The Food and Drug Administration abruptly canceled a critical meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), which gathers annually in March to determine what flu strains will be covered by next year’s vaccine.
The sudden cancellation of the meeting comes amid anxiety at federal health agencies over the future of vaccine programs under the Trump administration, and the stewardship of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist.
VRBPAC member Dr. Paul Offit told CNBC that the meeting was canceled with little explanation on Wednesday afternoon. “Who canceled this meeting? Why did they cancel the meeting? Will manufacturers now turn to the World Health Organization to determine strains for this year’s influenza vaccines?” he said.
“It’s a six-month production cycle,” Dr. Offit added in a separate interview with The New York Times. “So one can only assume that we’re not picking flu strains this year.”
Earlier this month, a planned meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) — which included votes on key recommendations for the CDC’s influenza prevention programs — was also abruptly “postponed.” No new date has been set.
The 2025 flu season has been particularly brutal. According to the Centers for Disease Control, there have been “at least 33 million illnesses, 430,000 hospitalizations, and 19,000 deaths from flu so far this season.” The current flu outbreak is the worst experienced by the nation in 15 years, according to the CDC, and preparation for next year’s flu season is critical.
Shortly after being sworn in, Kennedy used his first address to staff at the Department of Health and Human Services to inform them that they would be reviewing and investigating subjects that were “formally taboo or insufficiently scrutinized” and that “nothing is going to be off limits,” including “childhood vaccine schedule, electromagnetic radiation, glyphosate, other pesticides, ultra-processed foods, artificial food allergies, SSRI [antidepressants] and other psychiatric drugs, PFAS, PFOA, microplastics.”
Earlier this month, Kennedy began making preparations to gut members of vaccine advisory committees — including VRBPAC — who he considered to have conflicts of interest, according to a report from Politico.
On Wednesday, Kennedy drew public condemnation after downplaying the severity of a measles outbreak in Texas that has killed at least one child — the first measles related death in the U.S. since 2015. When asked about the outbreak during a Cabinet meeting, Kennedy claimed that “it’s not unusual to have measles outbreaks every year.”
Between influenza and the measles, two unusually severe viral outbreaks are currently ravaging the United States — and Kennedy appears wholly unqualified to deal with them.
Article by:Source:
