This isn't entirely cynical, I do assume there are some pragmatists who might think this way.
They may even go one step deeper and believe the vaccines aren't proven properly to know whether they work well enough.
They may even go further still and claim that the shot causes the flu—like RFK recently did with measles:
> Kennedy claimed the outbreak was likely caused by vaccines — contrary to evidence that showed low vaccination rates as the culprit. The false theory seems to stem from a misreading of a California Department of Public Health report that mentioned cases of a vaccine-induced rash, not vaccine-induced measles.
* https://www.nbcnews.com/news/texas-measles-outbreak-anti-vac...
Measles used to not be a thing:
> The US declared that measles had been "eliminated" in 2000, but the country has seen outbreaks in recent years amid a rise in anti-vaccine sentiment. The last US measles death was in 2015, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
If this meeting is cancelled, we would expect the vaccine to be less effective and would see greater impact (simply because it wasn't tailored to the be the most likely effective vaccine), but due to all the variables I mentioned it could even appear that "things got better after we did this" (post hoc ergo propter hoc).
There is no steel man here, RFK just wants to demonstrate that his beliefs about viruses are true. We may or may not get enough unambiguous data to make conclusions about his beliefs in a year or two, but given the concomitant reduction in the effectiveness of the CDC due to Trump policies, and the sycophantic nature of the people being placed into leadership roles, we may simply never know because the data would not be collected, or the research not funded, or the publications retracted.
Or RFK could somehow be right and we see a huge magic increase in public health across the country (not seen in other countries that keep vaccination). I am not aware of very many scientists who believe this will happen.
Our current approach isn't working.
At least that's what this forum has taught me.
Without the effects known for months, it sounds a lot like gambling to me.
Whoops, gave away my political leanings.
So despite US shenanigans rest of world may still be OK
I guess we're going to relearn this lesson the hard way. Especially with businesses also demanding people come back to the office to work.
A big part of the problem is a lot of people don't understand this. How often do you hear people say, "I got the flu vaccine and still got the flu".
However, most people who say they have "the flu" are using the term colloquially and it is unlikely that they actually had influenza.
Further, as we saw with the COVID vaccines, people are incapable of understanding that vaccines don't create an impenetrable barrier. Instead it lowers risk of infection and increases likelihood of a milder case.
I get how flu vaccines become more important as you age, COVID also (lest you win a Herman Caine award). Younger people getting vaccinated also helps limit transmission to older people who are more likely to die from it, but doing so requires a bit more empathy than just pure self interest.
And because like Trump and Musk, many (most?) of them truly believe they know more about everything than anyone else (more than even the experts).
Are we not going to get a flu vaccine? Companies that make the vaccines can't do this on their own anyway?
Normally it's around this time period that decisions around which strains to target are discussed, because it takes around six months to incubate the vaccine. Then once a decision is made, that information is passed to manufacturers.
Without this meeting, there's no guidance around which strains to target. Without guidance, manufacturers have no clue what to do. So the odds are it either highly delays the vaccine if not promptly rescheduled or we simply just don't get one this season.
Sounds like bad news. But can the manufacturers meet among themselves to hash it out? Would they? And if they did, would they make a worse or different decision than if the FDA were involved?
Just trying to see a way this could turn out ok.
There is so much breathless hysteria in the media predicting or implying a prediction, and when 99% of it fails to materialize there is never a follow up.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/26/us/politics/fda-flu-vacci...
> The F.D.A. sent an email to members of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee on Monday afternoon informing them of the cancellation, according to a senior official familiar with the decision. There was no reason given. The panel was to meet March 13.
> One committee member, Dr. Paul Offit of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, an outspoken critic of Mr. Kennedy, confirmed the cancellation and warned that it could interfere with or delay production of flu vaccines.
> “It’s a six-month production cycle,” Dr. Offit said. “So one can only assume that we’re not picking flu strains this year.”
Considering the flu kills tens of thousands every year and hospitalized hundreds of thousands more, with the potential of evolving to be more lethal - yes this is important.
If the Trump, GOP and Musk fucked up staffing by firing people who have the expertise to make these decisions, yes they are at fault. If RFK Jr is interfering with this for his anti-vax and anti-science crusade, he is also at vault.
They are “assuming” a major unannounced policy change based on… a single meeting cancelation. By this cause/effect protocol, I have personally witnessed dozens of multi billion dollar project cancellations, or so I assume.
RFK Jr has never proposed canning the vaccine program. He wants certain studies performed, which presumably would run in parallel with the existing program.
The constant hysteria really makes me want to quit the internet. It seems to get worse every year.
I can't find anything about this being related to a flu vaccine.
The public, thus far, is generally ok with this. They’d be even more okay shipping them to underfunded camps where they are even more out of sight out of mind.
If you want to see the establishment's viewpoints, read the NY Times (the news articles, and analysis, but not the op-eds).
dismantling the Dept of Education, reducing spending across all areas, reducing government involvement in healthcare -- take a look at the Fortune 100 list and see how many healthcare companies are in the top ranks -- have been top priorities for decades.
they're just saying the quiet part loud now, and acting on it.
So we're either going to get insanely expensive flu vaccines or none at all.
China has seemed to play a larger role in novel viruses with zoological origins. The average flu season isn't driven by novel viruses, if they were every year would progress more similarly to CoV2.
I've never seen a study comparing the relative efficacy of culling vs. not culling chicken flocks. Unless you have sources for that, you're assuming culling is always best. One consideration there is that culling entire flocks ensures that we are never able to select breeding animals based on those with natural immunity. Maybe that is the right choice, but I don't think we have ever studied that.
Egg prices haven't yet seemed to play an impact in flock culling rates. We have murdered 166 million birds based on a recent article [1] - extremely few of those were ever tested, they just happened to be in a house with a bird either confirmed or suspected of infection. At least based on that article, culling hasn't helped contain the outbreak.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-02-26/poultry...
Trump is coming in and saying culling isn’t needed, and he is finding experts that agree with his opinion to back it up. Whatever policy choice coming up, it will be one where science is abused to justify a pre-determined decision rather than using science to come up with the right decision.
You are taking an agency's assumption as a fact though, its functionally yours at that point. It doesn't matter if someone else says it, it matters if you agree with the logic of how they got there.
> And the point has always been to prevent a human outbreak, not reduce egg prices.
Human transmission has yet to be proven. Culling hundreds of millions of birds to avoid human transmission when we don't even know if that's possible seems idiotic at best, sadistic at worst.
If by "the flu" you're referring to the disease rather than a specific pathogen, a vaccine can cause the flu. Its common for vaccines to cause symptoms similar to the pathogen, though those symptoms are usually more mild.
Think about it for a second. A vaccine is meant to induce an immune response to allow the body to learn the pathogen before a natural infection. Symptoms are little more than the physical effects of your immune system doing its job and responding to a pathogen. Why wouldn't a good vaccine induce similar, though likely less severe, symptoms?
Disease is just a named collection of symptoms, that it. A vaccine absolutely can cause those symptoms, and when they occur together it would meet the definition of the disease. That obviously doesn't mean the vaccine caused an influence infection.
Few disease definitions actually take into account severity of symptoms. There are some examples where we have two named diseases where one is distinguished only by being more severe, but unless I'm missing something the flu doesn't fit into that category.
The articles are not hysterical and give good info, such as:
- vaccines take 6 months to make
- FDA spokesperson did not respond for comment
- its not the first meeting to be cancelled
- an earlier CDC quarterly meeting was postponed to accommodate "public comment"
Worrying about the grifter crank harming public health is level headed...
There is an alternative here - a population left to fight an outbreak through natural immunity will be stronger in the end. That's definitely not a popular opinion, and it may not be worth the cost, but it does align with large drops in death rates of past outbreaks which generally happened before a vaccine was even available.
> There is no steel man here
That's not how steel manning an argument works. The whole point is to make the most generous version of the argument, usually assuming the best intent. There is always a most generous explanation that would lead to the argument made, you just may not like it or may not think its likely.
> Or RFK could somehow be right and we see a huge magic increase in public health across the country (not seen in other countries that keep vaccination). I am not aware of very many scientists who believe this will happen
I don't know RFK's stance particularly well, but I would guess that he wouldn't expect a noticeable increase in health over a short timeline and without improving peoples' health in general. I'm pretty sure I've seen him argue for removing toxins from our food and water, reducing dependence on pharmaceuticals, etc. All of those are important factors and it isn't realistic to assume that removing only one factor would magically fix everything.
Most people get the flu multiple times during their lives already. When is this natural immunity supposed to kick in and stop the elderly and infirm from dying from it?
Hell, why didn't this natural immunity protect the hundreds of millions of people who died prior to the introduction of vaccines from reoccurring outbreaks over the millennia? Never mind those who suffered lifetime disabilities from deafness to warped limbs.
This story is similar for most infections we now vaccinate for, death rates were dropping dramatically years before vaccines were introduced.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-inf... [2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Measles+mort...
> When is this natural immunity supposed to kick in and stop the elderly and infirm from dying from it?
That's a whole different ball game. You're talking about immunocompromised individuals, their immune system isn't well prepared to respond to natural infection PR vaccination. Vaccines can still help, though they're usually less effective and more likely to cause symptoms similar to the original disease you're vaccinating against.
A vaccine isn't a magic bullet for preventing death. Vaccines still depend on the immune system doing its job effectively.
So to be clear you’re arguing let’s kill a whole bunch of people to “increase” the population’s strength, although you express some mild concern about the “cost” of doing that? Is that the argument here?
I'm not arguing that we kill anyone. You're implying that choosing not to intervene with vaccines is murder, which I would disagree with, but even then I left open the door for that cost to not be worth it.
My argument here was simply that if vaccines aren't used, as happened for effectively all of natural history, the population remaining (assuming some remain) is stronger for it.
That doesn't meant we should choose not to administer vaccines if we have them and they are proven safe and effective. That also does not mean that we should actively kill anyone, eugenics is a pretty messed up idea.
What you're proposing here is simply murder. We know what would happen, many more people would die.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-inf... [2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Measles+mort...
I wouldn't propose that people should be stopped from taking a vaccine if they want it.
I'm a strong supporter of informed consent. In this context that simply means that people need to know the pros and cons of a vaccine, what isn't known or scientifically studied yet, and they can make their own mind up.
Only the quacks say that, the science is firmly in the corner that not only is bird (or bat) to human transmission is possible, it has already happened a few times this season.
This is where having someone like Trump as president isn’t just annoying, but downright deadly.
Not long ago the CDC itself was saying that mammals couldn't catch this strain of avian flu and we had nothing to worry about. Then they found a few milk cows believed to be infected, but they assured us it couldn't kill cows and that the infection couldn't be transmitted through milk.
Where along the way did we go from scientific knowledge that it couldn't jump to humans to only quacks believing such nonsense? More importantly, where are the controlled studies proving transmission from infected birds to humans?
Proving transmissibility of such a pathogen would require something along the lines of Koch's postulates. Unless I missed something extremely important, we haven't done this type of study yet.
And herd immunity protects those that can't be protected by vaccines, your "experiment" would put them at risk as well.
We don't keep up any relevant research to prove that out. Vaccine studies don't use placebo controls, meaning we only know how they compare against what is usually the last approved vaccine. If you tell people that we know for certain that more people would die today without a particular vaccine you're lying, we simply can't know that without testing it.
> And herd immunity protects those that can't be protected by vaccines, your "experiment" would put them at risk as well.
How can we know herd immunity works as we predict it should without testing it? Its an untested hypothesis, and that's totally fine if we're not willing to risk testing it. We can't act as though it is scientific fact at that point though, its a hypothesis that a large majority agree with but that has yet to be tested in any significant way.
You've missed a significant strength of vaccines by focusing on individuals rather than on populations.
Vaccines slow the transmission rate through a population and reduce the severity of infection.
In a population with a high vaccination rates those few with weak immune systems have less exposure to infection.
It's similar to back burning and fuel reduction in combating wildfires.
Early on in the Covid pandemic response claims of herd immunity were being thrown around and Fauci was claiming a threshold of 60-65% vaccine rate for it to work. As time went on that number kept going up, eventually he admitted that they used a low number to start with only because they didn't think people would comply if the required vaccine rate seemed unrealistically high.
Herd immunity is almost certainly a thing at a certain immunity rate, the question that goes unanswered is what that rate actually is. For there to even be a case for vaccine mandates, of even just the arguments that people ought to get vaccinated due to herd immunity, we have to know the % of immunized population and the risk of vaccine side effects.
My understanding is that we don't have a solid understanding of the exact tipping point for herd immunity, and that at least during the covid pandemic response we didn't have a solid understanding of the true risks of adverse side effects to the vaccines either.
Where I would expect a scientific paper to come in is to provide a controlled study show transmission from an infected bird to a healthy human. Maybe that has been done, but if so I haven't seen it or ever heard it mentioned anywhere.
Almost all medical research is in the field, and they don't do controlled studies on humans anymore to see if they can get bird flu or not by being in contact with infected birds (can't get it passed the ethics board). It feels like I'm arguing with someone on the spectrum, who states that "we didn't think it was this way before, but now we think it? Impossible!" It is an exhausting argument and I really don't think it is worth our time, except that guy is now president - sigh.
Raising that here is important because in an earlier comment you said only a quack would claim that transmissibility hasn't been proven.
You even seem to acknowledge here that it hasn't been tested or proven yet, or that we even bother testing it today. Field research is all well and good, and it often is the best we can do in the moment, but that doesn't change what the research and data shows.
We don't do controlled studies to test transmissibility, meaning we don't test for transmissibility, meaning it has yet to be proven. I'm not sure how that chain of reasoning leaps to the realm of quackery.
> "we didn't think it was this way before, but now we think it? Impossible!"
There's a solid argument behind this view though (to be clear, I don't see that as an argument Trump has made).
Science is a well defined process. When we haven't studied transmissibility for whatever reason we simply can't say that transmission isn't possible.
As soon as the CDC gets out over their skis and makes that claim without scientific research to back it up they turned a scientific question into a political one. They can't say whether transmission is possible or not. By making this claim they're only trying to reassure the public of something they want people to believe but can't actually prove.
It's like the GIEC group 3. If you really want to understand what is happening, you need to read group 1 and 2 data directly (i did that during Covid, it took 3 month and a new notetaking app), because you have science, and "science" (what's funny is that one of the justification for lying was "avoid sentiment of helplessness and despair").
Anyway, not surprising, USians "elites" seems super-condescending all the time (on both side), i think it's baked into their personality, so they lie to "reassure" or shit like this. We have the same in our country, even if its not as widespread.