https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/13/dave-weldon-cdc-nomination-withdrawn
...............Earlier this week, Patty Murray, a Democratic senator from Washington state, told Bloomberg that at a meeting to discuss the nomination last month, 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”.
While in Congress, Weldon was a founder of the Congressional Autism caucus. He has long promoted the debunked claim that vaccines can cause autism, including in Vaxxed, a controversial but influential documentary from 2016.
Weldon introduced two bills related to vaccines: one seeking to limit use in vaccines of the preservative thimerosal, widely deemed to be safe, the other seeking to transfer work on vaccine safety away from the CDC.
Murray added: “At the same time this administration is elevating prominent vaccine skeptics like [Kennedy] and Dr Weldon to key positions, it is also mass-firing thousands of qualified public health experts and freezing communications across health agencies – and make no mistake, there will be serious consequences to decimating our public health infrastructure.”
When Weldon was nominated, Dorit Reiss, a professor of law at UC Law San Francisco, told the Guardian Weldon was “definitely someone who’s very sympathetic to the anti-vaccine cause”, and said nominations of anti-vaccine campaigners “increase their legitimacy. It gives them a microphone … to express their views and promote this information.
“It sends a message that the Trump administration is willing to work with the anti-vaccine movement. And I think it also sends a message that science-based decisions are not the priority.”
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