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 Offutt, one of the FDA Committee Advisors and Director of the Vaccine

Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. It's good to see you, Dr. Offutt.

So why was this meeting in particular so critical? And why did the FDA cancel it? What justification

did they give? 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 years of 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. And in which justification, if any, was given? There was no justification.

We don't know who did it. We don't know why it was done. We were told later that the FDA will

essentially take this in-house. They're going to make the decision

themselves, presumably based on the same information, but we don't know that. What's good about this

meeting is it's open to the public, it's transparent, and you can hear how we discuss what

...