WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump has selected Dave Weldon, a physician and former congressman who has questioned vaccine safety and fought for abortion limits, to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Weldon represented a Florida district in the House of Representatives for more than two decades, including stints with the Appropriations Committee and the panel on oversight and reform. Trump nodded to those roles in his announcement, saying that Weldon has been a “respected conservative leader on fiscal and social issues.”
Weldon will be the first CDC director nominee to go through the Senate confirmation process. “I have firmly advocated for reforming the CDC,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who is slated to run the health committee that will hold Weldon’s confirmation hearing, wrote on X after the announcement. “I look forward to learning about Doctor Weldon’s vision for the CDC.”
President-elect Trump alluded to the mass reforms both he and his nominee to lead the Health and Human Services Department, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have promised for public health agencies.
“Americans have lost trust in the CDC and in our Federal Health Authorities, who 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 step up and correct past errors to focus on the Prevention of Disease.”
Legislators in 2020 investigated reports that health officials including Trump’s CDC director in his first administration, Robert Redfield, interfered with coronavirus mortality and morbidity data.
Weldon has a history of backing controversial and, in the views of most scientists, discredited ideas that linked childhood vaccines with increasing rates of autism. Del Bigtree, a prominent anti-vaccine activist who worked on RFK Jr.’s campaign, applauded the selection of Weldon on X.
For instance, Weldon has raised concerns about the links between the preservative thimerosal and autism, even after most scientific bodies had dismissed a connection and the ingredient had been removed from many vaccines.
When a 2004 report from the Institute of Medicine concluded no link between thimerosal and autism could be found, Weldon issued a statement warning that the report was “perilously reliant on epidemiology, based on preliminary incomplete information, and may ultimately be repudiated.
“This report will not deter me from my commitment to seeing that this is fully investigated, nor will it put to rest the concerns of parents who believe their children were harmed by mercury-containing vaccines or the MMR vaccine.”
Parents who questioned vaccine safety and alleged links to autism have found advocates in both RFK Jr. and Weldon. The former Florida congressman sponsored legislation that would have carved out the CDC’s vaccine safety research and banned trace mercury amounts in vaccines.
Weldon in 2006 appeared with parents who claimed that the CDC had covered up evidence tying vaccines to children developing autism. In a television interview from 2008, Weldon implied that there might be some underlying trait that would cause some children to develop symptoms of autism following vaccination.
“The government has been telling the public for over a decade that there’s absolutely no reason to be concerned about any link. Well I have a lot of concerns,” Weldon said.
In 2007, he introduced a bill that would remove vaccine safety research from CDC’s purview and house the work in an independent HHS agency. The Vaccine Safety and Public Confidence Assurance Act never made it past committees that year. But calls to restructure the CDC and peel away some of its authorities on infectious disease research have found new momentum among GOP 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 childhood diarrhea, said the news was “unbelievable.”
Offit, who is a researcher at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, remembered interacting with Weldon at a moment in the early 2000s when Andrew Wakefield, a discredited researcher, had published a since-withdrawn article in the Lancet that purported to link the mumps, measles and rubella vaccine to autism. Based on that article, he said, Weldon was pushing to separate the combined vaccine into separate vaccines. Offit served on a government committee that voted against the move because there was no evidence of a risk.
“When they say things like that — he’s going to root out corruption, or that this sort of unholy alliance between the pharmaceutical industry and agencies like the CDC or FDA — where is that corruption? Where is the evidence for that? Because all I see are people working very hard to try and 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 moving into an era where you simply declare your own truths, even scientific truths,” Offit said. “That science is losing its place as a source of truth. So that’s a dangerous time. And all these picks are that.”
Weldon ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in Florida in 2012 and lost in the Republican primary to Rep. Connie Mack IV. Weldon argued during that and previous campaigns that the government is infringing on religious freedoms, and “a perfect example” of that is within health care and abortion access.
During his time in Congress, Weldon successfully passed what has now been dubbed the “Weldon Amendment” on “rights of conscience” regarding abortion policy. The amendment, which Congress has reapproved 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 by a federal court.