rewrite this title Louisiana’s top health official, a critic of the COVID vaccine, will be CDC deputy

The second-highest ranking official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be Dr. Ralph Abraham, the head of Louisiana’s health department.

He has questioned the safety of the COVID vaccine and forbidden his department from promoting vaccines to the public.

Abraham will join the agency as principal deputy director, according to an official for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services who was not authorized to speak to the media about a personnel matter.

A former Republican congressman and a physician with a practice in Richland Parish, Abraham has been a vocal supporter of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and shares some of his views on vaccines.

Abraham, 71, has called COVID vaccines “dangerous.” During a Sept. 2024 state legislative meeting, Abraham said he would support investigating the debunked link between vaccines and autism.

The position has been vacant since Dr. Nirav Shah, who served under the Biden administration, stepped down in February.

Shah called Abraham’s appointment “atrocious.”

The CDC is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Kennedy. The CDC’s current acting director is Jim O’Neill, who most recently worked as an investor.

Because neither Kennedy nor O’Neill is a doctor or scientist, Abraham’s medical degree is useful to help further their views, Shah said.

“With the addition of Dr. Abraham, they now have a scientific gloss that they can put on their anti-vaccine theories,” Shah said.

“He gives Secretary Kennedy some scientific and medical cover for their odious and unscientific beliefs,” he added.

Abraham was named Louisiana’s first Surgeon General in 2024, under Republican Governor Jeff Landry.

Soon after, Abraham moved to ban the promotion of COVID, flu and mpox vaccines by the state health department. He then banned all vaccine promotion and events by the health department in February, hours after Kennedy was confirmed as health secretary.

In late 2024, cases of whooping cough in Louisiana began to climb, eventually growing to 387 cases, the worst outbreak of whooping cough in the state in 35 years.

Early in the outbreak, two infants died from the disease. Infants are not eligible for their first pertussis vaccine until they’re 2 months old, but they can acquire immunity if their mother was immunized while pregnant.

After the infant deaths, Abraham’s health department waited three months before issuing an official alert to physicians and warning the public in a press release.

“Dr. Abraham’s record shows that when an emergency in public health materializes, his instinct is to sweep it under the rug,” Shah said.

In the event of the next pandemic, “that could mean the difference between controlling a major outbreak versus letting it fester and explode,” he added.

The principal deputy director is the second in command at the CDC, said Anne Schuchat, who worked there for 33 years, including as principal deputy director from 2015 to 2021.

Most appointees are CDC employees who’ve worked at the agency for many years, and have experience in crisis management and emergency response to public health threats, she said.

Responsibilities can run from overseeing every aspect of CDC’s work within the U.S., to coordinating emergency responses to outbreaks around the world.

Schuchat called Abraham’s appointment “scary.”

“This appears to be one more step away from health and towards danger,” Schuchat said. “We know that vaccinations are saving lives and protecting health and preventing outbreaks, and ideology should not outweigh the evidence.”

In the Louisiana legislature, Abraham supported bills to ban fluoride in public water systems, and to expand access to ivermectin to treat COVID, despite evidence that it is not effective against COVID. The fluoride bill failed, but the ivermectin bill passed.

Picking Abraham for this position was an “irresponsible choice,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University.

“Dr. Abraham has little trust in science and he is likely to further erode the credibility of the CDC,” he said.

HHS has not said when Abraham will start his new role.

This story comes from NPR’s partnership with WWNO and KFF Health News.