A Food and Drug Administration vaccine advisory committee meeting scheduled for March to select the strains to be included in next season's flu shot has been canceled, a panel member said Wednesday.
Federal health officials notified members of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee of the cancelation in an email Wednesday afternoon, said committee member Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
The email, Offit said, offered no explanation for the scrapped meeting.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The cancelation comes as the United States is in the midst of a particularly severe flu season. So far this season, there have been 86 deaths in children and 19,000 deaths in adults, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The FDA typically convenes the meeting every spring to get recommendations on which strains should be included in the upcoming flu vaccine.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed by the Senate as the Secretary of Health and Human Services on Thursday.
The meetings are important because the flu virus changes year to year, and the vaccine must be updated to provide the best protection. Deciding on the strains in the spring gives vaccine manufacturers enough time to produce the shots to be ready for the fall.
On Friday, a World Health Organization advisory committee is scheduled to meet on which strains should be included in the next flu vaccines in the Northern Hemisphere. That meeting typically influences the FDA's strain selection.
In January, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to begin the process of withdrawing the U.S. from the WHO. Federal health officials were later ordered to stop communicating with the WHO.
Stat News reported on Monday that officials from both the FDA and the CDC would participate virtually in the WHO meeting, however.
The canceled FDA advisory meeting comes just days after a CDC vaccine advisory committee meeting was abruptly postponed.
That meeting included a presentation and vote on a number of vaccines, including the use of the British drugmaker GSK’s meningococcal vaccine, as well as for a new chikungunya vaccine and the recently approved at-home nasal spray for influenza.
The canceled meeting in March is likely to add to concerns among scientists that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, an anti-vaccine activist, could undermine the vaccine regulatory process in the U.S., possibly leading to a resurgence of preventable diseases.
Earlier Wednesday, Texas health officials reported that an unvaccinated child in the state died from the measles, the first death from the virus in a decade. An outbreak in the state has led to at least 124 cases, mostly in children.
"It's a bad day for infectious diseases," said Dr. Ofer Levy, director of the precision vaccines program at Boston Children's Hospital who has advised the FDA on vaccines.
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