WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Dave Weldon, a physician and former congressman who has questioned the safety of vaccines and fought for abortion restrictions, to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Weldon represented a Florida district in the House of Representatives for more than twenty years, including on the Appropriations Committee and the Oversight and Reform Panel. Trump nodded to those roles in his announcement, saying Weldon has been a “respected conservative leader on budget and social issues.”
Weldon will be the first CDC director nominee to go through the Senate confirmation process. “I have strongly advocated for reform of the CDC,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who is expected to lead the health committee that will hold Weldon’s confirmation hearing, wrote on X after the announcement. “I look forward to learning more about Doctor Weldon’s vision for the CDC.”
President-elect Trump hinted at the massive reforms that both he and his nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have promised for public health agencies.
“Americans have lost confidence in the CDC and in our federal health authorities, which have engaged in censorship, data manipulation and misinformation,” he said in a statement. “Given the current chronic health crisis in our country, the CDC must take action and correct past mistakes to focus on disease prevention.”
Lawmakers in 2020 researched reports that health officials, including Trump’s CDC director in his first administration, Robert Redfield, meddled with coronavirus mortality and morbidity data.
Weldon has a history of supporting controversial and, in the opinion of most scientists, discredited ideas that linked childhood vaccines to rising rates of autism. Del Bigtree, a prominent anti-vaccine activist who worked on RFK Jr.’s campaign. worked, applauded Weldon’s selection on X.
For example, Weldon has raised concerns about the link between the preservative thimerosal and autism, even after most scientific bodies rejected a link and the ingredient was removed from many vaccines.
When a 2004 report from the Institute of Medicine concluded that no link between thimerosal and autism could be found, Weldon released a statement warning that the report was “dangerously dependent on epidemiology, based on preliminary incomplete information, and could ultimately be rejected.
“This report will not deter me from my commitment to ensuring this is fully investigated, nor will it allay the concerns of parents who believe their children have been harmed by mercury-containing vaccines or the MMR vaccine.”
Parents who questioned the safety of vaccines and alleged links to autism have found this advocates in both RFK Jr. as Weldon. The former Florida congressman sponsored legislation that would have produced the CDC’s vaccine safety study prohibited traces of mercury in vaccines.
Weldon published in 2006 with parents claiming that the CDC had covered up evidence linking vaccines to children developing autism. In a 2008 television interview, Weldon suggested there might be an underlying trait some children cause to develop symptoms of autism after vaccination.
“The government has been telling the public for more than a decade that there is absolutely no reason to worry about any link. Well, I have a lot of concerns,” Weldon said.
In 2007 he has submitted a bill that would remove vaccine safety research from the CDC’s purview and place the work in an independent HHS agency. The Public Safety and Confidence Act never made it out of committees that year. But calls have been found to restructure the CDC and abolish some of its authorities on infectious disease research new momentum among Republican lawmakers.
When told that Weldon had been nominated as CDC director, Paul Offit, the co-inventor of the vaccine against rotavirus, a common cause of diarrhea in children, said the news was “incredible.”
Offit, a researcher at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, recalled speaking with Weldon in the early 2000s when Andrew Wakefield, a discredited researcher, had published a now-retracted paper in the Lancet claiming to link the mumps, measles and the disease. rubella vaccine against autism. Based on that article, he said, Weldon pushed for separating the combined vaccine into separate vaccines. Offit served on a government committee that voted against the measure because there was no evidence of a risk.
“When they say things like that – he’s going to root out corruption, or these kinds of unholy alliances between the pharmaceutical industry and agencies like the CDC or the FDA – where is the corruption? Where is the evidence for that? Because I only see people working very hard to get it right!” Offit said.
Offit said the idea that CDC or FDA are hiding data is a “false premise.” He pointed out that more than a dozen studies have found no link between autism and vaccines.
“I don’t know. I just feel like we’re entering an era where you’re just proclaiming your own truths, even scientific truths,” Offit said. “Science is losing its place as a source of truth. So that’s a dangerous time. And that’s all these choices.”
Weldon unsuccessfully ran for Senate in Florida in 2012, losing in the Republican primary to Rep. Connie Mack IV. Weldon argued during that and previous campaigns that the government is infringe on religious freedomsand “a perfect example” of this is access to healthcare and abortion.
During his time in Congress, Weldon successfully passed what is now called the “Weldon Amendment” on “rights of conscience” regarding abortion policy. The amendment, which Congress has reauthorized each budget cycle, stipulates that HHS cannot discriminate in funding decisions against programs or agencies that do not provide abortions.
Weldon also prominently opposed removing the feeding tube for Terri Schiavo, a severely brain-damaged woman in a vegetative state. The then-congressman introduced legislation that would require Schiavo’s case and others to be reviewed in federal court.