Louisiana Surgeon General Dr. Ralph Abraham — a skeptic of COVID-19 vaccines who halted the state’s mass inoculation campaign — has been tapped to serve as second in command at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Abraham has been a vocal supporter of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and has said he would support investigating the debunked link between vaccines and autism. Soon after he was named Louisiana’s surgeon general in 2024, Dr. Abraham banned all vaccine promotion and events by the state’s health department. Later that year, Louisiana recorded the worst outbreak of whooping cough in the state in 35 years. In the Louisiana state Legislature, Dr. Abraham backed a bill banning fluoride in public water systems and another bill pushing ivermectin to treat COVID, which has been widely discredited. Dr. Nirav Shah, who served in the CDC under the Biden administration, said that Dr. Abraham “gives Secretary Kennedy some scientific and medical cover for their odious and unscientific beliefs.”