Key Vaccine Meetings Canceled: What You Need To Know

The cancellation of a pair of advisory meetings to discuss vaccines is fueling concern among scientists and health policy experts that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will write his long-held criticism of established vaccines into policy, possibly leading to a resurgence in once-eradicated diseases.

“Americans should be greatly worried,” Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, told Patch in an email. “RFK Jr. is executing on his promise to undermine the scientific basis for vaccines.”

The back-to-back cancellations of the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccine advisory panel meetings come as other scientific committees are also being placed on pause pending a review of childhood vaccines and related issues.

“I fear that Secretary Kennedy is implementing his long-held skepticism of science and scientific evidence,” said Gostin.

Kennedy has made misleading and false statements about the safety of shots, claiming they are linked to autism, despite decades of research debunking the association.

“I think we are highly likely to see childhood diseases that were once eliminated and largely forgotten will come roaring back,” Gostin said in the email to Patch. “I expect major outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases in the next months and years like measles, mumps, and chickenpox.”

What Meetings Were Canceled?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices meeting was to have taken place Wednesday through Friday in Atlanta.

The panel’s recommendations on what vaccines people should get and when are non-binding, but agency directors almost always adopt them

Items on the agenda included a new meningitis vaccine, a vaccine to prevent a mosquito-borne illness called chikungunya, and RSV and influenza vaccines.

The Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee was to have met in March to discuss strains for next year’s flu shot.

In a statement Thursday, the FDA said it will make public its recommendations to manufacturers “in time for updated vaccines to be available for the 2025-2026 influenza season,” but declined to say if that means the recommendations will be made without input from its independent advisory panel, ABC News reported.

What Else Has Changed?

Days after he was sworn in, Kennedy told HHS employees the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” commission would investigate the childhood vaccine schedule that prevents measles, polio and other dangerous diseases, and other issues that “were formerly taboo or insufficiently scrutinized.”

The panel will also study pesticides, food additives, microplastics, antidepressants and the electromagnetic waves emitted by cellphones and microwaves also will be studied.

“Nothing is going to be off limits,” Kennedy said.

Also, the CDC has been ordered to discontinue some promotions developed for vaccines, including a campaign for flu shots, multiple news outlets reported.

Instead, Kennedy wants ads that promote “informed consent” in vaccine decision-making, Stat News reported. Informed consent refers to the discussion of risks, benefits and possible side effects of vaccines.

In January, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to begin the process of withdrawing from the World Health Organization and ordered federal officials to stop communicating with the WHO. But as Stat News reported, representatives of both the CDC and FDA participated virtually in a meeting to select the viruses for next season’s vaccine.

Kennedy is reportedly preparing to remove some current members of the FDC and CDC vaccine advisory committees and replace them with members he perceives do not have conflicts of interest, Politico reported. Kennedy has claimed the pharmaceutical industry has undue influence over government health agencies.

Measles Outbreak ‘Not Unusual’: Kennedy

These developments are occurring against the backdrop of a brutal flu season in which 86 children and 19,000 adults have died, according to CDC surveillance data.

This week, a child who wasn’t vaccinated died in a measles outbreak in rural West Texas, state officials said Wednesday, the first U.S. death from the highly contagious — but preventable — respiratory disease since 2015.

Kennedy on Wednesday said the HHS is keeping an eye on the outbreak, which has sickened 125 people as of Friday, but said it is “not unusual.”

“This is a big deal,” Dr. Amy Thompson, a pediatrician and chief executive officer of Covenant Health, said Wednesday at a news conference. “We have known that we have measles in our community, and we are now seeing a very serious consequence.”

The United States had considered measles — a respiratory virus that can survive in the air for up to two hours — eliminated in 2000, which meant there had been a halt in continuous spread of the disease for at least a year. Measles cases rose in 2024, including a Chicago outbreak that sickened more than 60.

In the current outbreak, Lubbock’s first case was in an unvaccinated child who sat in an emergency room with a kid who had measles, Katherine Wells, director of the local health department told The Associated Press.

The case was a testament to how quickly and easily the virus spreads.

“When you see it in real life, you really realize how contagious it is,” said Wells, who expects more local cases. “An entire household gets sick so quickly. Whole families are getting sick with measles.”

The Associated Press contributed reporting.