White House pulls CDC director nomination hours before hearing

In a statement he shared with C&EN, David Weldon—a physician and former Republican congressperson from Florida—says he received a call late March 12 from an assistant at the White House. Weldon was told that his nomination to lead the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was being withdrawn. The reason: “there were not enough votes to get me confirmed,” Weldon says in the statement.

Members of the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) were set to probe Weldon in a public hearing on March 13. But the committee cancelled the hearing after Weldon’s nomination was withdrawn.

Committee member Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), who’d separately met with Weldon on Feb. 20, issued a press release March 13 highlighting her previous comments to Bloomberg News that she was “deeply disturbed to hear Dr. Weldon repeat debunked claims about vaccines—it’s dangerous to put someone in charge at CDC who believes the lie that our rigorously tested childhood vaccine schedule is somehow exposing kids to toxic levels of mercury or causing autism.”

Weldon has questioned the safety of vaccines, particularly for children, and has expressed concerns that they are linked to autism, despite repeated studies finding no such link. In a Feb. 20 statement, Murray also pointed to “Dr. Weldon’s history of peddling inflammatory and medically debunked anti-abortion rhetoric and past legislative efforts, which have put the lives and health of countless women in danger.”

Weldon believes that his nomination was withdrawn because two Republican senators on the committee, Susan Collins and Bill Cassidy, weren’t inclined to vote in his favor. In his statement, Weldon says that Sen. Collins’ staff accused him of being “anitvax,” despite him reminding the staff that “I actually give hundreds of vaccines every year in my medical practice.” Weldon also added that Sen. Cassidy thought that “I believed that vaccines cause autism, which I have never said.” (In a 2019 video that CNN found, Weldon told journalist Sharyl Attkisson, “Some children can get an autism spectrum disorder from a vaccine.”)

In response to an email from C&EN, Collins’s office rebutted the “antivax” allegations and said that the senator had not expressed any concerns regarding Weldon’s nomination to the White House—although she had some reservations—and hadn’t made a final decision on how she’d vote. “I followed my normal practice of waiting until the hearing was scheduled, so he [Weldon] can respond in a public forum,” Collins told The New York Times.

Sen. Cassidy’s office told C&EN that the decision to withdraw Weldon’s nomination was not based on any request the senator made.

At the hearing, Weldon would have likely faced questions about the ongoing measles outbreak which has now spread to at least 14 states, and his commitment to advocate for the use of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine. Senators were expected to ask him about the CDC’s recently announced plans to study whether childhood vaccines cause autism—a decision that experts have criticized, calling it a waste of time and money given that scientific studies have repeatedly shown no link between vaccines and autism. Senators were also expected to question Weldon about his plans and commitment to contain the ongoing bird flu outbreak.

It’s unclear who is next in line to be nominated for heading the CDC. Meanwhile, the Senate HELP committee voted to advance Jay Bhattacharya’s nomination as National Institutes of Health director and Martin Makary’s nomination as Food and Drug Administration commissioner by 12-11 and 14-9 respectively.