The decision comes amid the worst flu season in 15 years. 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.
![[This year’s flu season is one of the worst in years. At least 33 million Americans have been infected and the Centers for Disease Control has reported 19,000 deaths]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/02/27/15/18/GettyImages-1339524956.jpeg)
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.
"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. “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. 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.
