The CDC Nominee Who Hasn’t Read the CDC Website
Dr. Erica Schwartz vowed to “never betray science,” then wouldn’t commit to removing a false vaccine-autism claim from the CDC’s own site.
The false claim still on the CDC’s site.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a page on its website that tells parents that scientists “have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” The agency rewrote its own guidance to say that in late 2025. The old heading, “Vaccines do not cause autism,” is still at the top. A footnote explains that the heading survives only because of an agreement with Senator Bill Cassidy. Since 1998, more than 40 studies across seven countries, involving over 5.6 million people, have looked and found no link.
On Wednesday, the physician nominated to run that agency sat before the Senate and was asked, more or less, whether she’d take the page down. Dr. Erica Schwartz said she hadn’t read it. She’d look into it. She’d speak with the Secretary.
That was the hearing, in one exchange.
Dr. Schwartz is a serious pick on paper. She’s a career military physician and clinical epidemiologist who served in the Navy and the Coast Guard and was deputy surgeon general during COVID. She told the committee that public health is in her DNA, that her top priority is to restore trust, that she’ll run the CDC with “radical transparency,” and that she’ll “never betray science.” She came across, by most accounts, as sincere.
Then they got into the specifics.
A lot of deflecting.
Senator Bernie Sanders asked Dr. Schwartz whether the evidence shows that vaccines don’t cause autism. She said she accepted that evidence. So would she commit to removing the claim the CDC itself had posted? She wouldn’t. She hadn’t reviewed the page. She’d talk to the Secretary. She agreed with the science and declined to act on it in the same two minutes.
Then Senator Maggie Hassan pushed harder. If the Secretary ordered her to stop promoting the flu vaccine during a bad flu season, would she refuse? “I don’t speak in hypotheticals,” Schwartz said. Hassan’s answer: it isn’t hypothetical, it happened. Last year HHS ordered the CDC to halt some vaccine advertising.
What integrity cost the last CDC director.
The senators had a specific reason to press her. Schwartz’s predecessor, Susan Monarez, was confirmed as CDC director and lasted about 29 days. She was fired in August 2025 after she refused to promise, in advance, to approve the vaccine committee’s recommendations “regardless of the scientific evidence” and refused to fire career scientists on demand. “I was fired for holding the line on scientific integrity,” Monarez told the Senate. Several senior CDC leaders resigned in protest that week.
Dr. Schwartz insisted that she didn’t believe the President or the Secretary would pressure her to rubber-stamp vaccine policies. She said it 11 months after the Secretary did exactly that to the last CDC director.
being pressured by the Secretary to approve the vaccine committee's recommendations "regardless of the scientific evidence" and to fire career scientists, then getting fired for refusing. So "something like that" = being ordered to carry out an unscientific directive.
The hearing kept returning to the same question, the same one senators ask every nominee: is this a person of integrity? Schwartz kept answering it. “I have lived and led with my integrity.” It’s the wrong question because the job has been rebuilt so that her integrity can’t influence the decisions that matter.
The HHS secretary makes the final call.
Vaccine recommendations become official policy when the CDC director signs them or when the Secretary does. Dr. Schwartz conceded the point herself: the Secretary “ultimately makes the decision.” The Secretary has already reconstituted the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the external advisory committee on vaccines, to include vaccine skeptics. He already removed the last CDC director for pushing back. So a sincere director can sit atop the agency and never personally betray science, because the calls she’d object to get made one level up. Her integrity is real and, for the questions the senators care about, beside the point.
The senators trying to pin her down, Cassidy, Sanders, Hassan, Tammy Baldwin, Lisa Blunt Rochester, were all trying to do the same thing, which is to turn a promise about character into a promise she’d be held to. They couldn’t. A confirmation hearing is supposed to be where the public trades a vote for enforceable commitments. This one produced assurances of good character and almost nothing they could enforce.
Why a strong CV isn’t enough.
Trust in the CDC didn’t break because the wrong person held the title. It’s breaking because the people who held it and did the job got pushed out, because a false claim about vaccines and autism went up on the government’s own website, because the recommendations that decide whether childhood vaccinations are covered now run through a committee rebuilt to doubt them. A trustworthy person confirmed into a role stripped of the power to change anything doesn’t fix the problem.
Senators can withhold their votes until her commitments are binding. But the Secretary can sign the vaccine policy either way, whatever the nominee promises.