The White House has taken the candidate of President Donald Trump to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, former representative Dave Weldon, confirmed Thursday the Senate Health Committee.
The measure occurred only a few hours before the former Republican legislator from Florida, a vaccine critic, appeared before the Health, Education, Education, Work and Pensions Committee of the United States for a confirmation audience. The panel said the audience, which had been scheduled for 10 am et, is canceled.
Axios first reported the decision on Thursday. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who runs the Department of Health and Human Services, said Weldon was not ready for paper, Axios said. The HHS supervises the CDC and all the other federal health agencies.
Weldon said he had been excited to work with Kennedy and serve the country again, New York Times reported Thursday.
“It's a shock, but, you know, somehow, it's relief,” Weldon told the newspaper. “Government's work demands many of you, and if God does not love me in that, I'm fine with that.”
He said he plans to “get on a plane at 11 o'clock and I'm going home and I will see the patients on Monday,” according to the newspaper.
“I will earn much more money in my medical practice,” Weldon added.
But Weldon's opinions are closely aligned with Kennedy, a notorious vaccine skeptic. Weldon, 71, has long questioned the safety of certain vaccines, promoting the false claim that links vaccines with autism. In 2006, Weldon appeared with the parents who said that the CDC had covered evidence that linked vaccines to the children who developed autism.
According to the reports, the CDCs will reexamine that link with Kennedy despite the decades of research that advises it.
While I was in Congress, Weldon sponsored a bill that would transfer the responsibility for vaccines away from CDCs. He said that the agency had a conflict of interest because it buys and promotes vaccines. The bill never reached the previous committees.
Weldon is an internal medicine doctor who served in Congress for 14 years, from 1995 to 2009.
Senator Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat and a member of the Help Committee, said she was “deeply disturbed” by Weldon's false statements about vaccines.
In a statement on Thursday, Murray said: “While I have little or not confidence in the Trump administration to do so, they should immediately nominate someone for this since, to the minimum, they believe in basic science and help to lead the important work of the CDC to monitor and prevent mortal outbreaks.”
He added that Kennedy is already doing “incalculable damage by spreading lies and misinformation as the best health official in the United States.”
The HHS did not immediately respond to a request to comment why the administration withdrew the weldon nomination and when Trump can choose another person for the position.
