A seminal annual meeting updating advisers on next season’s influenza vaccines was abruptly canceled by the Food and Drug Administration.
The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee was slated to meet on March 13, but several officials confirmed to CBS News Wednesday that the meeting was axed without any reason being provided.
This is the second vaccine advisory panel at the federal level to be postponed or canceled since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. assumed his role as health and human services secretary, The Washington Post notes.
“We’re all left trying to understand what is going on. Why was this meeting canceled? It’s an important meeting. What’s the plan for flu vaccines this year,” Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the FDA advisory panel, told CBS News.
Offit added that he was notified of the meeting’s cancellation at around 4 p.m.
One former and one current federal health official additionally confirmed to CBS News that the meeting was canceled without explanation.
The meeting, which was held last year on March 5, helps discern what strains are allowed to be used in vaccine shots ultimately made available to the public around six months later for flu season. Strains are selected based on what flu variants are likely to circulate in upcoming winter months.
“Because the vaccine is grown in eggs, for the most part, it requires six months to produce,” Offit explained to CBS News. “So March is six months before September, which is when these vaccines roll out.”
In a statement to the Daily Beast, the FDA shared: “A planned March 13 meeting of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee on the influenza vaccine strains for the 2025-2026 influenza season in the northern hemisphere has been cancelled.
“The FDA will make public its recommendations to manufacturers in time for updated vaccines to be available for the 2025-2026 influenza season.”
A former federal health official also told CBS News that even if the meeting were to simply be delayed and scheduled for later, it would still “put manufacturers behind.”
“It takes time to optimize updated vaccine virus strain production,” the unnamed official told CBS News. “They need as much time as possible before the upcoming fall vaccine season.”
A vaccine advisory panel for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was also indefinitely postponed earlier this week, with HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon explaining the delay was to “accommodate public comment in advance of the meeting.”
RFK Jr. is famously a vaccine skeptic. Along with formerly serving as the chairman of Children’s Health Defense, a leading anti-vaccine nonprofit group, he also repeatedly voiced his disregard toward the COVID vaccine during the pandemic’s prime.
In a 2022 anti-COVID vaccine rally, the Kennedy heir compared vaccine mandates to fascism saying that “even in Hitler’s Germany you could cross the Alps to Switzerland.” He swiftly apologized for his remarks.
During his Senate confirmation hearing in January, RFK Jr. insisted that he was neither “anti-vaccine or anti-industry” and was “pro-safety” instead. Despite this proclamation, however, the health secretary downplayed a measles outbreak Wednesday claiming: “It is not unusual, we have measles outbreaks every year.”
