Geoff Bennett:
The FDA has canceled a critical meeting of flu vaccine experts, making this the second vaccine policy meeting to be canceled since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took over as secretary of Health and Human Services.
The annual gathering is key. Federal health officials must decide in advance which strains to target in the next vaccine since production takes months. It comes amid one of the worst flu seasons in 15 years, with more than 19,000 deaths, according to the CDC, nearly 100 of them children.
We’re joined now by Dr. Paul Offit, one of the FDA committee advisers and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
It’s good to see you, Dr. Offit.
So why was this meeting in particular so critical? And why did the FDA cancel it? What justification did they give?
Dr. Paul Offit, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia: Well, it’s critical because it takes about six months to make this vaccine. So, every March, we meet. And we meet with representatives from the World Health Organization, the Department of Defense, the CDC, and we look at a map of the world and we look at how these viruses are moving across that map as a way to predict what strains are likely to come into this country.
We then pick strains we think are most likely to cause this coming year’s influenza epidemic. And then the manufacturers, the vaccine manufacturers, then use that information to make the vaccine for what is the six-month production cycle, March to September. So it’s a critical meeting, and it just got canceled.
