Upcoming FDA VRBPAC Meetings

Three meetings of the FDA’s VRBPAC advisors on vaccines are coming up this month.

Upcoming meetings

The US FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) has finally put a few more meetings on its calendar ^[1]:

• 2022-Jun-07: Discussion of Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the Novavax vaccine. I’m not quite sure what difference that will make at this point, but ok.
• 2022-Jun-14 & 15: Discussion to modify the Moderna EUA for 6-17 year olds, and the next day to consider 6 months to 5 years old. Many parents will be quite relieved!
• 2022-Jun-28: Discussion of modification of strains of SARS-CoV2 for vaccines going forward. Again, I sort of don’t see the point: as Moderna pointed out (and we blogged previously), if they make any changes at all from what’s in clinical trials now (classic + Omicron), there will be no time to manufacture the modified vaccine for winter. Still, perhaps the science will be revealing.

So, progress. Albeit slowly, and not exactly compatibly with manufacturing lead times for winter. But at least it’s progress.

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Notes & References

1: FDA Staff, “Advisory Committee Calendar”, US Food & Drug Administration, retrieved 2022-May-10. ↩