On Wednesday, the FDA sent an email to its advisory panel on vaccines canceling a meeting scheduled for March 13. There was no explanation. If the panel obeys, we will all be denied next fall’s flu vaccine.
Among its other duties, the expert panel of doctors and scientists works with vaccine makers to assess mutations in strains of flu, so that safe and effective vaccines can be made for the fall flu season, a process that takes about six months of lead time. The panel also relies on data from the World Health Organization, which the Trump administration has quit.
In the usual process, the FDA panel makes recommendations each March, followed by a parallel process of the Centers for Disease Control panel in June, to certify findings so that manufacture can begin. That in turn sets in motion coverage by insurance companies and the government. Last week, a CDC meeting on vaccines was also canceled with no explanation.
This order is breathtaking—literally. Even with the wide availability and use of flu vaccine, some 19,000 adults and 86 children have died from flu this season. About 430,000 people were hospitalized. If effective vaccines are not available next fall, the toll of illness and death will be much higher.
Worse still, there is an epidemic of bird flu sweeping through American chicken and cattle farms that has caused egg prices to skyrocket. Should that evolve to transmit between humans, we could see another pandemic on scale with COVID-19, if not a repeat of the great flu pandemic of 1918, which cost 50 million lives worldwide, three times the number of deaths in World War I.
Trump may be an extreme nationalist, but pandemics know no national borders. In 1918, the flu killed 675,000 Americans.
You would think he’d also want a rapid program to develop and stockpile an updated bird flu vaccine, but instead he is considering rescinding an existing contract to do so with Moderna.
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Let’s take a step back and consider what’s at work here. First, this is a bizarre and perverse expression of the general attack by Trump and Elon Musk on government. Second, it belies the promise made to the Senate by Robert Kennedy, Jr., that he was not anti-vaccine.
Kennedy has a longstanding animus against one of the FDA panel members, Dr. Paul Offit of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who is a national leader on vaccine research and development. Dr. Offit has been a critic of the bizarre views of Kennedy.
DESPITE THE FDA’S ORDER, the panel needs to keep meeting and doing its urgent work. If the FDA panel has the courage to keep meeting, as an act of soft civil disobedience on behalf of the public health, it will set a salutary example for other experts barred from their official duties, to function as a kind of government-in-exile. If they want to set up a go-fund-me process to underwrite the costs, I will be among the first to donate.
Trump may have pulled the US out of the WTO, but all of the doctors and scientists on the panel have their own contacts with the WTO and with counterparts in other countries. Major European nations have their own processes and expertise for researching flu strains, as does the WHO. In the past, they have relied heavily on US leadership, but now they need to take more of a leading role, rather as Europe has stepped into the breach on Ukraine.
The pushback against these edicts is likely to be so massive that Trump could well reverse them, but we can’t count on that. It’s not even clear that Trump knew about, or signed off on, these cancellations. But that’s the kind of potentially catastrophic unforced errors that happen when you hire wackos to run the government.
The orders are also an example of the perverse incoherence of the Trump’s scattershot war against government. Politically, he can get away with some actions, such as promoting racism under the guise of going after excesses of DEI. He can even achieve some cuts in valued public spending via the usual rightwing lies about waste, fraud, and abuse.
But inviting the next flu pandemic is something else entirely. One of the few things Trump can claim credit for, late in his first administration, was the massive spending to create COVID vaccines at “warp speed.” Why despoil one of his rare genuine achievements?
Speaking of warp, you may recall that in the run-up to the election, there was increasing discussion of Trump’s escalating dementia. Four months later, he is no less demented, and now he has the entire US government plus Musk as his wrecking ball.
We have to hope that Trump’s random recklessness will feed the growing opposition and eventually lead to his downfall—and do everything possible to bring that about.
