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Amid one of the worst flu seasons the U.S. has seen in years, the Food and Drug Administration has canceled a key meeting to discuss next year’s vaccine.
The annual meeting of the administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee had been scheduled for March 13. That meeting is now off the schedule. The meeting allowed experts to discuss the upcoming season and determine which strains to include in the upcoming vaccine.
The administration told The Independent in an email on Thursday that its yearly preparations would not be impacted.
“The FDA will make public its recommendations to manufacturers in time for updated vaccines to be available for the 2025-2026 influenza season,” it said.
Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the committee that discusses and makes recommendations on the selection of viral strains to be included in the vaccines, told CBS News that he had received a notification from the administration shortly after 4 p.m. on Wednesday.
“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,” the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia said.
Offit also voiced his concerns about the timeline to The New York Times.
“It’s a six-month production cycle,” he said. “So one can only assume that we’re not picking flu strains this year.”
Manufacturers take about six months to produce and distribute the flu vaccine, growing flu viruses in fertilized eggs. Manufacturers are given candidate vaccine viruses that are injected into fertilized chicken eggs and incubated. The fluid from the virus is harvested from the eggs and the viruses are killed before they can be quality tested and distributed. Vaccine shipments usually begin in the late summer.
That work has to start months before the flu shot is needed. That way, enough vaccines can be produced by the fall ahead of the busy winter flu months.
The news comes after staffers told NPR that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2023 “Wild to Mild” flu vaccine campaign was halted last week. It comes as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is now leading the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has long been known as a vaccine skeptic.
This year has been a particularly bad flu year, with at least 33 million Americans infected thus far and 19,000 deaths estimated by the CDC. Flu vaccines can protect people from infection, and health authorities say anyone six months old or older should get a shot every flu season.
This year, rampant cases have shuttered schools across much of the U.S. — as have other viruses. The first death in a measles outbreak in West Texas was reported on Wednesday, and H5N1 bird flu has sickened dozens of others. The virus killed a person in Louisiana.
Hospitals have felt the strain of these viruses on top of RSV, norovirus, Covid, and other illness. They’ve set visitation restrictions during the surge.
“It is important for people to realize that these vaccines are critical for preventing infection,” Dr. Thomas Russo, who heads the infectious diseases department at the University at Buffalo School of Medicine, told USA Today earlier this month.
