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 program’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 favorable 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.

China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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