Ralph Abraham, a top Louisiana health official who stopped promoting mass vaccination policies and once described Covid-19 vaccines as “dangerous”, has been appointed deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), it was revealed on Tuesday.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has not formally announced Abraham’s appointment, but the center’s internal database now lists Abraham as the federal agency’s principal deputy director, effective this week. Abraham’s appointment was confirmed to the Washington Post by an HHS spokesperson.
Abraham’s appointment is certain to cause renewed anxiety among health experts as rifts deepen over US vaccine policy under the leadership of the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, who is reconstituting leadership at US federal health agencies in ways that prioritize vaccine skepticism.
As Louisiana’s surgeon general since 2024, Abraham drew criticism for directing state health agencies to stop promoting mass vaccination as a public health strategy, and for criticizing “blanket government mandates” for immunizations.
Earlier this year, Abraham wrote that “missteps” during the Covid-19 pandemic had caused a loss of trust in government.
“Government should admit the limitations of its role in people’s lives and pull back its tentacles from the practice of medicine,” he wrote, adding that “restoring this trust requires returning medical decisions to the doctor-patient relationship, where informed, personalized care is guided by compassion and expertise rather than blanket government mandates.”
The CDC currently has no permanent director following the ousting of Susan Monarez over the summer. The HHS deputy secretary, Jim O’Neill, is serving as acting CDC director, making Abraham effectively No 1 at the institution.
The agency, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, was rocked when a gunman opened fire there. One of the suspect’s neighbors told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “He very deeply believed that vaccines hurt him and were hurting other people.”
Abraham’s elevation adds to the vaccine skeptics working at the CDC under Kennedy, who has previously cut funding to vaccine research programs and purged pro-vaccine members from the CDC’s federal vaccine advisory board.
Abraham’s position on vaccines has previously brought him into conflict with the Louisiana US senator Bill Cassidy, a pro-vaccination physician, when Abraham canceled the state’s mass vaccination program. The state is now in the midst of its worst whooping cough outbreak in three decades.
But Cassidy later voted to confirm Kennedy as HHS secretary, and Kennedy has now appointed Abraham.
Asked by CNN last weekend if Kennedy’s vaccine positions could cause harm to Americans, the senator responded that “anything that undermines the understanding, the correct understanding, the absolute scientifically based understanding that vaccines are safe and that, if you don’t take them, you’re putting your child or yourself in greater danger, anything that undermines that message is a problem.”
