(Reuters) -A two-day meeting aimed at raising awareness among policymakers and the public about rare diseases scheduled for the end of February has been postponed, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s website showed on Friday.
This comes after a meeting of U.S. vaccine advisers set for late-February was postponed and only a week after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as the secretary of Health and Human Services.
As President Donald Trump’s administration overhauls federal agencies, employees at the FDA and National Institutes of Health have been laid off in recent days. While it is not yet clear how many FDA employees have been affected, 1,165 people, mostly probationary employees, were laid off at the NIH.
“After much consideration, we are postponing FDA-NIH Rare Disease Day 2025 and will reschedule it to occur in the coming months,” a notice on the FDA’s website showed.
Both the FDA and the NIH were sponsoring the event. The NIH did not immediately respond to a Reuters’ request for comment.
The event’s agenda was set last week and sessions related to artificial intelligence, early diagnosis, gene therapies and access to rare disease treatments were planned.
Several executives from both the federal health agencies were scheduled to speak at the event, including FDA acting commissioner Sara Brenner and Matthew Memoli, acting director of the NIH.
The Rare Disease Day is observed globally every year on February 28, or February 29 in leap years, since its creation in 2008. According to the NIH website, the U.S. has observed the day every year since at least 2016.
(Reporting by Bhanvi Satija in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)
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