Still, the advisory meetings were the most open portion of the US process. The advisors held public meetings with comment periods in which advisors had open discussions—and sometimes disagreements. They reviewed the global flu data and offered post-mortem analysis of the previous year’s season and vaccines.
Now, the committee—the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC)—is in limbo. Members are unsure why they were cut out of the process and whether they will meet to discuss other decisions, including the upcoming selection of strains for the next annual COVID-19 shots. Other meeting dates are not populating their calendars as they normally would, according to Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and VRBPAC member.
Ars Technica has reached out to the FDA asking, again, why the meeting was canceled, why the agency is moving forward without the advisors’ input, and what the future is for VRBPAC. The FDA did not respond.
“That’s what worries me in this—that this represents something bigger,” Offit told Ars Technica. These meetings give the public a way to see how experts are viewing vaccines and what they see as their strengths and weaknesses. “When you eliminate that, you eliminate transparency, which according to RFK Jr. is what he wanted.”
For now, all one can do is “just sort of buckle up and see how this plays out,” he said.
