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The White House has withdrawn the nomination of its pick to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Dave Weldon, a Republican former congressman who was to have appeared at a Senate confirmation hearing Thursday morning.
Reached by phone, Dr. Weldon, who learned of the decision last night, said he had been told by a White House official that “they didn’t have the votes to confirm” his nomination.
Dr. Weldon, 71, was scheduled to appear before the Senate health committee on Thursday at 10 a.m., the first time an agency director would have been subject to the confirmation process. The decision to withdraw the nomination was first reported by Axios.
He said he had been excited by the prospect of serving his country again and helping to restore the public’s confidence in the C.D.C. Dr. Weldon has long maintained that the agency has done too little to investigate the safety of childhood vaccines.
He said had also been looking forward to working with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new health secretary, on the MAHA, or Make America Healthy Again, agenda to curtail chronic diseases among Americans.
“It is a shock, but, you know, in some ways, it’s relief,” Dr. Weldon said. “Government jobs demand a lot of you, and if God doesn’t want me in it, I’m fine with that.”
The Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions canceled Dr. Weldon’s hearing. But the panel voted to advance to the full Senate two other health nominees, Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Martin Makary to head the Food and Drug Administration.
(The hearing for Dr. Mehmet Oz, the nominee to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is scheduled for Friday.)
Dr. Weldon was perhaps the least known of the men nominated to lead major agencies at the Department of Health and Human Services. But he was the one aligned most closely with Mr. Kennedy.
The two men have been friends for 25 years. The health secretary has cited Dr. Weldon’s criticisms of the C.D.C. along with his own. Mr. Kennedy is “very upset” at the decision to withdraw Dr. Weldon for consideration as C.D.C. director, Dr. Weldon said.
“I’m going 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,” he said. “I’ll make much more money staying in my medical practice.”
His hearing was set to take place amid significant measles outbreaks in Texas and New Mexico, which have infected more than 250 people and claimed two lives; a flu season that led to record numbers of hospitalizations; and the potential for a bird flu epidemic.
He had repeatedly questioned the safety of the measles vaccine and criticized the C.D.C. for not doing enough to prove that vaccines are safe.
“They never did it the right way,” he said in a statement released on Thursday morning. He also praised the work of discredited British doctor Andrew Wakefield, who first proposed the theory that vaccines cause autism.
“We might be able to do research and figure out why some kids have a bad reaction to the M.M.R.,” Dr. Weldon wrote, despite dozens of studies that have disproved a link. “Clearly, big Pharma didn’t want me in the C.D.C. investigating any of this.”
While in Congress, Dr. Weldon pushed to move the vaccine safety office away from C.D.C. control, saying the agency had a conflict of interest because it also purchases and promotes vaccines. He is also a staunch opponent of abortion.
Dr. Weldon served in Congress for 14 years, from 1995 to 2009. His signature legislative accomplishment was the Weldon Amendment, which bars health agencies from discriminating against hospitals or health insurance plans that choose not to provide or pay for abortions.
Like Mr. Kennedy, he had questioned the need to immunize children against hepatitis B, describing it as primarily a sexually transmitted disease afflicting adults.
He also argued that abstinence is the most effective way to curb sexually transmitted infections. Cases have soared in recent years and only began to show signs of a possible downturn in 2023.
In an interview with The New York Times in late November, Dr. Weldon said that he had worked “to get the mercury out of the childhood vaccines.”
The C.D.C. had published a research study showing the mercury had done no harm, “but there were credible accusations that C.D.C. had incorrectly manipulated the data to exonerate themselves,” he said in the statement.
“If confirmed I was planning on going back into the C.D.C. database and quietly investigate this claim.”
Still, he described himself as a supporter of vaccination. Both his adult children are fully immunized, he said in November. As a doctor in coastal Florida, he prescribes thousands of doses of flu and other vaccines to his patients.
“I’ve been described as anti-vaccine,” Dr. Weldon said, but added: “I give shots. I believe in vaccination.”
Apart from a handful of tough questions from the committee’s chair, Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, comments from members have largely fallen along partisan lines. Dr. Weldon’s hearing was not expected to be different.
