The Freedom From Religion Foundation says that Dave Weldon is a disastrous choice to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Weldon, 71, a physician and former Republican member of Congress, is a vaccine safety denier and an anti-abortionist who has reportedly called Jesus one of his biggest political influences.
Of grave concern is Weldon’s stint as president of the Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries, a trade group representing Christian cost-sharing ministries offered as an alternative to regular health insurance that have no legal obligation to pay medical claims. FFRF has played a key role on a congressional bill, the Health Share Transparency Act, which has been introduced by Rep. Jared Huffman to rein in these ministries.
Weldon would be a proverbial fox guarding the CDC chicken coop. A vaccine safety skeptic, he has maintained a 25-year relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and promoted the false claim that autism is caused by vaccinations. He was actively hostile toward the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration during his 14-year (1995-2009) tenure in Congress, undermining trust in their vaccine policies. Weldon even introduced a “vaccine safety bill” to relocate most vaccine research from the CDC to a separate agency, claiming that the CDC had an “inherent conflict of interest.”
Weldon also introduced legislation to interfere with the case of Terri Schiavo, a woman in a persistent vegetative state whose husband wanted to take her off life support, but whose Catholic parents fought him. The painful, two-year nationally debated situation became inflamed by anti-abortionists and Catholic and evangelical lobbyists. Weldon wanted to force a review by the federal government. After Schiavo’s feeding tube was removed and she died, an autopsy showed her brain had shrunk to half its size and that no treatment could have altered her condition.
Weldon is an anti-abortion advocate whose congressional Weldon Amendment bars health agencies from “discriminating” against hospitals and health insurance plans that do not provide or pay for abortion care. During Trump’s first administration, health officials utilizing the Weldon Amendment threatened to withhold $200 million in Medicaid funds from California because the state required health plans to cover abortion care. In addition, Weldon unethically promoted the fake link between abortion and breast cancer, which has been thoroughly debunked but is widely promoted by the anti-abortion movement.
Revealing his Christian nationalist bias, Weldon co-sponsored in Congress a Resolution on the Importance of Christmas, which insinuated that Christians are being persecuted in the United States. It asked the House of Representatives to recognize “the Christian faith as one of the great religions of the world” and to acknowledge “the role played by Christians and Christianity in the founding of the U.S. and in the formation of the Western civilization.”
If confirmed by the Senate, Weldon would control a multibillion dollar budget and a staff of several thousand. The CDC is charged with preventing and controlling a range of diseases and infectious outbreaks.
“Weldon’s record should disqualify him from helming the CDC,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Like so many other Trump nominees, Weldon would be a menace to the agency he would be tasked to serve.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters across the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
