Washington: The US Food and Drug Administration has unexpectedly canceled a meeting with experts to discuss the development of next year's flu vaccines, media reported late Wednesday.
It comes after the Republican-controlled Senate approved Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary this month, disregarding widespread alarm from the medical community over his long history of promoting vaccine misinformation and denying scientific facts.
Laboratories that produce flu vaccines have traditionally relied on the FDA to annually select which strains should be chosen based on the variants of the virus expected to circulate in the United States the following winter.
A selection is usually made by an expert committee convened by the FDA in March based on data from the World Health Organization.
"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," Paul Offit, a member of the FDA advisory committee and director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told CBS News.
Offit confirmed the cancellation of the meeting and warned that it could interfere with or delay production of flu vaccines.
He added that given the vaccines have a six-month production cycle, he assumes the committee is not picking strains this year.
US Health Secretary Kennedy has repeatedly and falsely linked vaccines to autism, a claim widely debunked by scientific research.
