Despite this being the worst flu season in 15 years, President Donald Trump's administration has abruptly cancelled a critical meeting that infectious disease experts were counting on to make sure the latest flu vaccine is the strongest.
NBC News reported Wednesday that a scheduled March meeting of a key Food and Drug Administration (FDA) vaccine committee has been scuttled without explanation, and no future date has been set. Members of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee were told about the cancellation in an email. Wednesday's announcement followed the news of a similar meeting hosted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) being unexpectedly delayed.
The meeting typically happens in the spring, so experts can decide which strains of the flu to include in the version of the vaccine that is normally ready for the public by the fall. Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist who chairs the New England Complex Systems Institute, noted in a Bluesky post that the FDA is under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which is run by anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
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"Any delays will jeopardize next year’s vaccine supply chain," Dr. Feigl-Ding wrote. "God help us all."
The FDA's March meeting was slated to happen after the World Health Organization's (WHO) flu vaccine meeting this Friday, which typically influences what strains of the virus the FDA chooses to include in the updated vaccine. Even though Trump withdrew the United States from the WHO on the first day of his second term, officials from the FDA and the CDC will attend Friday's meeting.
"I feel like the world is upside-down," Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the FDA's vaccine committee, told Dr. Jeremy Faust's Inside Medicine Substack newsletter. "We aren't doing the things we need to do to protect ourselves."
According to NBC, 86 children and 19,000 adults have died from the flu this season alone. And the news of the vaccine committee meeting being called off comes on the heels of a school-age child in Texas dying of measles — the first measles-related death in a decade. The child was not vaccinated for measles.
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"It's a bad day for infectious diseases," Boston Children's Hospital's Dr. Ofer Levy, who has advised the FDA on vaccines, told NBC.
Click here to read NBC's report in full.