The White House has pulled President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, former Rep. Dave Weldon, the Senate’s health committee confirmed Thursday.
The move came just hours before the Republican former Florida lawmaker, a vaccine critic, was set to appear before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions for a confirmation hearing. The panel said the hearing, which had been scheduled for 10 a.m. ET, is canceled.
Axios first reported the decision on Thursday. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who leads the Department of Health and Human Services, said Weldon wasn’t ready for the role, Axios reported. HHS oversees the CDC and all other federal health agencies.
Weldon said he had been excited to work with Kennedy and serve the country again, The New York Times reported Thursday.
“It is a shock, but, you know, in some ways, it’s relief,” Weldon told the paper. “Government jobs demand a lot of you, and if God doesn’t want me in it, I’m fine with that.”
He said he plans to “get on an airplane at 11 o’clock and I’m going to go home and I’m going to see patients on Monday,” according to the newspaper.
“I’ll make much more money staying in my medical practice,” Weldon added.
But Weldon’s views align closely with Kennedy, a notorious vaccine skeptic. Weldon, 71, has long questioned the safety of certain vaccines, promoting the false claim linking vaccines to autism. In 2006, Weldon appeared with parents who claimed that the CDC had covered up evidence tying vaccines to children developing autism.
The CDC will reportedly reexamine that link under Kennedy despite decades of research debunking it.
While in Congress, Weldon sponsored a bill that would transfer responsibility for vaccine safety away from the CDC. He claimed the agency had a conflict of interest because it purchases and promotes vaccines. The bill never made it past committees.
Weldon is an internal medicine doctor who served in Congress for 14 years, from 1995 to 2009.
Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington and HELP committee member, has said she was “deeply disturbed” by Weldon’s false claims about vaccines.
In a statement on Thursday, Murray said, “While I have little to no confidence in the Trump administration to do so, they should immediately nominate someone for this position who at bare minimum believes in basic science and will help lead CDC’s important work to monitor and prevent deadly outbreaks.”
She added that Kennedy is already doing “incalculable damage by spreading lies and disinformation as the top health official in America.”
HHS did not immediately respond to a request to comment on why the administration pulled Weldon’s nomination and when Trump may choose another person for the post.
