In November, Trump selected Dr. Dave Weldon, a former Florida congressman, as his CDC director, but Weldon’s nomination was revoked moments before his scheduled confirmation hearing before the Senate Health Committee.
Following the announcement, Weldon published a statement that his nomination was withdrawn because he was not likely to receive enough Republican support on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee because of his history of skepticism of vaccines.
Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Susan Collins (R-ME), whom Weldon blamed by name for sinking his nomination, told reporters that they had no preconceived notions about how they planned to vote for Weldon’s nomination heading into the confirmation.
Weldon was closely aligned with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who narrowly passed his confirmation process due to a last-minute endorsement from Cassidy. Kennedy and Weldon shared a professional relationship for 25 years.
Candidates for the various agencies within HHS have been an important part of Trump and Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, a platform for tackling chronic diseases ranging from obesity to neurodevelopmental disorders.
Whoever it will be, Trump’s nominee will be the first CDC director required to undergo the extensive Senate confirmation process, a reform that was passed into law following the missteps in the agency during the pandemic.
The White House did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment on the deliberations.
Here is a list of people that Trump could tap for the position.
Former Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX)
Burgess, 74, practiced obstetrics and gynecology in Texas before moving to Washington in 2003. He is the longest-serving physician in Congress.
The former Texas congressman is among the top choices circulating in the White House, according to three anonymous people who spoke to Reuters.
During his time on Capitol Hill, Burgess was an influential voice in health policy, co-chairing the House GOP Doctor’s Caucus and serving as the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Health.
Burgess criticized certain CDC guidelines related to COVID-19 during the later half of the pandemic, calling lingering mask mandates for public transportation “nonsense.”
But Burgess was supportive of COVID-19 vaccines. He filmed a public service announcement video in May 2021 to urge constituents to vaccinate. He strongly opposed vaccine mandates, though, including for healthcare workers.
Burgess’s support of vaccines might be enough to get his candidacy for CDC director approved by Cassidy, Collins, and other key Republican votes.
Burgess also helped lead the House effort in 2017 to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, during the first Trump administration. Overturning Obamacare was a key policy goal of the first Trump administration, but the legislation was ultimately blocked in the Senate.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo
Ladapo, Florida’s surgeon general, is also a possibility for the CDC director position, considering that his track record on infectious and chronic diseases aligns with core elements of the MAHA agenda.
Weldon told CBS News that Ladapo “should be at the top of President Trump’s list” to lead the CDC.
Ladapo earned his joint MD/PhD at Harvard University in 2008. His research focused on behavioral economic strategies for cardiovascular disease prevention.
He rose in notoriety in November 2020 after writing an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal advocating the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 regardless of randomized studies demonstrating their efficacy.
Since Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) appointed Ladapo as Florida surgeon general in 2021, Ladapo has made several controversial moves that landed him in the national spotlight.
Last year, Ladapo stressed parental choice in vaccination during a small measles outbreak in the Fort Lauderdale area.
Ladapo told the Washington Examiner during an interview at the time that leaving the decision to vaccinate children up to their parents was “much more humane, much more practical, and much more sustainable” than vaccine mandates.
But Ladapo’s perspective on the measles vaccine during last year’s outbreak could make gaining the necessary support from pro-vaccine Republicans on the Senate Health Committee difficult, considering the measles outbreak this spring in Texas and New Mexico.
Ladapo is also a staunch opponent of mRNA vaccine technology for infectious diseases out of fear that the vaccines can be a “vehicle for delivering contaminant DNA into human cells,” a process known as DNA integration.
The Food and Drug Administration has said mRNA vaccines do not pose the type of genetic risk that Ladapo describes.
Ladapo echoes many of Kennedy’s points on chronic diseases. He’s favored the removal of fluoride from drinking water because of its effects on children and pregnant women.
Ladapo, in November, called fluoridation “public health malpractice” and has since traveled to multiple local jurisdictions in Florida to help with defluoridation efforts.
Former COVID-19 adviser Scott Atlas
Atlas, a radiologist by training, served in the first Trump administration as an adviser on COVID-19 policy after making several appearances on Fox News in 2020 to discuss the pandemic.
Atlas served in the first Trump White House under the designation of “special government employee,” the same designation that tech billionaire Elon Musk currently holds to advise the Trump administration on cutting waste, fraud, and abuse.
In his capacity as White House adviser, Atlas said children had “virtually zero risk of dying” and rarely transmitted the disease. He also was an opponent of using masks as a public mitigation tool.
Atlas was also a fierce opponent of state-level lockdowns, particularly of schools and businesses, and instead advocated protecting high-risk individuals while letting the rest of society operate as normal.
In November 2020, Atlas encouraged Michiganders to “rise up” against the strict lock-down restrictions imposed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI).
Before the pandemic, Atlas served as a senior adviser for the Republican presidential campaigns of Rudy Giuliani in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. He has been a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution since 2003.
Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis
Ioannidis, an epidemiology and population health professor at Stanford University Medical School, would be an unlikely pick for the CDC position, but his reputation as a data scientist and his anti-establishment streak during the pandemic could put him on Trump’s radar.
Ioannidis has published more than 800 academic papers and is one of the most cited scientists in the world.
His 2005 paper, “Why Most Published Research Papers are False,” analyzes the replication crisis or the problem that many scientific papers cannot be reproduced using the same data and methods.
Fixing the replication crisis is one of Kennedy’s primary goals, and he wants to return HHS to what he calls the “gold standard” of biomedical research.
Ioannidis published multiple research papers throughout the pandemic on infection rates, suggesting that the death rate from COVID-19 was much less than was reported at the time due to a severe underestimation of infection rates. He received major pushback from other epidemiologists and scientists in other fields for his reports.
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In March 2020, Ioannidis cultivated a cohort of like-minded physician-scientists to advise the president against lock-down policies.
Ioannidis and his colleagues were unsuccessful in their efforts to meet with Trump, but private emails published later that summer indicated that Ioannidis believed that their efforts influenced Trump’s goal of reopening the country by Easter.
