The Trump administration withdrew the nomination of Dave Weldon for the top job at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a White House official said.
Weldon, a physician and vaccine critic, was set to go before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Thursday in the first-ever confirmation hearing for a CDC director. The HELP committee canceled the hearing less than an hour before it was set to begin.
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Weldon was not immediately available for comment.
He has previously spread debunked theories linking childhood vaccination to autism. As head of the CDC, Weldon would have been in charge of the vaccine schedule doctors typically follow to administer shots to kids.
Weldon, 71, has promoted the idea that a once-common vaccine preservative has links to childhood autism. Weldon recently told Senator Patty Murray in a prehearing meeting that children may be exposed to toxic levels of mercury through the government’s recommended immunization schedule. But the mercury-based preservative, thimerosal, was removed from childhood vaccines in the US in 2001.
The withdrawal of Weldon’s nomination didn’t ease some health experts’ concerns, as he would have joined Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a powerful voice sowing doubt about the safety of vaccines.
“One possibility is that the Senate is becoming very sensitive to the negative press that’s surrounding all of RFK Jr.’s antivax activity and they didn’t want more of it,” said Paul Offit, a vaccine expert and professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital Philadelphia. “The second possibility is they’re just going to pick another anti-vaccine, science-denying conspiracy theorist.”
Earlier Thursday, the Food and Drug Administration’s top lawyer resigned two days after her appointment was announced, the agency posted on the social media site X.
Hilary Perkins, who joined the Department of Justice during President Donald Trump’s first administration, had come under fire from Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who posted on X that Marty Makary, Trump’s nominee for FDA commissioner, was “attempting to sneak a Biden abortion lawyer into top leadership at FDA.”
The nomination withdrawal was first reported by Axios.
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