By Sarah Owermohle, Katherine Dillinger, CNN
(CNN) — The US Senate voted 51-44 on Wednesday to confirm Dr. Erica Schwartz as director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Schwartz, a former deputy surgeon general and retired US Coast Guard officer, was nominated for the job in April.
She’s a notable departure from prior contenders considered by the administration, who have toed the “Make America Healthy Again” line. She has a lengthy record of guiding vaccination programs and crises responses for the government – a stark contrast to Trump’s first CDC pick, whose nomination was withdrawn in part because it became clear that his vaccine skepticism would prevent him from getting the job.
The CDC has been without an official director for a year, since Dr. Susan Monarez was removed less than a month into the job after clashing with US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over vaccine policies and his efforts to oust some senior CDC officials.
Kennedy installed his then-deputy secretary, Jim O’Neill, as interim head and sought to concentrate much of the decision-making among the department’s political leadership in Washington.
Yet senior White House and HHS officials soon soured on O’Neill, who rarely spent any time at the CDC’s Atlanta headquarters and was seen among political appointees as a subpar public communicator, according to people familiar with the matter.
The agency was then overseen by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who is also director of the US National Institutes of Health.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor and chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, had raised concerns about Schwartz’s independence and autonomy to lead the CDC after Monarez’s ouster, but he was a crucial vote in favor of Schwartz. He said he decided to support her after multiple conversations with top HHS officials about removing claims about vaccines and autism from the CDC website, and making personnel changes at the agency.
HHS recently edited a claim on that website — that there is no evidence that vaccines do not cause autism — in an apparent bid to ensure that Schwartz would get through a committee vote.
Cassidy said last week that discussions about the website are not over.
“While there have been changes to the CDC website, any assertion that there is a link between autism and vaccines is wrong. We don’t know what causes autism, but study after study shows that it is not vaccines,” he said. “The administration is committed to continuing the work to remove vaccine misinformation from that website. This is something, again, that I’ll pay close attention to as HHS nominees move through the confirmation process.”
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