Dr. David Weldon’s stance on the safety of MMR vaccines 25 years ago has led to a loss of support for his CDC nomination

Dr. David Weldon has withdrawn his bid to become director of the CDC.  He believes, as do many, that Big Pharma has influenced Senators so that it is unlikely that he would have garnered sufficient votes to confirm his appointment.

Why does Big Pharma not want Dr. Weldon in the CDC?  Because of the stance he took 25 years ago on the lack of safety of childhood vaccines.

Dr. David Weldon is an American politician and physician who served as a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives, representing Florida’s 15th congressional district.  In November 2024, Donald Trump nominated Weldon as the next director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”) but Trump withdrew the nomination in March 2025 due to concerns about Dr. Weldon’s anti-vaccine views and lack of support in the Senate.

Earlier today, Brownstone Institute published a statement from Dr. Weldon which explains why he withdrew his nomination.  Dr. Weldon believes that it is likely Big Pharma exerted pressure on Senators to withdraw support for his nomination based on events that happened decades earlier.   “My big sin was that as a congressman 25 years ago I had the temerity to take on the CDC and big Pharma on two critical childhood vaccine safety issues,” he said.

One of the safety issues related to a neurotoxic preservative called thimerosal, a mercury-containing organic compound, in childhood vaccines that was causing autism.  The second was the safety of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, or MMR vaccine.

Below is an extract relating to the MMR vaccines from the ‘Statement of Hon. Dave Weldon on the Withdrawal of Nomination for CDC’ published by Brownstone Institute on 15 March 2025.

Related:

The following statement was issued by Dr. David Weldon following his withdrawal from being the Trump Administration’s pick for the CDC.

I [ ] had the temerity to take on CDC and Pharma regarding another childhood vaccine safety issue, the safety of the measles vaccine called MMR. More than 25 years ago there were a series of articles published by a British paediatric gastroenterologist named Andrew Wakefield. He had seen many parents who claimed that after the MMR their child had not only deteriorated developmentally but had also become fussy eaters and developed diarrhoea. He did colonoscopies on the children and discovered that they had a new form of inflammatory bowel disease. His research was later duplicated and to this day he has been credited for defining this form of childhood inflammatory bowel disease.

Wakefield published 15 papers in all. Only one was withdrawn. The one that created the big controversy was published in a journal called Lancet and one of the co-authors on the paper was a highly respected Irish virologist by the name of O’Leary. I actually knew of O’Leary. I used to take care of AIDS patients prior to going to Congress and I knew of O’Leary’s reputation as a solid scientist. One of the complications the AIDS patients were developing was a form of cancer called Kaposi Sarcoma and O’Leary had shown that the cancer occurred in the AIDS patients when there was co-infection with a second virus called Herpes Simplex Type 8.

Wakefield decided to give some of the colon biopsy specimens to O’Leary who was able to show using a technique called PCR that the inflammatory bowel disease biopsies in these children contained the vaccine strain measles viruses. The live virus in the vaccine was supposed to be weakened and not cause illness. This suggested that the children were not able to handle the viral particles and that it was causing an infection in their bowels which also might have been affecting their central nervous system and causing the autistic features.

When this article was published thousands of British parents started refusing the MMR and there were measles outbreaks. British health officials had their hands full. They decided to get the journal Lancet to withdraw the article and they actually got O’Leary to withdraw his research findings. I was following all of this closely and had actually met with O’Leary and I had looked at his biopsy micrographs and his PCR findings. It certainly looked to me like the vaccine particles were causing the problem in these children, and I was surprised that O’Leary withdrew his assertions.

I then called O’Leary on the phone and asked him why he was doing this. There was a very long pregnant pause. He then said that it had taken him many years to get to the place where he was in the scientific community, and after another pause, he said he had four small children at home. I had small children at home myself at the time and I understood what he was saying. If he didn’t do it, he was going to be fired. He was going to be ruined.

British officials were not satisfied with just getting the journal to withdraw the article and getting Dr. O’Leary to withdraw his claims. They then decided to begin proceedings to take away Dr. Wakefield’s medical license and one of his lead co-authors. Wakefield by this time had moved to the United States and to defend himself in court would have cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars so he let them take his license away. But his lead co-author Dr. Simon Murch was still practicing medicine in England and decided to defend himself in court, and the government lost and they were not able to take his license away. If Wakefield had the money to defend himself, he would never have lost his license. The court documents clearly show that Wakefield and his co-authors had not done anything unethical or inappropriate and their work was possibly valid.

But that was all Big Pharma needed. They could go around, saying it and feeding it to the media that the research had been withdrawn and Wakefield lost his license. But I looked at the micrographs and it sure looked to me like there were vaccine-strain measles particles infecting the bowels of these kids.

The CDC was charged with the responsibility of repeating Wakefield’s research and showing that the measles vaccine was safe, but they never did it the right way. They decided to do epidemiologic studies instead of a clinical study. Again, as in the mercury study, there were claims made that indicators that there was a problem with MMR were there. CDC was accused again of changing the protocol and data analysis until the association went away.

Ironically, I talked with Wakefield after all of this was over. He agreed with me that we have to vaccinate our kids for measles. He thought the solution was to give the vaccine at a slightly older age, like they do in many European countries. Or we might be able to do research and figure out why some kids have a bad reaction to the MMR. Clearly, Big Pharma didn’t want me in the CDC investigating any of this [which is why they would have exerted pressure on Senators not to confirm my appointment as director of the CDC].

You can read Dr. David Weldon’s full statement HERE.