillar” of Revive, the Government’s new National Cultural Policy.

The NLA is “delighted that Trove’s future has been secured”, and stated:

The certainty of this funding decision will allow the National Library to continue to provide this essential service, enrich it with new content, and stabilise and secure the platform, in line with the Trove Strategy. 

Trove is a free resource of truly remarkable potential. You can access it here. To discover more about how material is collated I recommend this entry at The Atlas. To understand more about the archive, its history and long term strategy, visit What is Trove.

And if you type “Australian Skeptics” into Trove, your results would be here.