By Robert McGreevy, Daily Caller News Foundation | March 13, 2025
The White House pulled former Republican Florida Rep. Dave Weldon’s nomination to become the next Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), leading skeptical Republicans to express surprise at the move.
Weldon, a physician and former 14-year congressman, was scheduled to face the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee in his confirmation hearing Thursday. However, as first reported by Axios, the White House decided to withdraw his nomination. Weldon confirmed the news in a statement obtained by Dr. Mary Bowden.
“Twelve hours before my scheduled confirmation hearing in the Senate, I received a phone call from an assistant at the White House informing me that my nomination to be Director of CDC was being withdrawn because there were not enough votes to get me confirmed,” Weldon wrote in the statement.
Weldon’s would-be boss, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was also “very upset,” Weldon said, writing that “he said I was the perfect person for the job.”
Kennedy Jr. allegedly said he was not ready, Axios reported, citing an anonymous source.
Weldon claimed Republican Maine Sen. Susan Collins was on the fence, but Collins told the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) that his withdrawal was a surprise.
“I did not express concerns to the White House. I had some reservations, but I certainly have not reached a final judgment,” Collins told the DCNF.
Weldon, however, alleged that Collins’s staff had claimed he was “antivax.”
“They [were] repeatedly accusing me of being ‘antivax,’ even though I reminded them that I actually give hundreds of vaccines every year in my medical practice,” he wrote in his statement. “More than Twenty years ago, while in congress I raised some concerns about childhood vaccine safety, and for some reason Collins staff suddenly couldn’t get over that no matter what I said back.”
A person familiar with the March 11 meeting between Weldon and Senate staffers, however, told the Daily Caller that he was mischaracterizing the Collins staffers.
Rather than explicitly calling Weldon antivax, the source relayed, Collins staffers asked him how he would handle criticisms from Democrats about being skeptical of vaccines. They also relayed that Weldon was wholly unprepared for the meeting. Weldon admitted he wasn’t personally familiar with the structure of the CDC’s authorities and that he didn’t have a strategic plan, the source told the Caller.
“Our staff never called him antivax, that is categorically false,” a Collins staffer told the Daily Caller.
Republican Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, chair of the HELP Committee, was also going to be a no-vote, Weldon wrote.
“I have known him for years and I thought we were friends,” Weldon claimed. “But he too was also throwing around the claim that I was ‘antivax’ or that I believed that vaccines cause autism which I have never said. He actually once asked that my nomination be withdrawn.”
A spokesperson for Sen. Cassidy pushed back on Weldon’s framing. “The decision to have him withdrawn did not come at our request,” the spokesperson told the Daily Caller.
In Congress Weldon had advocated for and supported legislation which would remove mercury from vaccines, a crusade he shares with Kennedy Jr.
He had also been highly critical of the very agency President Trump tapped him to head.
“There is a pattern of behavior at the CDC in which I see the agency draw broad and perhaps misleading conclusions based on incomplete research,” he wrote in a 2007 statement introducing his Vaccine Safety and Public Confidence Assurance Act of 2007.
Weldon laid the blame for his withdrawal at the feet of Big Pharma in his statement. “They are hands-down the most powerful lobby organization in Washington DC, giving millions of dollars to politicians on both sides of the aisle,” he wrote. “I have learned the hard way don’t mess with Pharma.”
Robert McGreevy is a reporter at the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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