(Bloomberg) -- President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Dave Weldon to be director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tapping a former Florida politician and physician to lead the nation’s public health agency.
Weldon will replace Mandy Cohen, who took on the role last year. For the first time in its 78-year history, the nominee for CDC director will require Senate confirmation, a change promoted by Republicans who say the agency needs more accountability.
If confirmed, Weldon takes the helm of an Atlanta-based agency that’s been trying to regain public trust and address shortcomings identified during the pandemic. The agency is also bracing for major changes under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic who has been tapped to run the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC.
“Americans have lost trust in the CDC and in our Federal Health Authorities, who have engaged in censorship, data manipulation, and misinformation,” Trump said in a statement posted on Truth Social late Friday. “The CDC must step up and correct past errors to focus on the Prevention of Disease.”
Weldon was a practicing physician before serving multiple terms in Congress starting in 1994. As a congressman, he promoted the idea that thimerosal, a mercury-containing vaccine preservative, caused children to become autistic. He also sponsored legislation to ban thimerosal from childhood flu vaccines. The CDC, which Weldon has now been tapped to lead, says on its website that “research does not show any link between thimerosal and autism.”
Among other roles, the CDC director decides whether to approve an advisory committee’s guidelines on vaccine use. Public health experts worry that Kennedy could undermine that process or continue to raise doubts about vaccines in a new position of power, unwinding decades of progress that have prevented millions of illnesses and deaths.
At a recent conference in Washington, Cohen warned about the threat of curtailing vaccination efforts, saying “I don’t want to have to see us go backward in order to remind ourselves that vaccines work.”
Kennedy has also called for the end of adding fluoride to drinking water. The CDC supports having fluoride in tap water to prevent tooth decay.
During his previous term in office, Trump proposed cutting the CDC’s budget. House Republicans are pushing a bill that would reduce the agency’s budget by $1.8 billion, or 22%, ending programs to address the health effects of climate change and deaths related to firearms, opioids, tobacco and HIV.
The proposed cuts echo a popular criticism of the CDC: that it wasn’t ready for the pandemic because it tries to do too much. In September, several former CDC directors pushed back in an opinion piece in Stat, arguing that by addressing a wide range of health threats beyond infectious diseases, the agency had saved lives.
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