Hey, everybody. Welcome to Bullwork Takes. I am Andrew Eger. This is Jonathan Cohn, our policy reporter,

here to talk about some crazy stuff that's going on in the world of vaccine approvals over at the

Food and Drug Administration. So you may have heard of these MRNA shots that companies like

Moderna and Pfizer have been messing around with the last few years.

They kind of helped lift us out of the COVID pandemic pretty much single-handedly.

They're a technology platform that has a lot of applications.

One person who does not really like these MRNA shots is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the

anti-vax quasi-crank, who runs the Department of Health and Human Services.

He has been kind of putting a lot of pressure and his people who work for him have been putting

a lot of pressure on MRNA vaccines and their developers for quite some time now, for about

a year. And we got maybe one of the most shocking developments

in this respect last week when the Moderna, the MRNA vaccine company submitted an application

to the FDA for an MRNA flu vaccine to try to get FDA approval. And the FDA fired right

back saying they not only did not approve this

application, but they were not actually even going to look at the application because they did

not think that Moderna had put together a sufficient sort of data package to send to them in the

first place in terms of early trials. That was last week, made a huge splash. Jonathan Cohn

wrote about it in his

breakdown newsletter on Sunday. The new development today is the FDA seems to be walking it back.

Moderna announced this morning that they're actually going to look at the application after all.

We're all kind of running around with our hair on fire, trying to figure out exactly what's going

on here. Fortunately, Jonathan is here to walk us through.

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