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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced on Tuesday that it will cancel $500 million worth of projects dedicated to designing messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines for pandemic preparedness.

The move drew sharp criticism from medical and health experts. “Scrapping the fastest platform we have is a reckless move rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of vaccinology,” wrote Jake Scott, an infectious diseases specialist and clinical associate professor of medicine at Stanford University, on the social media site Bluesky.

The use of mRNA in vaccines has opened new doors beyond infectious disease. Researchers are investigating promising mRNA vaccines for pancreatic cancer, which currently has a five-year survival rate of just 13 percent. They’re also studying mRNA treatments for multiple other types of cancer, autoimmune disorders, and genetic diseases such as sickle cell anemia.

What makes mRNA so valuable is its programmability—and, for pandemics, the speed at which it can be programmed.

Traditional vaccines introduce an inactivated or dead pathogen into the body so that the immune system can learn to recognize and fight it: the immune system stores that memory in case it should ever run across the real thing. Vaccines that use mRNA, on the other hand, instruct the body’s own cells to make parts of a protein in or on a pathogen. The body will then learn to recognize this protein without having to fight off the full infectious agent.

These vaccines do not interfere with cellular DNA, which is the permanent blueprint, tucked away in the cell nucleus, that tells the cell’s machinery what proteins to make. Those proteins, considered the cells’ workhorses, then carry out various and critical functions throughout the body. Messenger RNA is a middle step in the process: DNA produces this single-stranded RNA, which then tells the cell how to assemble amino acids into proteins. The mRNA instructions from vaccination degrade within a few days, and studies suggest the spike protein generated by such vaccination against COVID lasts about a month in the body.

When making a traditional vaccine, researchers have to manufacture the antigens, or proteins that stimulate the immune system. They might do this by growing a whole virus in bacteria or chicken eggs and then weakening or killing the pathogen with heat or chemicals. In other cases, they use organisms such as yeast that are genetically engineered to churn out pieces of a virus that

are familiar to the immune system. In these cases, the manufacturing process takes time, testing, and tweaking. For mRNA vaccines, developers design the genetic instructions for an antigen on a computer. The manufacturing process remains the same from vaccine to vaccine, with only the genetic instructions changing. This allows researchers to develop multiple vaccines at once, as well as to develop vaccines that contain mRNA to make multiple antigens for different infections.

“We are working on about 30 different mRNA vaccines, including ones for influenza, HIV, hepatitis C, malaria, tuberculosis, and many others,” said Drew Weissman, a physician-scientist at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, who shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with biochemist Katalin Karikó for their work on mRNA, in an interview with Nature Medicine in 2021.

The loss of HHS funding won’t stop all mRNA work in the U.S., but it will stymy research designed to get mRNA vaccines out quickly in a public health emergency. The canceled grants include one to develop an mRNA-based vaccine against H5N1 avian influenza, the strain of bird flu that is currently one of the most salient pandemic threats for people. Researchers who study vaccines had previously warned that current federal officials might target the technology.

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Police have identified the suspected gunman who killed a police officer in a shooting near the Emory University campus in Atlanta, Georgia, on Friday.

The suspected gunman, who opened fire and struck the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention building near Emory, has been identified as 30-year-old Patrick Joseph White from Kennesaw, Georgia. The gunman was found dead in the CVS, though officials don’t know “whether that was from officers or if it was self-inflicted,” Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum said Friday.

DeKalb County Police Department confirmed officer David Rose was fatally shot in the line of duty. He was a 33-year-old father of two, with a third on the way.

“Officer Rose served DeKalb County with courage, integrity, and unwavering dedication,” the DeKalb County police said in a tribute. “Even in the face of danger, was he diligent in his duty to protect our community.”

Police are reportedly working on the theory that the CDC was the shooter’s target, who “blamed his illness on the Covid-19 vaccine,” a law enforcement official told CNN. The gunman’s identity has not yet been released.

No one inside the CDC building was harmed, and no civilians were killed in the shooting, officials confirmed.

Where is the suspected shooter from?

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation says Patrick Joseph White, 30, is from Kennesaw, Georgia.

The town is about 30 miles away from the CDC campus where Friday’s shooting unfolded.

How did the Emory University shooting unfold?

A gunman, who reportedly believed he was sick from the COVID-19 vaccine, is dead after opening fire at Emory University, near the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters, on Friday.

Here’s how the incident unfolded:

Gunman identified as Patrick Joseph White

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has identified the gunman as 30-year-old Patrick Joseph White of Kennesaw, Georgia.

White died during the incident. DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose was also killed.

Gunman struck CDC campus building

Police say a gunman opened fire in a CVS across the street from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention campus in Atlanta, Georgia on Friday afternoon.

The gunman fired several shots at the agency’s building, breaking windows. DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose was killed in the shooting.

Officials have declined to comment on the gunman’s motive. However, the gunman may have targeted the CDC because he believed he was sick from the COVID-19 vaccine, a law enforcement official told CNN.

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Suspect in Emory University shooting dead after killing one police officer. Students were told to ‘run, hide, fight’ as police swarmed the area Friday afternoon

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In the 2024 UK general election, Reform came third with a 14% share of the vote, capturing five seats in the House of Commons. This was a breakthrough election for the party. In the previous general election in 2019, when it was known as the Brexit party, it won a 2% vote share and captured no parliamentary seats at all.

This success is part of a trend. Radical right-wing populist parties are making gains in elections across many democracies and, in plenty of cases, they’re winning power. Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy has been in government in Italy since the election of September 2022, when they took 26% of the vote and captured 119 seats in the national parliament.

In the National Assembly elections of June 2024, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally increased its representation from 89 seats to 125 seats. And in the Netherlands, the Freedom Party (PVV), led by right-wing populist Geert Wilders, won the largest vote share in 2023 with 24%, capturing 37 seats in the House of Representatives.

Perhaps most significantly, Donald Trump won the US presidential election in November 2024 with a rightwing populist agenda – a victory that has created turmoil in American politics and the economy, along with the rest of the world.

Expert views

The American political scientist, Larry Bartels, argued in a recent book that democracy erodes from the top. He explains that contemporary democracies die not by military coups or revolutionary overthrows but by populist leaders winning elections and then subverting the institutions of democracy from within. Once in power, they restrict the freedom of the courts, squeeze the fairness out of elections, and attack the press.

The Chapel Hill expert surveys, a database that classifies political parties into ideological groupings, helps illustrate the stakes at play here.

The 2024 survey data covers 31 countries, and it was administered in all the European Union member state,s plus a few others, including Britain, Norway, and Turkey. It shows that there are more radical right-wing parties than any other kind of party in these countries, and they are growing in number and in support.

The 2024 data was compiled by 609 political scientists, who looked at party ideologies, their policy preferences, electoral performances, and the extent to which they participate in government. There are 279 parties in the database altogether, and so they are classified into “party families” to make the analysis manageable.

A party family is a grouping of parties which the experts think are similar to each other, even though there may be some differences between them. For example, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the National Rally (RN) in France, the Party for Freedom (VVD) in the Netherlands, the Freedom Party in Austria (FPO), and Reform in Britain are all classified as right-wing populist parties in the dataset. The chart shows the extent to which these 11 party families have been successful in winning votes in the most recent elections.

The Performance of Party Families in 31 Countries in 2024:

The radical right family consisted of 48 parties, and on average, they won 11% of the votes and 17% of seats in the various national legislatures. They are growing in support and influence, coming fourth after the conservative, socialist, and Christian democrat party families in voting support and representation in parliaments.

The threat to democracy

We can get some idea of how likely such parties are to undermine democracy by looking at responses to a question in the Chapel Hill survey. This asked the experts to judge the extent to which parties think power should or should not be concentrated in the executive. It is measured on a ten-point scale where zero means that the party is strongly in favour of constraining the power of the executive, whereas ten means that a party opposes any restrictions on executive powers.

The chart shows the average scores for each of the party families on this executive power scale. It is readily apparent that the radical right parties are significant outliers on the scale, being very much more likely to support executive dominance than the other party families.

Scores on the Executive Power Scale

The survey showed that parties of the right, such as the Conservatives, Agrarian and Religious parties, are rather more likely to support executive dominance than parties of the centre or left. But the radical right parties stand out as really strongly supporting this. This is in sharp contrast to radical left parties, which are quite suspicious of such executive dominance.

This is important since it shows that once in power, these parties are tempted to subvert the separation of powers between the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. This is likely to be accompanied by attacks on an independent media, the use of the courts against opponents, and attempts to gerrymander elections.

All this comes from the belief that a strong leader is the best form of government, a sentiment shared by many Trump supporters in the United States. Anne Applebaum’s recent book Twilight of Democracy illustrates this dynamic in the case of eastern European countries such as Poland and Hungary.

The implication is that if these parties grow stronger and dominate governments, they are quite likely to try to subvert democracy. Reform supporters in Britain could get more than they bargained for.

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Last month, a man on Long Island died after he was pulled into a magnetic resonance imaging scanner by a large metal chain he was wearing around his neck. It’s not the first time an MRI scanner has proved to be a death trap.

In this latest case, according to media reports, the man had accompanied his wife to the MRI center and was waiting outside the exam room while her knee was being scanned. When the procedure was completed, she called him over so that he could help her stand up. The man entered the MRI room, and a 20-pound chain he was wearing around his neck for weight training was immediately attracted to the magnet in the MRI. It pulled the man’s body with it, hurled him against the scanner, and trapped him there. He sustained serious injuries and was pronounced dead at a hospital the following day.

How could this happen? An MRI scanner uses magnetic fields generated by metal coils in its core, and other fields are then added in pulses. In simple terms, a static magnetic field orients the nuclei of hydrogen atoms in the body so they’re all facing the same direction; the magnetic pulses briefly redirect the nuclei, and then they align themselves in parallel again. The scanner detects these shifts and uses them to create images of the tissue.

In terms of safety, the problem is that, as current flows through the device, it becomes a huge and extremely powerful electromagnet. Ferromagnetic materials—which, at room temperature, include iron, cobalt, nickel, and some metal alloys—are attracted to it with a great deal of force. That means metallic objects that come close to a switched-on MRI can become dangerous projectiles.

So there’s a good reason why metal parts are taboo in and around MRI machines. In preparation for a scan, patients are asked to remove any metal objects they are carrying. When people don’t follow this instruction, serious accidents can occur. In 2023, a Brazilian man took a loaded firearm into the MRI room where he was accompanying his mother. The magnet pulled the gun out of his waistband, and a shot went off when it hit the scanner. The bullet hit the man in the abdomen, causing a fatal injury. Similar weapon discharges have also occurred in the U.S., fortunately with less serious outcomes, including a 2012 incident in New York State that involved an off-duty police officer.

Before a patient is brought in for a scan, they’re asked whether they have any medical or cosmetic implants containing metal in their body. These can include pacemakers, stents, piercings, and screws in bones. Metal residue from gunshot wounds must also be reported. The staff then check whether the objects could cause problems. In the end, most metal objects inside the body pose no danger to patients. But if they’re overlooked, things can get ugly.

Projectile fragments and metal shavings that have penetrated the tissue as a result of gunshot wounds or accidents may travel a few millimeters during the scan. Doctors consider very carefully whether an MRI is too risky in the presence of such foreign bodies and then switch to other imaging procedures if necessary. Small metal particles also sometimes move back and forth around their own axis and in confined spaces. This can cause them to heat up dangerously.

There can even be problems with tattoos that contain certain metallic inks. In one case, a tattooed professional football player sustained burns during a pelvic MRI scan. “At-risk” tattoos are those with black pigment or any other pigments containing iron oxide, as well as those with a design that displays loops, large circular objects or multiple adjacent points.

In one extreme example of internal metal objects causing damage during an MRI scan, a woman wore a sex toy into the MRI without the knowledge of the clinic staff. Most of these toys are made of silicone, a plastic that should be unproblematic in the magnet, but to the surprise of those present, especially the woman being examined, this one did contain ferromagnetic material. As a result, she suffered unspecified internal injuries and had to be admitted to a hospital.

In general, MRIs are very safe when used properly. Technicians perform tens of thousands of scans every year without causing any damage to those being examined. Serious accidents involving overlooked or unreported ferromagnetic materials are very rare. But it’s important that MRI patients follow one cardinal rule: leave the metal outside the scanning room.

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Monty Rakusen/Digital Vision

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Donald Trump has said he will meet with Vladimir Putin to discuss the war in Ukraine next week and said an end to the three-and-a-half-year war would have to involve “some swapping of territories”.

Trump said he planned to meet the Russian president next Friday in Alaska. He announced the location in a brief post on his Truth Social site.

Russian state media agency Tass confirmed the date and location of the meeting, citing Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov.

Earlier in the day, Trump told reporters in the White House the meeting “would have been sooner, but I guess there’s security arrangements that unfortunately people have to make”.

The US president also said “there’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both” Ukraine and Russia, and that the issue would be discussed soon, but he gave no further details.

Bloomberg reported on Friday that the deal could cement some of Putin’s territorial gains in Ukraine, in effect freezing the battle lines in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. Putin has claimed four Ukrainian regions in their entirety, although much of their territory remains under Ukrainian control.

US and Russian officials were working on a deal under which Russia would halt its offensive in exchange for the territorial concessions, making it a politically fraught proposal in Ukraine, Bloomberg said.

Trump’s comments came after Poland’s prime minister said a “freeze” in the conflict could be close, after speaking with the Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has communicated with Trump and European leaders in recent days.

“There are certain signals, and we also have an intuition, that perhaps a freeze in the conflict – I don’t want to say the end, but a freeze in the conflict – is closer than it is further away,” Donald Tusk said during a news conference. “There are hopes for this.”

Tusk said Zelenskyy was “very cautious but optimistic” about the ceasefire, Reuters reported. Ukraine was keen that Poland and other European countries play a role in planning for a ceasefire and an eventual peace settlement, Tusk said.

Trump has previously expressed his readiness to meet Putin one-on-one without preconditions, including direct negotiations between Putin and Zelenskyy, stoking fears that Ukraine may be left out of negotiations for the framework of a potential ceasefire.

If the summit happens, it would be the first US-Russia summit since 2021, when former president Joe Biden met Putin in Geneva.

Zelenskyy has responded by speaking with European leaders, including the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who are key conduits to Trump.

The US envoy Steve Witkoff had proposed a three-way meeting with Trump, Putin, and Zelenskyy, but the Kremlin had ignored that suggestion, said the Putin aide Yuri Ushakov, and was “focusing on preparations for a bilateral meeting with Trump in the first place”.

Putin has said he is not ready to meet Zelenskyy, even as the Kremlin claimed preparations were under way for a bilateral summit with Trump next week.

“I have nothing against it in general; it is possible, but certain conditions must be created for this,” Putin said of a meeting with Zelenskyy. “But unfortunately, we are still far from creating such conditions.”

Last month, Trump issued an ultimatum for Putin to agree to a ceasefire or face secondary sanctions, with the deadline set for this Friday. That deadline appeared in place despite plans for the summit, although the White House has not said what secondary measures it could enforce.

Trump did target India with a 25% tariff hike for purchasing Russian oil this week, singling out one of Moscow’s economic enablers in a move that New Delhi complained was unfair and selective.

Trump had grown frustrated with Putin in public in recent months as the war dragged through its third year and Putin continued to launch nightly missile and drone strikes on Ukrainian cities despite Trump’s insistence that he could strike a deal within 24 hours of becoming president.

“Putin … talks nice and then he bombs everybody in the evening,” Trump said last month. “So there’s a little bit of a problem there.”

At this dangerous moment for dissent

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you close this tab, I wanted to ask if you could support the Guardian at this crucial time for journalism in the US.

When the military is deployed to quell overwhelmingly peaceful protest, when elected officials of the opposing party are arrested or handcuffed, when student activists are jailed and deported, and when a wide range of civic institutions – non-profits, law firms, universities, news outlets, the arts, the civil service, scientists – are targeted and penalized by the federal government, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that our core freedoms are disappearing before our eyes – and democracy itself is slipping away.

In any country on the cusp of authoritarianism, the role of the press as an engine of scrutiny, truth and accountability becomes increasingly critical. At the Guardian, we see it as our job not only to report on the suppression of dissenting voices, but to make sure those voices are heard.

Not every news organization sees its mission this way – indeed, some have been pressured by their corporate and billionaire owners to avoid antagonizing this government. I am thankful the Guardian is different.

Our only financial obligation is to fund independent journalism in perpetuity: we have no ultrarich owner, no shareholders, no corporate bosses with the power to overrule or influence our editorial decisions. Reader support is what guarantees our survival and safeguards our independence – and every cent we receive is reinvested in our work.

The Guardian’s global perspective helps contextualize and illuminate what we are experiencing in this country. That doesn’t mean we have a single viewpoint, but we do have a shared set of values. Humanity, curiosity, and honesty guide us, and our work is rooted in solidarity with ordinary people and hope for our shared future.

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Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in 2017. According to reports, a US-Russia deal could allow Putin to keep some of the Ukrainian territory his troops have captured. Photograph: Jorge Silva/Reuters

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