This week, US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr announced that his department would begin winding down its mRNA vaccine development activities. This entails terminating some development contracts, de-scoping others, and rejecting mRNA-based vaccine research proposals, and signals a departmental shift towards “safer, broader vaccine platforms” such as “whole-virus vaccines and novel platforms”.

The rationale for this decision, Kennedy explained, was that most of these projects focused on developing mRNA vaccines against respiratory infections including Covid-19 and bird flu, but that the recent pandemic “showed us mRNA vaccines don’t perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract”. The problem, he added, is that “mRNA only codes for a small part of viral proteins, usually a single antigen, so a single mutation would render the vaccine ineffective. What’s more, “this dynamic drives a shift meaning that the vaccine paradoxically encourages new mutations and can actually prolong pandemics as the virus constantly mutates to escape protective effects of vaccines.”

This was a predictable move from Kennedy, a longtime vaccine critic and possibly the Covid-19 mRNA vaccine programme’s most famous detractor. (His boss, Donald Trump, has unsurprisingly been less critical of the shots whose rapid development his first administration initiated and oversaw.) It has also re-opened the bitter debate over the Covid vaccine’s safety, efficacy, and unintended side effects.

Since the vaccine roll-out in early 2021, critics have alleged, with varying levels of plausibility, that the shots don’t provide long-term protection against serious infection, and that they might trigger cardiovascular events, autoimmune conditions, micro-clots, and cancer. While conceding some of this, Covid jab proponents have replied — again with varying levels of plausibility — that the vaccines have saved millions of lives, that the risk of negative side effects or prolonged pandemics has been overstated, and that the shots continue to have a favourable safety profile for most.

The continuing debate over Covid vaccines is frustrating, not for its worthlessness — an open and healthy debate over a drug that so many were forced to take on pain of social exclusion and general opprobrium can only be a good thing — but for its narrowness. With very few exceptions, critics and proponents alike only consider the vaccine’s impacts on biological systems such as the immune system and the heart. This means that the vaccine’s socio-political and cultural harms are excluded from the debate, precluding an honest and holistic appraisal of its actual impact on our lives. Consider how the debate systematically sidelines the vaccine’s cruelest harm of all: its role in justifying sweeping lockdown policies.

Heading into 2020, many policymakers had a clear and decades-old sense of what was attainable with vaccines. Based on simulation studies and reanalyses of historical data, they felt that vaccines could be used to cheat death from epidemic disease by allowing us to impose transmission-cutting non-pharmaceutical interventions — such as face masks, school and business closures, and social distancing — until said vaccine was developed and administered, thus avoiding the dreaded rebound in cases when the interventions were dropped. This, combined with an awareness that Moderna and Pfizer were developing mRNA vaccines and the protracted mass quarantines for which China provided a proof of concept, resulted in a “lockdown-till-vaccine” mindset among many of our policymakers.

The problem is that absent from this vaccine-enabled idyll were the non-pharmaceutical interventions’ many harms. The mRNA vaccines were not alone in making lockdown conceivable but they played a significant role, and so lockdown harms are, indirectly, harms of the vaccines’ ideological effect. Any proper evaluation of the vaccine’s impacts must take this and other similar non-biomedical phenomena seriously. The language of Kennedy’s announcement engaged with the existing debate’s narrow terms, which might be appropriate for biomedics. Yet the rest of us — who live in the real world and were affected by the vaccine — would do well to move past them.