Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) and Maine Sen. Susan Collins (R) expressed their concerns over Dave Weldon’s nomination to head the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) prior to senior Trump administration officials deciding to withdraw it.
Murkowski relayed her concerns about Weldon directly to the White House, while Collins made an off-hand remark about the nominee to Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., though she had not reached a final decision on how she would vote.
Murkowski told reporters Thursday that she expressed her concerns about Weldon to the White House.
Asked if she had concerns about Weldon heading a leading public health agency, Murkowski replied, “Yes, I did, and I shared those.”
She said she wasn’t surprised by the decision to withdraw his nomination.
Collins also raised concerns about Trump’s choice of Weldon, an outspoken critic of vaccine safety, to head the nation’s science-based service organization in charge of protecting the public’s health.
“There are some areas of disagreement, and I look forward to the public hearing when I will be able to question him in public and in more depth on issues like vaccine recommendations,” Collins told Bloomberg earlier this month.
Weldon, in a statement reacting to the withdrawal of his nomination, said that Kennedy alerted him Wednesday that Collins had expressed concern over his record.
“Bobby told me that earlier that morning he had breakfast with Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who said she now had reservations about my nomination and was considering voting no,” Weldon said.
“I had a very pleasant meeting with her two weeks prior where she expressed no reservations about my nomination, but at my meeting with her staff on March 11 they were suddenly very hostile — a bad sign,” he recalled.
Collins happened to sit next to Kennedy at a Friends of Ireland breakfast Wednesday.
Collins, however, told reporters Thursday that she was surprised that Weldon’s nomination had been withdrawn shortly before his scheduled confirmation hearing.
“The news came as a surprise to me. I was on my way to the markup, which was going to be followed by the hearing on his nomination. It was not something I anticipated,” she said.
She said she did not express her concerns to the White House.
“I certainly had not reached a final judgment. I followed my normal practice of waiting until the hearing was scheduled, so he can respond in a public forum,” she said.
Weldon was scheduled to testify at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Thursday morning, before his nomination was suddenly pulled.
Murkowski and Collins both sit on that panel, on which Republicans control a 12-11 majority. If either of them had voted no, it would have been enough to bottle the nominee up in committee.
Some Republican lawmakers, however, thought that Weldon’s nomination would become a political liability given the negative publicity surrounding a measles outbreak across multiple states.
A school-aged child who was not vaccinated died in Texas last month, sending a wave of alarming headlines through the media.
Other Republicans said they weren’t surprised to hear the White House decided to pull Weldon’s nomination.
“I think it makes sense,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told reporters. “Some of us who had some concerns with [Secretary] Kennedy’s previous statements got past that because we believed that scientists running some of these three-letter health agencies are going to be driven by data, are going to be driven by science.”
Tillis said Weldon’s “past comments have raised enough questions” to sow doubts whether policies at the CDC would be driven by science.
Weldon, a former Republican congressman from Florida, has a long history of supporting anti-vaccine theories.
He has argued in the past that vaccinating children against the flu could poise a poisoning risk.
“Parents should not be forced to choose between the risk of the mercury containing preservative thimerosal — whether real or perceived and the risk of contracting influenza,” he wrote in a letter to the House Appropriations Chairman in 2007, according to Statnews.com.
