Last Monday, two days before the panel of scientific experts on the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee was to hold a preliminary meeting to discuss next year’s flu vaccine, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sent an email informing the attendees that the meeting had been canceled and would be rescheduled for some time in March.

No reason for this abrupt cancelation was provided. However, many on the panel have been highly critical of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s anti-vaccine agenda. A similar meeting of scientific advisors to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was postponed last week after RFK Jr. was sworn in as HHS secretary.

Kennedy has criticized the federal vaccine advisory committees for being in league with the industry they are supposed to regulate, using that critique as a ploy to practice Donald Trump’s brand of political brinksmanship. Kennedy said, “We will remove conflicts of interest on the committees and research partners whenever possible and balance them with other stakeholders.”

This comes on the heels of one of the worst seasonal influenza epidemics the country has weathered in more than 15 years, in large part due to the rescinding of all COVID pandemic measures that had pushed flu to the verge of elimination. With essentially zero masking and no public health strategy other than the call for flu vaccines to mitigate the impact of these respiratory pathogens, the current outbreak comes as no surprise.

According to the CDC, nearly 33 million people, 10 percent of the US population, have come down with flu. More than 430,000 people have been hospitalized and more than 19,000 have died this season. This includes almost 100 children.

Dr. Paul Offit, one of the FDA committee advisers and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, is a highly respected scientist. Questioned by the media as to why the cancelation of Wednesday’s meeting was problematic, he said that it would have a detrimental impact on the selection and production of next year’s flu season vaccine.

Offit explained:

It is critical because it takes about six months to make this vaccine. So every March we meet. And we meet with the representatives of the World Health Organization (WHO), the Department of Defense, the CDC, and we look at a map of the world and we look at how these viruses are moving across that map as a way to predict what strains are likely to come into this country. We then pick strains we think are most likely to cause this coming year’s influenza epidemic.

He added:

And then the vaccine manufacturers use that information to make the vaccine for what is the six-month production cycle, March to September. So [the preliminary meeting is] a critical meeting, and it just got canceled… There was no justification. We don’t know who did it. We don’t know why it was done. We were told later that the FDA will essentially take this in-house. They were going to make the decision themselves, presumably based on the same information. But we don’t know that.

The meetings of the advisory committee are open to the public, and their discussions include an analysis of the previous year and lessons learned about the coverage offered by vaccines. Offit noted that this transparent process is critical to allowing the public to know how these decisions are made so as to gain the public’s trust. He criticized the Heritage Foundation and its position in its Project 2025 that the CDC “should no longer be a recommending body about vaccines,” saying that its effect was “to sort of eliminate expertise.”

He continued:

I fear that we are slowly tearing apart the public health process that has served us well. We live 30 years longer than we did 100 years ago primarily because of vaccines.

One should recall the Global Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1920, which killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people and infected more than 500 million people worldwide. More than a decade later, in 1931, Ernest William Goodpasture and colleagues at Vanderbilt successfully grew influenza viruses in embryonated hens’ eggs, leading to the first experimental influenza vaccines developed by Thomas Francis and Jonas Salk at the University of Michigan.

The first application of the vaccines was by the military in the 1940s during World War II. After safety trials were completed, the vaccines were licensed for wider use. This work was important in the origin and development of the WHO and CDC. The Worldwide Influenza Centre was established in 1948 and the Global Influenza Surveillance Response System (GISRS) in 1952.

Influenza vaccines have been one of the main strategies for the mitigation of seasonal influenza epidemics. Three influenza pandemics since the 1918-1920 Spanish flu were the flu pandemics of 1957-58, 1968-69 and the 2009-10. Including the COVID pandemic, vaccines have been paramount in preventing severe disease and death from these pathogens. Flu continues to kill 650,000 people each year, and with the constantly evolving virus, vigilance and timely response is of the utmost importance.

Clearly, the cancelation of the critical meeting is part of the Trump administration’s attack on public health and the science behind the discipline. This includes the withdrawal of the US from the WHO and the ending of USAID funding, which provides a modicum of response to the longstanding HIV pandemic and other pathogens like cholera and malaria.

The firing of HHS employees and the cuts in funding for research on cancer, diabetes and heart disease are to divert resources to military and police forces and tax cuts for the wealthy.

A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research think tank found that excess deaths from the COVID pandemic in the first three years netted Social Security $300 billion in benefits not paid out. This speaks to the efforts of the political establishment to restrict the benefits of public health and force life expectancy to plummet. In this regard, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is the ideal figure to be brought in to oversee the gutting of the entire edifice of public health.

His comments on the death of a child in Texas from measles, the first death from measles in the US since 2015, are telling. Questioned about the worsening measles outbreak and the child’s death, RFK Jr. said, “It’s not unusual, we have measles outbreaks every year.”

He then said that the 20 or so children and adults currently hospitalized with measles had been put in hospital to be placed under quarantine, a bald-faced lie. In fact, these victims, who had never received the vaccine against the preventable infection, were fighting for their lives in intensive care units or critical care beds.

That measles is making a resurgence in the US speaks volumes about the decay of bourgeois society and rise of fascism and anti-science sentiments, promoted by major sections of the ruling elite and financial oligarchy, epitomized by Trump and his ally, centibillionaire Elon Musk.

According to the CDC’s tracker for measles outbreaks, in the first two months of 2025 there have been 164 cases as of February 27. Fifty-five cases involve children under five. Almost half (79) are among those aged five to 19. Twenty-nine infected people are 20 years or older. Virtually all have never been vaccinated. Thirty-two (20 percent) have been hospitalized and one child has died. By comparison, there were 285 cases for all of 2024 and only 59 in 2023.

Much of this trend is attributed to the steady decline in vaccination rates, with most states now below the critical 95 percent threshold for herd immunity. There have been three outbreaks of measles in the US, with nine jurisdictions impacted: Alaska, California, Georgia, Kentucky, New jersey, New Mexico, New York City, Rhode Island and Texas. The US is not unique in this, as Britain reported 2,911 measles cases in 2024, the highest yearly figure since 2012.

The trend in measles vaccination is a worldwide phenomenon, just as the attack on public health has assumed a global character. The WHO noted that in 2023, more than 10 million people were infected and 107,500 died, most of them unvaccinated children under five. Such cases are most common in low- and middle-income countries, mainly in Africa and Asia. Fifty seven countries had major measles outbreaks in that year, the biggest being in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

It is alarming to note that childhood vaccinations dropped from 86 percent in 2019 to 83 percent in 2023. More than 150 million lives have been saved in over 50 years of offering childhood vaccinations. The measles vaccines have saved close to 94 million people in that time, predominately children.

That the anti-vax movement coincides with the spread of fascist politics is not surprising. Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as representatives of the financial oligarchy, are spearheads of this development.