Dr. Dave Weldon, a former Florida congressman and physician, is set to appear at a Senate confirmation hearing Thursday for his nomination to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Unknown to many in the general public, he’s well known in anti-vaccine circles.
As director, experts say Weldon, 71, could serve as a key ally to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the CDC and appears to share similar views, particularly on vaccines.
On Thursday, Weldon is expected to face questions from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee about how he would manage an agency with a $9 billion budget and a staff of over 13,000, before the Trump administration job cuts.
Weldon served 14 years in the House until 2009, largely staying out of the public spotlight. During this time, however, he attracted the attention of anti-vaccine groups due to his criticisms of the CDC and questions about vaccine safety.
Like Kennedy, Weldon has promoted the false claim linking vaccines to autism — a matter that the CDC will re-examine under Kennedy, despite decades of research failing to find evidence of a link.
He introduced a bill in 2007 to transfer responsibility for vaccine safety from the public health agency to an independent agency within HHS — an idea not entirely opposed by some vaccine experts but would significantly reduce the CDC’s role. Within the CDC’s vaccine safety program, it tracks reported side effects. The bill never made it past committees.
According to an account in the 2004 book “Evidence of Harm” by journalist David Kirby, Weldon actively intervened to help anti-vaccine researchers Dr. Mark Geier and his son David access the Vaccine Safety Datalink, a CDC-housed dataset containing patient health records. This raw data is available to researchers, but it isn’t public because of concerns over privacy, misrepresentation of data, and manpower.
In a 2015 interview with Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group Kennedy founded, Kennedy suggested Weldon supports his view that the CDC has too cozy of a relationship with vaccine-makers.
What will Weldon accomplish at CDC?
The CDC, in fact, is historically regarded as the gold standard in public health. It does wield significant influence over vaccine recommendations through its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, an independent advisory panel made up of pediatricians, epidemiologists and public health experts. Under the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies are required to cover vaccines recommended by ACIP.
The CDC’s responsibilities go far beyond vaccines. It fights epidemics in the U.S. and warns about outbreaks around the world, including Ebola, mpox and tuberculosis.
The CDC was instrumental in alerting about infections and deaths linked to recalled contaminated eye drops in 2023. It investigated the health effects of a train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio; reported on fungal infections spreading in nursing homes; and has called attention to the alarming rise in rates of teen despair and suicide. It keeps track of obesity in the U.S. and rates of heart disease and diabetes.
It was the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics that almost a decade ago helped raise awareness that fentanyl was increasingly a cause of drug deaths in the U.S.
While Weldon is a medical doctor, it’s unclear what his views or general understanding of these other areas are, said Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases. While in Congress, Weldon advocated for limits on abortion.
“The director of CDC is a very important position and has a lot of responsibilities over a lot of aspects of public health,” O’Leary said. “Historically, it has had people who have a lot of experience in general, in public health and/or infectious diseases and/or chronic disease prevention. It’s probably the world’s largest public health agency.”
Weldon did not respond to a request for comment.
Weldon would serve as a key official in addressing multiple ongoing health threats, including the H5N1 bird flu and the measles outbreak in West Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma.
Amid the measles outbreak — which has led to more than 200 cases and two deaths — Kennedy has downplayed the significance of vaccinations, instead doubling down on supplements like vitamin A and cod liver oil, which do not prevent infection.
Experts weren’t so sure Weldon — who has previously questioned vaccine safety — would do much to help matters there.
“I’d love to understand why he’s qualified to do the job,” Dr. Buddy Creech, a pediatric infectious disease physician at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, said of Weldon. ”What does he bring to the table that is so compelling based on his experiences, and other than being opposed to the way that we protect millions of Americans through vaccines?”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It’s possible that committee chair Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., could ask Weldon to make commitments similar to those he asked of Kennedy, said Dorit Reiss, a vaccine policy researcher at the University of California Law San Francisco — although it’s unclear how effective that might be.
In a February speech supporting Kennedy’s HHS nomination, Cassidy said Kennedy had promised to give the Senate notice before making changes to certain vaccine programs and that he would maintain ACIP “without change.”
Since Kennedy’s confirmation, however, HHS has overseen several changes, including canceling or postponing two major vaccine advisory committee meetings. The CDC also launched a database listing information about current or former members of ACIP, including what it describes as conflicts of interest.
“Kennedy has been at the very least violating the spirit, probably even the language, of the commitments,” Reiss said. Neither Cassidy nor Kennedy has responded to multiple previous requests for comment.
The nomination comes as childhood vaccination rates are falling. Fewer than 93% of kindergarteners had received all of their state-required vaccinations in the 2023-2024 school year, compared with 95% in the 2019-2020 school year, according to KFF, a nonprofit group that researches health policy issues.
“Even in 2017, during the first Trump administration, anti-vaccine activists were floating his name as potential for CDC director,” Reiss said.
At the time, the role went to Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald, who resigned in 2018 after reports disclosed she had bought stocks in tobacco companies.
O’Leary worries about the implications of having a CDC director who may not fully support vaccines and promotes false claims, such as a link between vaccines and autism.
“The science there is very clear and has been for decades,“ O’Leary said. “To look into that again, seems like a big waste of resources.”
Creech said physicians continue to see vaccine-preventable diseases.
“And we’re about to see, in our opinion, we’re going to see larger waves of these communicable diseases, and it’s going to be really frustrating for us who care for these kids in a hospital,” Creech said. “It’s going to be even worse for the families that care for them.”
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