Gary Whittaker

Professor of Virology

Gary Whittaker, professor of virology at Cornell University, studies novel vaccines and diagnostic test development.

Whittaker says:

“mRNA vaccines remain an important first line public health response to emerging disease threats (as we found with COVID). Unfortunately, some people get side effects from the vehicle used to deliver the mRNA, and this has been interpreted such that mRNA vaccines are unsafe - they were also mobilized very quickly during the early part of the COVID pandemic - a very successful mobilization due to the urgent public health need (operation warp-speed), but one that also raised additional (largely unfounded) concerns about whether these vaccines were safe.

“The alternative strategy of HHS now seems to be a return to tried-and-tested but very old technology, but arguably technology that is not the most efficacious, and not easily mobilized (but with fewer side-effects, or reactogenity).”