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President-elect Donald Trump has tapped former Florida Rep. Dave Weldon, a physician and vaccine safety skeptic, to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While in Congress, Weldon introduced legislation to move oversight of vaccine safety from the CDC to an independent agency within HHS. He has also repeatedly voiced serious reservations about the independence of the federal government’s vaccine safety review process, and previously suggested that a mercury-based preservative once commonly used in vaccines, thimerosal, is linked to a rise in autism. (Messerly, 11/22)

For the first time in its 78-year history, the nominee for CDC director will require Senate confirmation, a change promoted by Republicans who say the agency needs more accountability. ... Weldon was a practicing physician before serving multiple terms in Congress starting in 1994. As a congressman, he promoted the idea that thimerosal, a mercury-containing vaccine preservative, caused children to become autistic. He also sponsored legislation to ban thimerosal from childhood flu vaccines. The CDC, which Weldon has now been tapped to lead, says on its website that “research does not show any link between thimerosal and autism.” (Smith, 11/22)

During his tenure in Congress, Weldon championed religious and anti-abortion causes, gun rights and strengthening American national security. Weldon helped secure money to construct the East Central Florida VA Clinic. He also supported multiple bills to criminalize human cloning ad sat on the Appropriations, Science, and Health and Human Services committees, among others. (Berman, 11/23)

Weldon, who served in Congress for 14 years from 1995 to 2009, attracted national attention for his involvement in the case of Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged Florida woman whose husband’s attempts to remove her feeding tubes and end her life attracted national attention — and prompted interventions by congressional Republicans. The attempt to remove Schiavo’s feeding tubes was a “grave injustice,” Weldon said on the floor of Congress in 2003. He petitioned her family in 2005 to personally review her case. (Sun, 11/22)

Timothy Caulfield, research director at the University of Alberta’s Health Law Institute in Canada, who studies health misinformation, said that people often are more willing to believe conspiracy theories about conditions such as autism, whose causes are complex and not fully understood, than diseases with clear causes. (Szabo, 11/22)