A meeting of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee to discuss the next season’s flu vaccine has reportedly been canceled, the second such disruption of a meeting involving vaccine policy experts at the federal level since prominent vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr took over as the Health and Human Services secretary earlier this month.
A meeting of the Food And Drug Administration's vaccine advisory committee has reportedly been ... [+]
A member of the FDA’s Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, Dr. Paul Offit, told various news outlets that the agency sent out an email Wednesday canceling a panel meeting that was set for March 13.
The agenda of the meeting was to select the strains of the influenza virus that would be included in the vaccine for the 2025-26 flu season.
Offit, who has been a vocal critic of Kennedy, told the New York Times that no reason had been given for the meeting’s cancellation and with the flu vaccine's six-month production timeline, he assumes this means “we’re not picking flu strains this year.”
Another panel member, Dr. Stanley Perlman, told Reuters he had not yet been informed about the cancellation, but was expecting it as the meeting had not been put in the Federal Register.
The FDA and Kennedy have not yet commented on the cancellation of the meeting.
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This is the second cancellation of a key vaccine panel meeting at the federal level, since Kennedy was confirmed and sworn in earlier this month. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a group of experts that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccine policy, was supposed to hold a three-day meeting in Atlanta this week from Wednesday to Friday. However, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon confirmed last week the meeting had been postponed, without offering any details on a new date. The ACIP, which usually meets thrice a year, had been a target of Kennedy’s criticism during his confirmation process. At the postponed meeting, the panel was scheduled to discuss a new meningitis vaccine, a shot targeting the mosquito-borne Chikungunya virus, along with RSV and influenza shots.
19,000. That is the total number of deaths from influenza reported during the ongoing 2024-25 flu season, according to the CDC’s tracker, making it one of the worst in recent years. The toll also includes 86 children.
F.D.A. Cancels Meeting of Vaccine Experts Scheduled to Advise on Flu Shots (New York Times)
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