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A purposeful gag order is what canceled the FDA meeting on flu vaccines [1]
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Date: 2025-02-28
Happy to see outrage and hundreds of news stories about the FDA canceling the advisory committee meeting for next year’s flu vaccine.
x Before reading this post remember 16k people have died in the US since Oct of seasonal flu👇 FDA canceled meeting of vaccine experts who advise on next winter's flu shots. It takes 6 months from identifying next season's vaccine strains to producing 150 million shots www.nytimes.com/2025/02/26/u... — Delthia Ricks (@dricks.bsky.social) 2025-02-27T15:31:15.559Z
There were also multiple nightly news segments about this and a good amount of noise on social media. However, the technical reason that the meeting was canceled is clear and is not being mentioned by the media. Federal advisory committee meetings must be posted in the Federal Register, and there was no such posting this year for this FDA meeting. It’s a legal requirement to provide public notice and enable public participation.
Clearly there are people embedded within HHS that are using the legal structure of the bureaucracy to stop things that they don’t like. Normally, it’s easy for FDA and NIH and CDC to notify the public about a meeting. But not anymore. They’ve gummed things up. On purpose. This failure to post public notices is the same tactic that is being manipulated to illegally prevent NIH from funding future medical breakthroughs that have been funded by Congress.
It’s directly related to the communication ban that Trump placed on HHS on January 21st and which continues to this day.
Let me be clear and provide some citations; these routine public notices were easy enough to do in prior years before FDA flu vaccine meetings (see 2024, 2023, etc). Since Musk’s coronation, the FDA has only posted 3 notices about anything, whereas it posted 66 notices during the same period last year.
The Federal Advisory Committee Act which is referenced by the prior FDA notices (and is codified in US law at Title 5 of the US Code in Section 1000) requires a notice of the meeting to be posted in the Federal Register, that the meeting be open to the public, and that the public have a way to comment.
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