Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump is mov­ing on from his Op­er­a­tion Warp Speed lega­cy.

Dur­ing his first ad­min­is­tra­tion, Trump’s health­care of­fi­cials led the spend­ing of bil­lions of dol­lars to get mR­NA vac­cines up and run­ning as fast as pos­si­ble in re­sponse to the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic, bring­ing a pow­er­ful new med­ical tech­nol­o­gy in­to the main­stream and like­ly sav­ing mil­lions of lives.

Five years lat­er, his health de­part­ment un­der HHS Sec­re­tary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is slash­ing funds and turn­ing its back on the tech­nol­o­gy, not just for Covid but for fu­ture ap­pli­ca­tions as well.

When asked about Kennedy’s mR­NA cuts at the White House on Wednes­day, Trump praised the work of Op­er­a­tion Warp Speed as “amaz­ing,” but added, “you know that was a long time ago, and we’re on to oth­er things.”

For the sec­ond time this week, the gov­ern­ment de­feat­ed a le­gal chal­lenge against Medicare drug price ne­go­ti­a­tions, af­ter an ap­peals court af­firmed that the pro­gram is vol­un­tary and didn’t vi­o­late Ger­man phar­ma Boehringer In­gel­heim’s con­sti­tu­tion­al rights.

Drug­mak­ers have suf­fered a string of loss­es in court as they try to de­rail the ne­go­ti­a­tions. The new prices will take hold for the first time in Jan­u­ary. Like oth­er re­cent court opin­ions in the gov­ern­ment’s fa­vor, the Thurs­day rul­ing from the US Court of Ap­peals for the Sec­ond Cir­cuit fo­cused on the “vol­un­tari­ness” of the ne­go­ti­a­tion process.

The CDC now rec­om­mends the use of Mer­ck’s re­cent­ly-ap­proved RSV an­ti­body in in­fants, af­ter ad­vi­sors to the agency vot­ed in fa­vor of the prod­uct in June.

CDC Di­rec­tor Su­san Monarez adopt­ed the rec­om­men­da­tion of the Ad­vi­so­ry Com­mit­tee on Im­mu­niza­tion Prac­tices on Mon­day af­ter tak­ing the helm of the agency last week.

Mer­ck­'s En­flon­sia was ap­proved by the FDA ear­li­er in June to pre­vent RSV low­er res­pi­ra­to­ry tract dis­ease in in­fants en­ter­ing their first res­pi­ra­to­ry virus sea­son. In­clu­sion of the an­ti­body in CDC’s guide­lines was the fi­nal step for Mer­ck as it chal­lenges Sanofi and As­traZeneca’s Bey­for­tus in the mar­ket. Bey­for­tus raked in al­most $2 bil­lion in sales in 2024 af­ter be­ing ap­proved in 2023.