Sabree Beneshour

They're investing less in research and development because the rules have been changing under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The federal government has rescinded funding for vaccine research, changed recommendations for who should get vaccines and when.

And just last week, the FDA refused to review Moderna's new mRNA flu vaccine.

And Marketplace's Samantha Fields reports the consequences could be long-lasting.

Developing new vaccines is extremely expensive, and Amish Adalja at Johns Hopkins University says it takes years.

That's why investment and support from the federal government is so critical for vaccine research and development.

Now both are in question, and Michael Osterholm at the University of Minnesota says the regulatory environment for vaccine approvals is shifting too.

That is already happening.

Moderna now says it's no longer planning to invest in new late-stage vaccine trials.

And Jason Schwartz at Yale is worried that other companies are also making early-stage decisions about whether to prioritize vaccine research at all.

At Geovax, a small biotech company in Georgia, CEO David Dodd says they're not moving away from vaccines, but... We may be setting priorities that are different than what we had in the past.

Previously, the company had two priorities, a better COVID vaccine for people who are immunocompromised and an MPOX smallpox vaccine.

Now, he says they've decided it's less risky to focus primarily on the MPOX vaccine.

Jason Schwartz at Yale is concerned about lots of companies shifting their priorities.

And he says that momentum has now been lost.

I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace.

The tech sell-off we've seen in the stock market over the past couple weeks has been driven mostly by two letters, AI, over fears of how it will disrupt businesses like software and questions about when massive investments in AI infrastructure will pay off.

As we've been reporting, big tech is spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build data centers for the AI boom.

But some of those facilities are sitting empty because there's not enough electricity to power them.

This surge in demand for energy is charging up the market for alternative and off-grid power sources.