The Trump administration abruptly withdrew its candidate for director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this morning, and a scheduled Senate committee nomination hearing was canceled less than 1 hour before it was scheduled to begin. David Weldon, an internal medicine physician and former Florida congressman who holds antivaccine views, had been nominated in November 2024 to lead the agency. Although the reasons for the withdrawal were not immediately made public, he reportedly faced skepticism from some Republican senators on a key committee considering his nomination, on whose support he was depending. The pullback also comes shortly after news reports that CDC is planning to study potential links between vaccines and autism—a long-debunked theory and one for which Weldon has also expressed support.
The nomination’s failure came amid a spreading measles outbreak in multiple U.S. states and public criticism of tepid support by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. 0Kennedy Jr. for measles vaccination. Weldon has said he and Kennedy have a friendship stretching back many years.
The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions did vote to approve the nominations of Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health and Martin Makary to lead the Food and Drug Administration. Both will advance to the full Senate. —Jennifer Couzin-Frankel
When the Patient Safety Network, a website within the Department of Health and Human Services, took down a pair of research papers referencing transgender and nonbinary people or the LGTBQ+ community, it seemed a clear example of the Trump administration enforcing its executive orders targeting “gender ideology.” But to an author on each paper, it was simply a violation of the First Amendment, essentially the government restricting their freedom of speech. So the authors, each a Harvard University physician, have joined with the American Civil Liberties Union and filed a lawsuit against RFK Jr. and other government officials, Reuters reports. (Here’s the case.)
STAT spoke with Steven Collis, a First Amendment law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, about the case. He said it will hinge on whether judges view the government website as a “limited public forum,” which is protected under the amendment, or “government speech,” which is not.
