Dave Weldon, President Trump’s nominee to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told a top Democratic senator that he believes there’s a link between vaccines and autism and that the childhood vaccine schedule puts children in danger due to mercury exposure.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said that during a private meeting last month, Weldon told her children following the CDC’s standard vaccine schedule are being exposed to toxic levels of mercury.
When he served in Congress, Weldon was one of the primary drivers pushing the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to eliminate the use of thimerosal in vaccines. Thimerosal contains small amounts of ethylmercury and was widely used as a preservative for multidose vaccines.
There is no evidence of harm caused by the low doses of thimerosal in vaccines, but it was removed from most vaccines as a precaution by 2001 at the urging of Weldon and other scientists and experts, including the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Weldon was also leader in Congress of pushing to examine a now-debunked link between vaccines and autism, something that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has also promoted.
Like Kennedy, Weldon has rejected studies that found no causal link between childhood vaccines and autism.
“In our meeting last month, I was deeply disturbed to hear Dr. Weldon repeat debunked claims about vaccines—it’s dangerous to put someone in charge at CDC who believes the lie that our rigorously tested childhood vaccine schedule is somehow exposing kids to toxic levels of mercury or causing autism,” Murray said in a statement.
Murray’s statement about Weldon was first reported by Bloomberg.
Weldon faces a Senate hearing Thursday, the first time a CDC director pick has needed to be confirmed.
His confirmation hearing comes as the U.S. is facing measles outbreaks that started in unvaccinated communities in West Texas and has now been linked to cases in two other states.
Kennedy has come under criticism for his response to the outbreak, giving mixed messages and muffling the benefits of vaccination while also promoting fringe theories about prevention and the supposed dangers of the measles shot.
“At the same time this administration is elevating prominent vaccine skeptics like RFK Jr. and Dr. Weldon to key positions, it is also mass firing thousands of qualified public health experts and freezing communications across health agencies—and make no mistake, there will be serious consequences to decimating our public health infrastructure,” Murray said.
The CDC recently confirmed plans to conduct more research into whether vaccines cause autism, Reuters first reported.
