By Rachel Cohrs Zhang and Madison Muller | Bloomberg
The Trump administration withdrew the nomination of Dave Weldon for the top job at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as it grew clear there were not enough Senate votes to confirm him.
Weldon, a physician and vaccine critic, was set to go before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Thursday morning. The HELP committee canceled the hearing less than an hour before it was set to begin.
Afterward, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who leads the committee, said “there were not the votes” to confirm Weldon.
Weldon’s interviews with Republican staff ahead of the hearing didn’t go well, according to a person familiar with the process. Weldon seemed to lack vision or direction for the agency, the person said. Top Senate Republicans like Susan Collins of Maine had previously expressed some concerns about his views on vaccines.
Weldon was not immediately available for comment.
He has previously spread debunked theories linking childhood vaccination to autism. As head of the CDC, Weldon would have been in charge of the vaccine schedule doctors typically follow to administer shots to kids.
Weldon, 71, has promoted the idea that a once-common vaccine preservative has links to childhood autism. Weldon recently told Senator Patty Murray in a prehearing meeting that children may be exposed to toxic levels of mercury through the government’s recommended immunization schedule. But the mercury-based preservative, thimerosal, was removed from childhood vaccines in the US in 2001.
After Weldon’s nomination was withdrawn, Murray said the Trump administration should choose a new nominee “who at bare minimum believes in basic science and will help lead CDC’s important work to monitor and prevent deadly outbreaks.”
The US is currently suffering from a measles epidemic that’s already been linked to two deaths. Less than three full months into the year, the nation’s confirmed cases are approaching the 285 cases reported in all of 2024.
The withdrawal of Weldon’s nomination didn’t ease some health experts’ concerns, as he could have joined Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a powerful voice sowing doubt about the safety of vaccines.
“One possibility is that the Senate is becoming very sensitive to the negative press that’s surrounding all of RFK Jr.’s antivax activity and they didn’t want more of it,” said Paul Offit, a vaccine expert and professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital Philadelphia. “The second possibility is they’re just going to pick another anti-vaccine, science-denying conspiracy theorist.”
Nonetheless Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University Law Center, called the decision to withdraw Weldon’s nomination “a triumph of public health.”
“He’s fomented distrust in vaccines and propagated a conspiracy theory of the link between vaccines and autism that is utterly unacceptable,” Gostin said, calling him “utterly” unqualified for the role.
Earlier Thursday, the Food and Drug Administration’s top lawyer resigned two days after her appointment was announced, the agency posted on the social media site X.
Hilary Perkins, who joined the Department of Justice during President Donald Trump’s first administration, had come under fire from Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who posted on X that Marty Makary, Trump’s nominee for FDA commissioner, was “attempting to sneak a Biden abortion lawyer into top leadership at FDA.”
The nomination withdrawal was first reported by Axios.
–With assistance from Damian Garde and Gerry Smith.
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