Flu season is coming. And for the first time, Americans will have an mRNA vaccine to help fight it.
Last month, the Food and Drug Administration approved Moderna’s mFLUSIVA for adults 50 and older. In a large Phase 3 trial, the vaccine was almost 27% more effective than a standard flu shot at preventing lab-confirmed influenza.
That’s especially welcome news after one of the worst flu seasons in years. It’s also arriving at a strange moment for the technology behind it.
Messenger RNA, or mRNA, vaccines have become a target of political suspicion since the COVID-19 pandemic. Lawmakers in several states have proposed restricting or even banning them. And last year, the Department of Health and Human Services announced it was winding down 22 mRNA vaccine-development projects worth approximately $500 million.
Skepticism about the government’s pandemic response is one thing. Writing off an entire medical technology is another.
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MFLUSIVA shows why. Influenza caused an estimated 51 million illnesses and 45,000 deaths during the 2024-25 flu season. Vaccination prevented an estimated 12,000 additional deaths.
Yet conventional flu vaccines have a longstanding weakness. Manufacturers must begin producing them months before flu season. That forces health officials to predict well in advance which strains will circulate. If that prediction misses, then manufacturers have little opportunity to change course.
MRNA could help change that. Because mRNA vaccines can be produced faster than conventional shots, manufacturers may eventually be able to wait longer before deciding which strains to target — and respond faster if circulating strains change.
That is, if we let them. Consider what happened in Idaho earlier this year. Lawmakers there considered legislation that would have imposed a two-year moratorium on administering certain “human gene therapy products” for infectious diseases to children and pregnant women. The proposal’s definition included in-vitro-transcribed RNA — the technology used in mRNA vaccines.
Some Tennessee lawmakers went further, proposing to prohibit providers from administering mRNA vaccines altogether.
Neither bill became law. But advocates for broader vaccine restrictions have promised to renew their push in future legislative sessions.
It’s not hard to understand how we got here. During the pandemic, mRNA became almost synonymous with COVID-19 vaccines — and thus entangled with the mandates and restrictions that many Americans resented. But anger over government coercion shouldn’t become hostility toward a promising medical technology.
Medical freedom ought to work both ways. No one should be forced to receive an mRNA vaccine. Nor should government prevent willing patients from receiving one.
And influenza may be only the beginning.
Shortly after mFLUSIVA’s approval, Moderna and Merck announced that an experimental personalized mRNA cancer therapy had succeeded in a Phase 3 melanoma trial. Given with the cancer drug Keytruda after surgery, the treatment significantly improved the time patients remained free of recurrence and distant spread compared with Keytruda alone.
It was the first positive Phase 3 result for an mRNA-based cancer therapy.
The treatment works differently from an infectious-disease vaccine. Scientists analyze mutations in a patient’s tumor and create a personalized therapy designed to train the immune system to recognize and attack the cancer.
That’s the larger promise of mRNA. The technology can give cells temporary instructions that prompt a desired immune response, with potential applications against infectious diseases, cancer and other illnesses.
MFLUSIVA and the new melanoma results show why we shouldn’t allow the controversies of the pandemic to dictate the future of mRNA. The technology should be judged by what it delivers.
And it’s only beginning to show us what it can do.
Sally C. Pipes is president, CEO and Thomas W. Smith fellow in health care policy at the Pacific Research Institute, a free market think tank. Her latest book is “The World’s Medicine Chest: How America Achieved Pharmaceutical Supremacy — and How to Keep It.”
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