Vaccine manufacturers have prepared updated versions of the annual flu shot, as they normally do. The FDA has green-lighted those recipes, as it normally does. And normally, the next step would fall to the CDC's expert vaccine advisory panel, known as ACIP, which guides the agency's recommendations for which Americans should take those shots. The CDC almost always accepts ACIP's advice verbatim'and those recommendations inform health-care providers' advice to their patients and coverage from private insurance and government programs. But in March, a ruling from a federal judge effectively suspended ACIP, on the grounds that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had violated the lawful procedure for selecting new members when he hastily remade the panel's roster last June. Currently, no functional ACIP exists to guide this autumn's immunization campaigns. (The Trump administration has appealed the judge's order.) Although ACIP itself doesn't make policy, the CDC has depended on its...
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