US vaccine advisory meeting postponed after Kennedy takes top health job

Corrects spelling of former ACIP member's last name to Duchin in paragraphs 10-11

By Dan Levine and Puyaan Singh

Feb 20 (Reuters) - A meeting of U.S. vaccine advisers set for late February has been postponed, a federal official confirmed on Thursday, raising new uncertainty about the Trump administration's vaccine policy after Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s installation atop the nation’s health bureaucracy.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) normally holds multiple meetings a year, reviews scientific data and makes recommendations to the director of the Centers for Disease Control. It had been scheduled to convene for three days next week and take several votes, including one about how a key government vaccine distribution program should handle influenza inoculations.

That session will be postponed to allow public comment prior to the meeting, said Andrew Nixon, director of communications at the U.S. Department of Health and Human services.

"The ACIP workgroups met as scheduled this month and will present at the upcoming ACIP meeting," Nixon added.

The move comes a week after Kennedy was confirmed as the secretary of Health and Human Services despite his criticism of agencies under his supervision, including the CDC. Kennedy has denied being "anti-vaccine" and has said he would not prevent Americans from getting vaccinated.

Kennedy secured support of Republican Senator Bill Cassidy - a Louisiana lawmaker and doctor who spent decades working in public health - for his nomination by pledging to “maintain” ACIP "without changes," Cassidy said earlier this month. Cassidy's office did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Reached on Thursday, Dr. Helen K. Talbot, chair of the ACIP committee, said that the members had not been notified of a postponement and were “very curious” as to whether the meeting would happen. Talbot did not immediately respond to a request for comment after Stat News first reported the postponement.

The public is normally allowed time to submit written comments in advance of ACIP meetings through a federal rulemaking portal, according to HHS's website. Before Trump was inaugurated last month, CDC had posted a formal notice of the February ACIP meeting and said comments could be submitted between Feb. 3-17.

However, that portal has been "absent," according to a letter to Kennedy signed by more than 50 medical experts and organizations asking that the "critical" meeting be rescheduled.

Dr. Jeff Duchin, a former ACIP member, said the postponement was "concerning" but that he didn’t want to jump to conclusions about what the new HHS leadership was going to do.

"The canceling of the meeting is clearly atypical, there was an agenda with significant issues of health importance to the people of our country," Duchin said. “That should be addressed in a timely way."

The meeting was set to begin on February 26 and a draft agenda showed it would review several vaccines including GSK's GSK.L meningococcal vaccine and AstraZeneca's AZN.L flu shot.