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Elon Musk’s push to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau comes two weeks after he struck a deal with Visa to launch a payment app on X. Sabotaging the agency would shield him from having to follow consumer protection laws. This is why you follow the money.

A Food and Drug Administration vaccine advisory committee meeting scheduled for March to select the strains to be included in next season’s flu shot has been canceled, a panel member said Wednesday.

Federal health officials notified members of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee of the cancellation in an email Wednesday afternoon, said committee member Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

The email, Offit said, offered no explanation for the scrapped meeting.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The cancellation comes as the United States is in the midst of a particularly severe flu season. So far, 86 children and 19,000 adults have died this season, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“I’m quite shocked,” Norman Baylor, a former director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccine Research and Review, said in an email. “As you know, the VRBPAC is critical for making the decision on strain selection for the next influenza vaccine season.”

In January, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to begin the process of withdrawing the U.S. from the WHO. Federal health officials were later ordered to stop communicating with the WHO.

Stat News reported Monday that officials from both the FDA and the CDC would participate virtually in the WHO meeting, however.

The canceled FDA advisory meeting comes just days after a CDC vaccine advisory committee meeting was abruptly postponed.

That meeting included a presentation and vote on a number of vaccines, including the use of the British drugmaker GSK’s meningococcal vaccine, as well as for a new chikungunya vaccine and the recently approved at-home nasal spray for influenza.

The canceled meeting in March is likely to add to concerns among scientists that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, an anti-vaccine activist, could undermine the vaccine regulatory process in the U.S., possibly leading to a resurgence of preventable diseases.

Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, said this is a “clearly emerging pattern to undermine, even eliminate, scientific advisory committees at HHS.”

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

Earlier Wednesday, Texas health officials reported that an unvaccinated child in the state died from the measles, the first death from the virus in a decade. An outbreak in the state has led to at least 124 cases, mostly in children.

“It’s a bad day for infectious diseases,” said Dr. Ofer Levy, director of the precision vaccines program at Boston Children’s Hospital, who has advised the FDA on vaccines.

Grogan wrote: Sat Mar 01, 2025 10:23 am Yes, that was planned. To humiliate him and kick him out of the meeting. Vance was fucking smirking. The press is going around saying shit like Zelenskyy was goading them, too.

This bully behaviour is actually going to weaken America, because now nobody respects it. Other leaders will now plot around this administration, give false or no intel, and give a big middle finger to the USA.

"Never underestimate the vanity of a guy who paints himself orange, and tapes dead ferrets to his head each day before going off to berate the public."

- D. Earl Stephens, Editor, Columnist, Writer