SAN FRANCISCO — Moderna’s cofounder is raising the alarm that the future of scientific progress is under threat.
“The politicization of [science] is dangerous because it can go to the heart of what underlies the medical enterprise,” said Noubar Afeyan. “It’s important for our scientists and those who are beneficiaries of science, including patients, including policy makers, to go back and say, ‘We have to protect the scientific method.’ ”
Seated in a hotel conference room in San Francisco for the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference this week — an annual gathering of biotech’s biggest players — Afeyan, chairman of Moderna and CEO of Cambridge-based startup backer Flagship Pioneering, lamented that scientific advances made in recent years are threatened by increasing contempt for science itself.
It’s a startling warning from a leader who has had a hand in more than 100 life science and technology startups. It’s also one that diverges from the hopeful chatter about the industry making a rebound after a multiyear post-COVID slump.
“There’s an estimated $3.2 trillion of GDP impact that comes out of broadly the health care enterprise,” Afeyan said. “And I think people don’t realize just how much that derives from a basic kind of working engine in science.”
Medical discoveries rely on the scientific method, a process of rigorous skepticism, experimentation, and debate. But that skepticism has taken on a new tenor recently, Afeyan said, as critics question research that is backed by data and has been thoroughly tested.
The last year was one of chaos for scientists who faced unprecedented federal research funding cuts under President Trump’s administration. Massachusetts labs received $48 million less in 2025 than in 2024. That shortfall would have been far greater if not for a number of high-profile lawsuits against the federal government that recouped some of the slashed research dollars from the National Institutes of Health.
Vaccine skepticism, which previously existed only on the fringes of the medical establishment, has found a vocal advocate in Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The secretary announced the removal of six vaccines from the universal list of childhood vaccinations earlier this month, drawing ire from state and national leaders.
Mounting vaccine skepticism has had a major impact on Moderna, which developed one of the most widely used COVID shots and continues to make boosters, while working on other vaccines, including for cancer.
In his annual open letter published Monday, Afeyan said that by losing the ability to confront skepticism through the scientific method, “we won’t just slow the miracle machine, we’ll throw it into reverse.” He pointed to the alarming rise in cases of measles, a disease eliminated from the United States a quarter-century ago.
“We are living simultaneously in the utopian age in which a baby born with a genetic death sentence is given a new lease on life thanks to the miracle of gene editing, and the dystopia in which a disease like measles is on the march in the United States,” Afeyan wrote. “It’s hard to square.”
“It is also — let’s be clear — a choice,” he added.
Afeyan isn’t alone in his concern over politics bleeding into the drug discovery and approval processes. At a STAT event tied to the J.P. Morgan conference on Monday night, former longtime Food and Drug Administration regulator Richard Pazdur said the barrier between those who review drug candidates and the agency’s political appointees has faltered.
Pazdur left his post as director of the FDA’s drug center in December, only a month after stepping into the director role.
Distress in the US research world comes alongside a meteoric rise in research investment and output in China, a reality that Afeyan said will continue. He said he knows some investors who have chosen to put their money behind foreign biotechs rather than domestic firms.
Pressures on the biotech market that marked 2025 with uncertainty likely aren’t going away, Afeyan said, even as many in the industry enter 2026 with cautious optimism.
“Do I think that volatility subsides this year and there’s a directional positive trend? I couldn’t tell you. I don’t think so,” Afeyan said. “There’s still a lot of forces that are having an impact on something that should otherwise be a private enterprise trying to do good and use money responsibly to generate societal impact.”
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