Washington, D.C. — Today, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, issued the following statement on President-elect Donald Trump announcing his intention to nominate Dr. David Weldon, a former Florida Congressman, to serve as Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“The CDC is our nation’s first line of defense against disease outbreaks and public health threats—we need a leader who has real experience in public health, not someone who has spent years promoting vaccine misinformation and junk health plans. I am also deeply concerned by Dr. Weldon’s anti-abortion extremism—there is no reason to entrust the work of tackling our nation’s maternal mortality crisis and collecting data essential to understanding the deadly outcome of abortion bans to the man responsible for the Weldon Amendment that allows health care providers to deny women essential abortion care.
“I can hardly believe it requires saying, but the absolute last thing we need at a public health agency advising the American people on vaccines and other key public health issues is someone who has been totally entrenched in anti-vaccine conspiracy thinking. Parents don’t want us to take a gamble on whether they can vaccinate their kid—not at HHS, not at FDA, and certainly not at CDC. To every one of my colleagues considering this nomination, I cannot drive home enough: this isn’t a game, this is not a political role without consequence, it has real power over whether Americans can get basic information and care to keep their families safe.”
Senator Murray is also a senior member and former chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) and the former chair of the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education subcommittee on Appropriations. In 2022, as Chair of the HELP Committee, Murray passed into law her bipartisan PREVENT Pandemics Act to strengthen the nation’s public health and medical preparedness and response systems—which, among other things, requires that the CDC Director be Senate-confirmed.
The CDC Director recommends members to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which makes vaccine recommendations that determine—among other things—whether insurers are required to cover certain vaccines with no cost-sharing. The CDC Director also determines whether or not to endorse ACIP’s recommendations.
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