By Gina Shaw
The Trump administration withdrew the nomination of David Weldon, MD, to head the CDC just hours before his scheduled confirmation hearing before the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee on Thursday, March 13, 2025.
Dr. Weldon, a former Republican member of Congress from Florida who served from 1995 to 2009, has been a vocal critic of vaccinations and has promoted debunked studies linking vaccines to autism. As first reported by Axios, unnamed sources suggested that Dr. Weldon would not have the votes for confirmation, and that Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did not believe he was ready for confirmation.
Walter Orenstein, MD, a professor emeritus in the Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases at Emory University School of Medicine, in Atlanta, said the decision to withdraw Dr. Weldon’s nomination was a sound one, given the nominee’s past criticisms of vaccine safety. “The benefits of vaccines approved by the FDA and recommended by the CDC far outweigh the harms,” he said. From 1988-2004, Dr. Orenstein was the Director of the United States Immunization Program at the CDC.
Dr. Orenstein added that the decision is also the right one, given the important role the CDC plays “in developing immunization policies and evaluating them for safety and effectiveness and determining how best to enhance vaccine uptake.” The CDC director, he added, “plays a critical role in overseeing this process and maximizing the benefits and minimizing the risks of vaccine-preventable diseases.
“It is important that CDC directors understand the science of vaccines, vaccination, and be recognized by the scientific and public health communities for their expertise in these areas. I hope the next nominee will meet these criteria.”
The move comes two days after Science reported that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) terminated at least 33 research grants studying vaccine hesitancy and strategies to increase vaccine uptake, while also scaling back nine others. The termination letters stated that the funding "no longer effectuates agency priorities. It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research activities that focus on gaining scientific knowledge on why individuals are hesitant to be vaccinated and/or explore ways to improve vaccine interest and commitment."
Dr. Orenstein, a former associate director of the Emory Vaccine Center, expressed serious concerns about this move, particularly in view of growing measles outbreaks in West Texas and New Mexico, which have led to two deaths, both in unvaccinated individuals (one child and one adult). The Texas outbreak had risen to more than 220 cases as of March 11, while the New Mexico outbreak involved at least 33 cases, the vast majority of which were in unvaccinated people.
“My director of communications at the U.S. Immunization Program used to say to me, ‘You need the right message, delivered by the right messenger, through the right communications channels, and you need to find out who people trust and how to educate them,’” he said. “In a time of vaccine hesitancy, it’s important to invest in education of the public and understand how to reach them.”
Dr. Orenstein said he was also dismayed by recent comments from HHS Secretary Kennedy on Fox News, falsely claiming that the measles vaccine itself causes deaths, encephalitis and blindness every year. “I don’t know what he’s talking about. I don’t know where he is getting that from,” Dr. Orenstein said. “Certainly, when you are vaccinating 4 million children every year, unfortunately some of those children will die during that time period due to other causes, such as accidents or medical conditions. The issue is to differentiate causation from coincidence.”
A 2015 CDC study (Vaccine 2015;33[29]:3288-3292) reviewing data from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, in addition to medical records, death certificates and autopsy reports, found no evidence to suggest “a causal relationship with the MMR [measles, mumps and rubella] vaccine and death.”
“The evidence for the safety and effectiveness of vaccines routinely given to children and adults in the United States is overwhelmingly favorable. In the case of MMR vaccine, this includes preventing hundreds of potential measles-related deaths each year,” it concluded.
“Vaccines are a victim of their own success; people don’t perceive the benefits,” Dr. Orenstein said. “I am very worried about having to have resurgences of these vaccine-preventable diseases in order to reaffirm how important vaccines are. I would like us not to make that mistake.”
The HELP Committee voting on two other nominations, Stanford health economist Jayanta Bhattacharya, MD, for director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Johns Hopkins surgeon Martin Makary, MD, for commissioner of the FDA, moved forward as scheduled Thursday morning. Dr. Bhattacharya’s nomination advanced on a party-line vote of 12 to 11, while Dr. Makary’s nomination was advanced on a 14-9 vote, with Democratic senators Maggie Hassan (N.H.) and John Hickenlooper (Colo.) joining Republicans to endorse him.
