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'God help us all': Infectious disease experts panic after Trump FDA cancels vaccine meeting
(www.alternet.org)
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
351 points (98.3% liked)
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These will be the meetings to kick off creating the next season's flu vaccines. The R&D that goes into these each years requires a fair bit of lead time.
I doubt RFK's FDA is going to approve another vaccine so let's buckle up for the next 4 years. Time to say goodbye to the older folk in your life. They are particularly negatively affected by the flu.
And this is at a time when Bird Flu is raging in US farms unchecked. The conditions are perfect for a major flu pandemic.
This isn't just about seasonal flu, there is a slowly unfolding crisis that could lead to a deadly flu pandemic. It will be pot luck how deadly bird flu is, but it has been incredibly deadly in birds. It had not been deadly in cattle yet - but it could just take 1 mutation to become so. And the farms are also a perfect incubator for it to transfer into humans.
With Trump and Musk disassembling public health infrastructure we are less likely to stop a pandemic, less likely to detect it when it gets going, less likely to contain it and now less likely to be able to vaccinate to save lives.
Disease isn’t contained by borders so - ‘Thanks’ from the rest of the world.
We can smuggle needed medicines into the US if needed. This might mean they are expensive but worth it for the immunocompromised.