The White House is planning to withdraw the nomination of Trump’s pick for CDC director reportedly because of his anti-vaccine views.
Dr Dave Weldon, a former congressman from Florida, was tapped by President Donald Trump to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and scheduled to have his confirmation hearing Thursday morning in front of the Senate Health Committee.
However, people familiar with the situation told Axios the Trump administration had concerns over Dr Weldon’s longtime criticism of vaccines and another said the White House pulled the nomination because they knew he wouldn’t get the votes.
As director of the CDC, Dr Weldon would have been in charge of vaccine policy, safety and messaging. He would have run the agency that oversees research on vaccines and public health, as well as responds to national and international disease outbreaks, like the Covid-19 pandemic.
One of the sources also told the outlet Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr – who has himself voiced anti-vax sentiments – said Dr Weldon wasn’t ready.
Dr Weldon is an internal medicine doctor who served in Congress from 1995 to 2009, where he continually pushed a link between vaccines and autism and sponsored anti-vax bills.
A link between vaccines and autism is a false claim RFK Jr also promotes, despite decades of medical studies debunking the link and concluding vaccines are safe.
Former Congressman Dr David Weldon speaks in The Villages, Florida, in 2012 (file photo)
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In 2007, Dr Weldon said ‘legitimate questions persist regarding the possible association between the mercury-based preservative, thimerosal, and the childhood epidemic of neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD), including autism.’
He also sponsored a bill that would’ve banned mercury from vaccines.
Mercury itself is not used in vaccines, but a compound that contains it, thimerosal, had been used as a preservative in some shots to prevent contamination.
The compound was removed from all childhood vaccines in the US in 2001, according to the CDC.
Even still, studies have shown thimerosal is quickly eliminated from the body and therefore does not pose any health risk to the receiver. Multiple studies have found no link between the compound and autism or other health problems.
Additionally, in July 2004, Dr Weldon asked the House Appropriations Committee to fund an autism research center led by Andrew Wakefield, one of the authors of a 1998 study that linked vaccines to autism.
Ten of the 13 researchers later retracted the study, the medical community has rejected its findings and Dr Wakefield later lost his medical license.
A national medical board of scientists also rejected the autism-vaccine link in 2004.
However, letters, memos and research analyzed by Stat News found Dr Weldon continually promoted the theory that vaccines cause autism
Additionally, Dr Weldon has repeatedly questioned the CDC’s objectivity when assessing vaccine safety.
Dr Weldon as pick to run the CDC came as a surprise as the former lawmaker has kept a relatively low profile since a failed Senate run in 2012.
He returned to practicing medicine in Florida and joined the faculty of the Florida Institute of Technology’s biomedical engineering program as a professor.
He also currently serves as the chief medical officer at Luke & Associates, a healthcare staffing agency, and is an attending physician at Health First, a healthcare system throughout the state of Florida.
In announcing Dr Weldon as his pick for CDC director, Trump wrote on Truth Social: ‘Americans have lost trust in the CDC and in our Federal Health Authorities, who have engaged in censorship, data manipulation, and misinformation.
‘Given the current Chronic Health Crisis in our Country, the CDC must step up and correct past errors to focus on the Prevention of Disease.’
But leaders in the health community have spoken out against Dr Weldon.
Richard Besser, a former CDC acting director, said: ‘He held on to this false belief that vaccines were harming our children. When you see that by people in positions of authority… He had a responsibility that he shirked.’
