Flu Vaccines Should Not Be This Hard

Katherine Wu: “In a typical year, the process of bringing a new seasonal flu shot to market is one of the United States’ most predictable vaccine routines. This, however, is not a typical year.”

“Vaccine manufacturers have prepared updated versions of the annual flu shot, as they normally do. The FDA has green-lighted those recipes, as it normally does. And normally, the next step would fall to the CDC’s expert vaccine advisory panel, known as ACIP, which guides the agency’s recommendations for which Americans should take those shots…”

“But in March, a ruling from a federal judge effectively suspended ACIP, on the grounds that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had violated the lawful procedure for selecting new members when he hastily remade the panel’s roster last June. Currently, no functional ACIP exists to guide this autumn’s immunization campaigns.”