What to Know About Dave Weldon, Trump’s Pick to Lead the CDC

President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), former Republican Congressman Dr. Dave Weldon, is set to face questioning by Senators on March 13.

Weldon is due to appear before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions for his nomination hearing, and members will likely question him on topics including his past statements expressing vaccine skepticism. If confirmed by the Senate, Weldon would be the director of the agency responsible for protecting the country’s public health.

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Here’s what to know about Weldon.

Weldon, 71, served in the Army, and currently operates a private medical practice in Florida. From 1995 to 2009, he served in Congress, representing Florida. Since then, he’s largely been out of the political spotlight, though he’s run campaigns—he lost the GOP Primary for a seat in the U.S. Senate in 2012, as well as the GOP Primary for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives in 2024.

From 2017 to 2020, Weldon was the president of the Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries, an association of faith-based organizations that claim to offer alternatives to health insurance. The organizations have sparked controversy and criticism from state regulators, who have expressed concern that the groups’ marketing strategies have led to confusion among consumers over whether the ministries would fund medical claims.

When asked about this controversy by the New York Times in November, Weldon said that during the time he was president of the alliance he “strongly encouraged all the ministries to get together and form an accreditation system, and I think they did,” but since he left, “I don’t know how rigorous it really was.”

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In the past, Weldon shared views similar to his would-be boss, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), when it comes to vaccines. Despite years of research proving the safety and efficacy of vaccines, Weldon has previously repeated the debunked claim that some children could develop autism if they receive the measles vaccine.

Dr. Peter Hotez—professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine and co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development—has never worked with Weldon, but says the false claim that vaccines can cause autism “makes no sense.”

“We have overwhelming evidence that vaccines don’t cause autism,” Hotez says. “Anyone who wants to reopen spurious autism and vaccine links, you have to believe either they’re misinformed or they have an agenda outside of public health.”

Hotez says that many of Weldon’s comments were made years ago, and he hopes that Trump’s nominee to lead the CDC has since learned more about the topic and changed his views. In November, when the Times spoke to Weldon, they asked him about his past comments, but Weldon declined to state whether he still believed that there is a link between vaccines and autism. He told the Times that his two adult children have been vaccinated, and that he gives vaccines, including the flu shot, to his adult patients.

While serving in Congress, Weldon sponsored a bill that passed with bipartisan support in 2003. The bill launched a program, known as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), that allocated $15 billion for HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria prevention and treatment programs in low-income countries. In the more than two decades since, PEPFAR has saved up to 25 million lives, officials estimate.

Hotez says “there’s clearly a disconnect” between Weldon’s support for PEPFAR and his previous anti-vaccine statements. 

”But again, those [anti-vaccine theories] were statements he made almost 20 years ago, so what we need to find out is, where does he stand today and what are his views? So the [nomination hearing] will be very instructive in finding that out,” Hotez says.

Read More: What to Know About Marty Makary, Trump’s Pick to Lead the FDA

Like some of Trump’s other nominees to lead the nation’s health agencies, such as Dr. Marty Makary, who has been nominated to lead the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Weldon has been a vocal critic of health agencies in the past. In April 2007, he said that federal agencies “failed to free themselves from conflicts of interest that serve to undermine public confidence in the safety of vaccines.” He accused the federal government at the time of dedicating “far more resources to promoting the immunizations than in safety evaluations,” and claimed that the CDC focused its vaccine safety resources on considering short-term side effects, and not enough focus was given to long-term side effects. He also proposed that the vaccine safety office be moved out of the CDC and operate instead as a separate office within HHS.

Hotez says he was critical of Weldon’s comments back in 2007. “There’s no one that’s more qualified to assess vaccine safety once a vaccine is licensed than the CDC,” Hotez says, adding that the CDC has multiple systems in place to monitor both the short and long-term side effects of vaccines.

Weldon authored and introduced the Weldon Amendment, which passed in 2005 and prohibits health agencies from discriminating against health care institutions, medical providers, and insurance plans that don’t provide or fund abortion care, typically on religious grounds. Nourbese Flint, president of the reproductive rights group All* Above All, says the amendment “has been incredibly harmful to abortion access.”

“This is particularly important in places where people don’t have a lot of providers to turn to,” Flint says. “Particularly for those in rural spaces where there are no other providers, people are stuck.”

Flint points out that Project 2025 encouraged the next presidential Administration to conduct “abortion surveillance” through the CDC, which is the agency tasked with collecting health data across the country. Project 2025 calls for HHS to ensure that “every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.” Flint and other reproductive rights advocates fear that Weldon could follow through on that Project 2025 suggestion, and that the data collected could be used to identify and penalize providers or even patients.

Weldon has also shared unreliable claims about reproductive health. In 1998, he suggested that there was a connection between abortion and breast cancer; the American Cancer Society maintains that “the best scientific evidence does not support a link between abortion and breast cancer risk.” In 2002, Weldon suggested that federal programs focus on abstinence education, rather than teaching adolescents about contraceptives, to prevent sexually transmitted infections (STIs)—research has found that abstinence-only education programs are ineffective.

“We’ve seen time and time again that Weldon has used bad science,” Flint says. “Anybody who is worth their weight in salt has known that abstinence is not an effective policy against both STI and unplanned, untimed pregnancies, and that we have a lot of data and research on our side that having a robust sexual education and access to reproductive health care and destigmatizing has been the best ways in which we can reduce STIs and unplanned pregnancies.”

Flint calls Weldon “dangerous” for America’s public health, pointing to both his past anti-vaccine and anti-abortion comments. Flint says that when people share “bad science,” it can lead to the public being uninformed about important health topics, which can have fatal consequences.