Trump Wants an Anti-Abortion Extremist to Run the CDC

This piece first appeared in our weekly newsletter, The Fallout.

The confirmation hearing for longtime anti-abortion advocate and former Congressman David Weldon to run the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) begins this week, and, wow, that’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.

Weldon’s name may sound familiar to many of you, even if you can’t immediately place it. He’s the architect of the Weldon Amendment, one of a series of refusal-of-care policies that allows hospitals and other health-care facilities to refuse to provide abortion care because of religious or other conscience objections, all without jeopardizing federal funding. He’s also stridently anti-choice, supporting bill after bill targeting abortion rights and access. And to top it all off, he’s a doctor who is anti-vaccine—just the kind of guy you want running the nation’s top public health agency during a measles outbreak.

“As a physician, providing life-saving health care in this fragile, ever changing political landscape, I know that Weldon’s leadership is the antithesis of the CDC’s mission and will further propel our country into a public health crisis with disproportionate impacts on the most vulnerable members of our community,” Dr. Jamila Perritt, president and CEO of Physicians for Reproductive Health and an OB-GYN in Washington, D.C., said in a statement prior to Weldon’s hearing.

In her statement, Perritt pointed out that Weldon has largely been able to fly under the radar.

“Make no mistake, although we are all at risk, should Weldon become the next CDC Director, he will have access to sensitive public health data that could put Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and those in rural communities at greater risk of surveillance and criminalization as they seek the care they need.”

Like so many of President Donald Trump’s other executive agency nominees, Weldon hasn’t been chosen to lead the CDC—he’s been chosen to break it. Alongside Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., both men are conservatives’ key to erasing the public health gains from the New Deal and Civil Rights Era, and implementing Project 2025 policy objectives that include expanded surveillance of abortion patients and providers.

In the parade of horribles that is the Trump administration, David Weldon might be one of the most dangerous and under-the-radar picks to date.

The post Trump Wants an Anti-Abortion Extremist to Run the CDC appeared first on Rewire News Group.