Members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions were just as surprised as everyone else to learn that the White House had pulled Dave Weldon’s nomination for director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Walking into the HELP committee hearing room a few minutes before the hearing on Weldon’s nomination was supposed to begin, Sen. Tommy Tuberville told reporters he’d learned of Weldon’s fate “two minutes ago.”
“We don’t know anything. We’ll find out,” Tuberville said.
It’s so far unclear why Weldon’s nomination was pulled less than an hour before his hearing. A CDC source confirmed to NOTUS that Weldon was officially out as the nominee. CBS reported a White House source as saying, “It was clear he did not have the votes in the Senate.”
In a lengthy statement, Weldon blamed his withdrawal on pressure from pharmaceutical companies who disapproved of his anti-vaccine activism, and claimed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was upset by his exit. He wrote that Sen. Susan Collins had expressed concerns about him to Kennedy at a meeting the morning before his hearing was supposed to take place, and that Sen. Bill Cassidy had at one point asked for his nomination to be withdrawn.
“Ironically, he is also an internist like me and I have known him for years and I thought we were friends,” Weldon wrote about Cassidy.
Weldon’s statement went on to repeat some of the claims he has made over the years, including references to discredited research from Andrew Wakefield, who claimed that vaccines caused autism.
“The CDC was charged with the responsibility of repeating the Wakefield research and showing that the measles vaccine was safe, but they never did it the right way,” Weldon wrote.
Collins told reporters Thursday morning that while she hadn’t made up her mind about Weldon yet, she hadn’t expressed any concerns about the nominee to the White House. “The news came as a surprise to me,” she said.
Only one committee member said they weren’t surprised by the abrupt change. Sen. Lisa Murkowski told reporters that she’d had concerns with Weldon’s stance on vaccines, and had shared those concerns with the White House.
Multiple sources affiliated with Democrats on HELP said that they’d learned of the development from Axios’ report Thursday morning.
Cassidy’s team seemed to have been caught off guard by the last-minute cancellation. Cassidy, the HELP chair, declined to comment on Weldon, but one HELP spokesperson said via text, “I was having such a peaceful morning.”
A physician by training, Weldon was known for his anti-vaccine and anti-abortion views. He served as the representative from Florida’s 15th Congressional District from 1994 to 2009. While in Congress, Weldon introduced a bill to move vaccine safety oversight from the CDC to a new, independent agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. Some experts agree that an independent agency for vaccine oversight would reduce the risk of conflict of interest at the CDC, which also oversees vaccine purchasing and promotion for the government.
Weldon also called into question the safety of the MMR and HPV vaccines in a 2007 statement while introducing the bill that would create an independent vaccine oversight agency. While any vaccine can cause side effects, both the MMR and HPV shots have been well studied and proven to be safe.
“Several issues relating to vaccine safety have persisted for years,” Weldon wrote. “The response from public health agencies has been largely defensive from the outset and the studies have been plagued by conflicts of interest.”
Weldon declined to run for an 8th term in Congress, saying he “never wanted to be a career politician.” He then unsuccessfully ran for Senate in 2012 and for the Florida House of Representatives in 2024. Weldon has run a private medical practice in Florida in recent years.
Weldon has promoted the debunked theory that the vaccine preservative thimerosal can cause autism in children. He appeared in the 2016 documentary Vaxxed, which claimed that the CDC had conspired to cover up the connection between vaccines and autism.
The Senate HELP committee still met Thursday morning to vote on whether to advance the nominations of Marty Makary and Jayant Bhattacharya, nominated to lead the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, respectively. Both nominees advanced to the full Senate.
“That’s two out of three, at least,” one Weldon supporter was heard saying as the committee adjourned.
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Margaret Manto is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.