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The White House has withdrawn the nomination of Dave Weldon as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a U-turn that came just hours before his Senate confirmation hearing, according to two people familiar with the decision.
Weldon, a former congressman from Florida and a vaccine sceptic, would have been one of the country’s top public health officials, but did not have enough support among senators to be confirmed.
“He did not have the votes in the Senate”, said a person familiar with the matter.
The CDC is the US’s public health agency with a broad mandate that includes detecting and responding to disease threats.
The reversal was an unusual stumbling block for President Donald Trump. Each of his nominees who has reached a full Senate floor vote has been confirmed — including controversial figures such as defence secretary Pete Hegseth and health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, who is also a vaccine sceptic.
Matt Gaetz, Trump’s original pick for attorney-general, withdrew as a candidate after controversy around his selection became a “distraction”. A congressional panel had accused him of having sex with an underage girl, paying women for sex and using illegal drugs in a report released in December. He denied all the allegations.
In a letter published in The New York Times on Thursday, Weldon said he had been informed of the decision to withdraw his nomination 12 hours before his scheduled confirmation hearing and suggested that Republican senators Susan Collins and Bill Cassidy had expressed doubts about his candidacy.
Weldon said that Kennedy was “upset” by the decision and that it was “probably true” that “big Pharma was behind this”. “My big sin was that as a congressman 25 years ago I had the temerity to take on the CDC and big Pharma on two critical childhood vaccine safety issues,” he wrote.
Weldon served in Congress for 15 years before leaving in 2009. In 2007 he introduced a bill to Congress calling for vaccine oversight to be shifted away from the CDC to a new agency called the Agency for Vaccine Safety Evaluation.
A trained physician, he has stirred controversy by suggesting links between vaccines and autism — a theory that has been widely disproved.
Cassidy, a physician who chairs the committee that was set to grill Weldon, supported Kennedy’s nomination but vowed to “use my authority . . . to rebuff any attempts to remove the public’s access to life-saving vaccines without ironclad, causational scientific evidence that can be defended before the mainstream scientific community and before Congress”.
“I will carefully watch for any effort to wrongfully sow public fear about vaccines between confusing references of coincidence and anecdote,” Cassidy said.
Democratic senator Patty Murray said Weldon had repeated “debunked claims about vaccines” in a meeting last month.
“A vaccine sceptic who spent years spreading lies about safe and proven vaccines should never have even been under consideration to lead the foremost agency charged with protecting public health,” said Murray following Weldon’s withdrawal on Thursday.
At the time of Weldon’s nomination in November, Trump said that he would “restore the CDC to its true purpose, and will work to end the Chronic Disease Epidemic, and Make America Healthy Again!”
“Americans have lost trust in the CDC and in our Federal Health Authorities, who have engaged in censorship, data manipulation, and misinformation”, the president said.
