The Food and Drug Administration unexpectedly canceled an annual meeting of its advisers to update next season’s influenza vaccines, an adviser on the panel and multiple officials confirm to CBS News, potentially upending the process to start manufacturing next winter’s flu shots.
“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 committee and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told CBS News.
Offit said he received the notification that the meeting was canceled shortly after 4 p.m. The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee was supposed to meet on March 13 to discuss how to update the shots for the next flu season, Offit said.
One former and one current federal health official also confirmed that the committee’s upcoming meeting had been canceled without explanation.
An FDA spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The companies that manufacture influenza vaccines rely on the FDA each year to pick out the strains to use in shots made for the American market. The specific strains are chosen each year based on predictions of what flu variants will be circulating in the coming winter.
That selection is usually done by the committee in early March, drawing in large part on findings from a meeting of the World Health Organization’s advisers reviewing data on influenza from across the Northern Hemisphere.
“Because the vaccine is grown in eggs, for the most part, it requires six months to produce. So March is six months before September, which is when these vaccines roll out,” said Offit.
Last year, the FDA asked the committee to meet on March 5 to decide on how to update the influenza shots for the 2024 to 2025 season.
The agency usually announces these meeting dates around a month in advance. Next month’s meeting had not yet been publicly disclosed.
Even if the meeting is eventually scheduled for later this year, a delay could affect availability of shots at the beginning of flu season.
“This delay will really put manufacturers behind. It takes time to optimize updated vaccine virus strain production. They need as much time as possible before the upcoming fall vaccine season,” a former federal health official told CBS News.
Which strains are picked to be targeted by the vaccines can have a significant impact on how effective the shots are.
Early data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s testing suggests that this past season’s vaccine may have been a poor match for one of the common strains of the virus. More data on the effectiveness of the vaccine is expected to be released Thursday.
The cancellation is just the latest federal vaccine meeting to be disrupted.
A quarterly meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices was unexpectedly postponed earlier this month, citing the need “to accommodate public comment in advance of the meeting.”
