MICHIGAN CITY, Ind. — Jerome Adams has always viewed himself as a medical doctor and, essentially, apolitical. After serving as Indiana health commissioner and President Donald J. Trump’s first-term surgeon general, Adams begged off when I asked him if he supported a second term.
“I believe health care and public health should be nonpartisan, and as such I don’t endorse candidates or reveal who I’m voting for,” Adams told me in March 2024. “However, I stand ready to help whoever is president address America’s poor health and inequitable health care system.”
This month, after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. canceled $500 million in mRNA research contracts, Adams could stay silent no longer.
“[I]n his second term, Trump’s tolerance for his own appointees undermining this legacy is nothing short of baffling,” Adams wrote in an Aug. 15 Washington Post op-ed. “There is a clear pattern of insidious spread of fear-mongering and misinformation emanating from the highest echelons of our nation’s healtwh research agencies. As a physician and public health leader, I am outraged.”
Now a distinguished professor at Purdue University, Adams added, “The latest affront comes from Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health. His conflation of vaccine mandate politics with the proven science of mRNA technology is not just irresponsible; it’s a betrayal of the public’s trust and a direct threat to our nation’s biosecurity.”
In 2023, the Indiana immunization rate for children aged 19-35 months dropped to 56%, a 14% decrease compared to 2019. This is partly attributed to political fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Adams was one of several Hoosiers in the first Trump administration who played crucial roles in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. “I was in ‘the room where it happens’ during the harrowing early days of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Adams explained in his op-ed. “I witnessed the birth of Operation Warp Speed, a triumph of American ingenuity that harnessed mRNA technology to halt a predicted tidal wave of death and despair.”
Adams wrote that Trump rightly called Operation Warp Speed “one of the greatest miracles in the history of modern-day medicine.
Indiana had 2 million confirmed COVID cases and 26,115 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University & Medicine’s Coronavirus Resource Center, making it the most lethal public health crisis in state history. Only 3,888,678 Hoosiers (58%) received the vaccine. The pandemic killed 1.2 million Americans.
Operation Warp Speed became what Adams called “a masterstroke of American competition and scientific rigor.” Within days of isolating the virus’s structure, the operation allowed the U.S. government to formulate, distribute and inoculate millions of people within months.
Adams said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Aug. 10 that mRNA research “helped us develop COVID-19 vaccines in record time. And it’s, quite frankly, President Trump’s greatest achievement.”
Alex Azar, the former Eli Lilly executive from Indianapolis who served as Trump’s first Health and Human Services secretary, agreed back in 2022. During a fireside chat in October of that year at the University of Pennsylvania, Azar said Operation Warp Speed became his “biggest achievement” at HHS and in his life.
Azar explained how scientists in China posted a genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 online on Jan. 10, 2020. Three days later, American scientists had developed a seed vaccine, a sample used as the starting material for vaccine production.
“It was the fastest time in human history that a [pharmaceutical] product has moved from discovery to actual phase one human trials,” Azar said.
Since Kennedy was barely confirmed as secretary, 52-48, by the U.S. Senate in February — with Indiana Republican Sens. Todd Young and Jim Banks voting yes — he has taken a series of extreme and controversial steps.
Kennedy has fired prominent HHS officials who developed COVID strategies and in June dismissed the entire Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, despite assurances to Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La. — a medical doctor — that he wouldn’t. The Trump administration, under the auspices of the Department of Government Efficiency, has terminated hundreds of National Institutes of Health grants. The Indiana University School of Medicine has had $70 million in NIH funding cut for 2025.
“Abandoning mRNA for antiquated technology is a national security disaster,” Adams wrote. “Our health and our security — and Trump’s legacy — depend on it.”
Asked about the mRNA cancellations, Trump told reporters that it was “a long time ago, and we’re onto other things” and that the administration is “looking for other answers to other problems, to other sicknesses and diseases.”
While Russia’s and China’s vaccine efforts faltered, Operation Warp Speed delivered six candidates, with mRNA leading the charge. “This was no accident; it was the result of Trump and HHS Secretary Alex Azar’s vision for a competitive, science-driven process,” Adams wrote. “To now cast aside mRNA technology is to spit in the face of that achievement.”
Postscript: Since this column was originally published by State Affairs, on Wednesday the White House fired Susan Monarez as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after she refused to resign amid pressure to change vaccine policy. Other CDC senior officials resigned, accusing HHS Secretary Kennedy of “weaponizing public health for political gain” and “putting millions of American lives at risk.”
Brian A. Howey is a senior writer and columnist for Howey Politics Indiana/State Affairs. Follow him on X @hwypol and Blue Sky @hwypol.bsky.social.
