After the Department of Health and Human Services canceled about $500 million in funding for mRNA vaccine development, one senior agency leader has decided to call it quits. Alastair Thomson is resigning as chief data officer at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), according to his Aug. 10 LinkedIn announcement that has since been deleted.
“This is painful beyond belief for me because we at ARPA-H are doing incredible things in the interests of the American people, and showing progress that will truly change the trajectory of people's health,” Thomson wrote in the now-deleted post.
The data chief attributed his departure, which he confirmed to Fierce is planned for Aug. 22, directly to the Aug. 5 announcement that HHS was terminating 22 contracts for work developing new mRNA vaccines designed to combat infectious diseases like influenza and COVID-19.
“This is the single most stupid thing they could be doing,” Thomson wrote in the LinkedIn post. “mRNA vaccines are demonstrably the most effective and safest vaccines ever produced by humanity. They saved millions of lives during the pandemic, and continue to do so today.”
“They are ignoring that that [sic] If you honestly and openly analyze the data these vaccines and other mRNA technology are a boon to health,” he added.
HHS declined to comment on Thomson’s departure.
Multiple studies have concluded that mRNA vaccines are safe and effective, and the research underlying them goes back to the discovery of mRNA in the early 1960s.
Thomson is not the first senior ARPA-H official to depart over disagreements with the Trump administration.
In February, Director Renee Wegrzyn, Ph.D., was let go from the agency, which an HHS spokesperson attributed to a desire to align ARPA-H’s leadership with President Trump’s priorities. A successor has yet to be named, with Jason Roos, Ph.D., currently serving as acting director.
ARPA-H is modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which Wegrzyn worked as a consultant and project manager before taking the reins at ARPA-H just a few months after it launched. The agency kicked off in March 2022 with former President Joe Biden’s blessing and $1 billion from Congress; its coffers rose to $2.5 billion by May 2023, when it announced it had hired its first program managers and was “open for business.”
Data leader Thomson joined ARPA-H in April 2023, the most recent stop in a federal career spanning two decades. He spent eight-and-a-half years as a software developer for the National Institutes of Health before joining the NIH’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, where he rose to the rank of chief information officer over a 13-year tenure.