The FDA’s Mood-Ring Era Meets Moderna's Flu Shot

In the age of “WMD” bills, the FDA chose plot over procedure

In Minnesota and Tennessee, lawmakers have decided that messenger RNA is not a molecule so much as a felony waiting to happen. In bill language that reads like it was drafted during a cable news segment and proofread by a guy who thinks Wikipedia is peer review, mRNA injections and products are described as “weapons of mass destruction.” Not metaphorically, not as a spicy rhetorical flourish, as in: “hello, state code, please hold my Red Bull.”

This is the atmosphere in which the federal government has been trying to conduct ordinary, boring, paperwork heavy regulation, which is the kind of activity you normally want the FDA doing. Quietly, predictably, with fewer plot twists than a prestige drama. Instead we got a week where the agency effectively told Moderna, “we are not even going to open the envelope,” and then promptly changed its mind.

Here is the update, in clean terms.