The Food and Drug Administration was allowed to participate in the World Health Organization’s meeting this week on updating influenza shots, officials for the U.N. agency said, despite an order by President Trump last month banning government employees from working with the WHO. The administration has granted some exemptions to the order.
“FDA, the same as CDC, participated in the vaccine composition consultation that just finished. They contributed again with the data package. So they participated as in the past,” Dr. Wenqing Zhang, head of the WHO’s global influenza program, told reporters on Friday.
A source familiar with the exemption told CBS News that the FDA is able to work with the WHO on “public health outbreak and emergency response.”
The Trump administration has granted some waivers for U.S. officials to collaborate on other diseases, like allowing the CDC to work with the WHO on an Ebola outbreak in Uganda.
Zhang’s comments about the FDA’s participation followed the release of this year’s WHO recommendations for how the annual flu shot should be updated for the next flu season in the Northern Hemisphere. Experts and officials gather from around the world every February to come up with the updates.
As part of that process, the FDA runs one of four WHO “essential regulatory laboratories” developing tests for the potency of influenza shots.
One major change recommended by the WHO for the next flu season is an update to an ingredient that guards against strains of the virus called H3. Data from the U.S. suggests this season’s vaccines were less effective for some kids in protecting against an H3 strain.
“The H3 component always gives us the most grief. It’s constantly changing and evolving quicker than the other viruses,” said Ian Barr of the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory in Australia, part of the WHO’s network of influenza researchers and testing laboratories.
WHO officials also said the U.S. had resumed sharing data within the global influenza system, making it available in time for the process of updating flu shots. Some of the sharing was done by publishing data to publicly available data platforms, instead of to WHO servers, as was standard in the past.
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