Good News: Weldon is Out. Bad News: RFK Is Not

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.    Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.

A number of posts discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion.

Good News:

Lena H. Sun, Dan Diamond, Rachel Roubein and Fenit Nirappil

The White House abruptly abandoned the nomination of Dave Weldon, the former Florida congressman who questioned vaccine safety, to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday amid concerns he could not be confirmed by the Senate.

The move leaves the Trump administration in search of a leader for the agency — which formulates vaccine policy recommendations — as a growing measles outbreak highlights criticism of the administration’s public health response.

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Weldon, a 71-year-old doctor who left Congress in 2009, drew scrutiny for his longtime promotion of the false claim that vaccines can cause autism.

In a four-page statement released Thursday, Weldon said a White House assistant called him Wednesday night to inform him his nomination was being withdrawn because he lacked the votes to be confirmed. Weldon, who again raised concerns about routine vaccines in his statement, said Republican senators concerned about his vaccine views doomed his nomination and that he suspected the pharmaceutical industry also played a role.

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He also extensively defended Andrew Wakefield, who ignited the modern anti-vaccine movement with a retracted 1998 study linking the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism.

Bad News: 

 Mary Kekatos at ABC:

Measles is continuing to spread across the United States, as outbreaks grow in western Texas and New Mexico.

Between the two states, 256 cases have been confirmed as of Thursday, mostly in those who are unvaccinated or with unknown vaccination status, according to state health officials. At least one unvaccinated school-aged child in Texas has died and another suspected death is being investigated in New Mexico in an unvaccinated adult. At least 10 other states have also confirmed cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As health care professionals work to care for patients, they are also attempting to combat the proliferation of misinformation about how to prevent and treat the disease, some tell ABC News.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been one of the prominent voices on measles, making comments that public health experts say are not accurate.

In multiple interviews, Kennedy has claimed that vitamin A and cod liver oil are effective treatments for measles. He also said that poor diet contributes to severe cases of measles and that -- while vaccines prevent illness -- they also cause severe illnesses and even death.

Weldon v. Science

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.    Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.

A number of posts discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion.

 Trump is nominating former Rep. Dave Weldon to head CDC. 

Lena H. Sun, Fenit Nirappil and Aaron Schaffer at WP:

A Washington Post review of Weldon’s public comments, media appearances and congressional letters along with accounts of those who worked with him reveal a portrait of a politician and physician who emphasized the experiences of individuals while dismissing dozens of studies based on data from hundreds of thousands of patients that showed no link between vaccines and autism.

In Congress, Weldon was “absolutely and completely dismissive” of data showing vaccines were not associated with autism, recalled Josh Sharfstein, a former Democratic staff member on the House Government Reform Committee in the early 2000s when the Republicans who were in charge held regular hearings questioning vaccine safety.

“He appeared to have a closed mind on the issue,” said Sharfstein, now a vice dean for public health practice at Johns Hopkins University and a former top official at the Food and Drug Administration. “He didn’t seem to understand that the core tool of population data analysis is one of the pivotal aspects of the work of CDC.”

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As CDC director, Weldon could influence federal guidance on vaccines, including information posted on the agency’s website, which unequivocally states that studies show no association between vaccines and autism.

He would have the authority to countermand recommendations from the agency’s independent vaccine advisory committee about vaccines approved by the FDA, choose members who oppose vaccines or abolish the panel altogether.

Insurance companies are not required to cover the cost of vaccines unless they are included in recommended vaccination schedules approved by the CDC director. Nor would a federal safety-net program that offers free shots to more than half of U.S. children be able to cover the immunizations if the CDC director has not endorsed them.

More on Weldon

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.    Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.

A number of posts discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion.

 Trump is nominating former Rep. Dave Weldon to head CDC.  David Gorski at Science-Based Medicine:

During his 14 years in Congress, Weldon funneled his belief in an “autism epidemic.” He also apparently believed in the thimerosal-autism link, to the point of promoting highly dubious studies and attacking decent studies examining whether mercury in childhood vaccines had been responsible for such an “epidemic.” Back in the day, he even spoke at antivax “conferences” falsely billed as scientific conferences:

Understanding autism and searching for a cure is a passion that I will continue to carry with me. In 2004, I delivered an address at the Defeat Autism Now Conference and the keynote address to the Autism One Conference in Chicago regarding the autism epidemic affecting one in 163 children. I challenged public health officials to direct the funding to defeat this epidemic. Today, autism affects one in 88 children. America can’t afford further delay in autism research.

Defeat Autism Now! was the umbrella organization for a lot of antivax quacks abusing children with “autism biomed” treatments to “cure” them of the “vaccine injury” blamed by antivaxxers for their autism, while the Autism One conference was the longstanding fake medical conference held in Chicago annually for many years that showcased all forms of antivax and autism quackery. For those of you not familiar with Autism One, It was at the 2013 Autism One conference that RFK Jr. likened vaccines to the Holocaust, at least to my knowledge, and where Kerri Rivera described feeding bleach to children in 2012 to treat their autism.

Back in 2003-2004, Weldon used his position in Congress to write letters to then-CDC Director Julie Gerberding demanding an “investigation” of supposed links between vaccines and autism. Basically, the letters made the same claims that RFK Jr. made in his 2005 conspiracyfest Deadly Immunity. Recall that the central claim in RFK Jr.’s article, co-published by Rolling Stone and Salon.com (to their eternal shame), was that there was evidence that thimerosal in vaccines was associated with a highly elevated risk of autism in children but that the CDC, at a meeting in 2000, “covered it up.” This is a claim that I like to call the Simpsonwood conspiracy theory, after the conference center where the meeting was held, an example of the central conspiracy theory of the antivaccine movement (at least in the US), one I’ve deconstructed in the past. Weldon, even though he’s a physician, fell for the Simpsonwood conference conspiracy theory, promoted a year and a half later by antivaccine crank Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., hook, line, and sinker. The first letter regurgitates the “concerns” being promoted by the antivaccine movement at the time. The second letter turned up the heat, trying to persuade Gerberding to postpone an important Institute of Medicine conference until the “concern” about the Verstraeten study had been addressed. As we all know, the IOM conference did go on and the IOM report found (and strongly stated) that there was no evidence to support correlation between the MMR vaccine and autism risk. Once again, antivaxxers were deceptively looking at standard epidemiological and statistical techniques to account for confounders as something nefarious, as they misrepresented how the observed “association” between thimerosal and autism risk declined and disappeared as appropriate confounders were accounted for as the CDC intentionally “covering up” an association, and Weldon was the Congressional spearhead for this conspiracy theory.

Truly, the vaccination program and public health efforts by the CDC are in serious jeopardy, even worse than I had imagined. I suppose I should be happy that Trump didn’t appoint Andrew Wakefield as CDC Director.