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.”
Notably, after Abraham left a congressional seat he had held from 2015 to 2021, his elected successor was his chief of staff, Luke Letlow.
Letlow, who received Abraham’s support while running for Congress, then died from Covid-19 in December 2020 – days before he was due to be sworn in – at a time when protective vaccines against the virus were not widely available.
Letlow’s widow, Julia Letlow, was subsequently elected to her late husband’s seat, with constituents who live in an area with a history of generally low vaccination rates. In April 2021, Julia Letlow told CBS News: “I would’ve given anything – I would’ve given everything – for that shot to be available for us.
“Looking back now, and for someone to turn it away, it’s heartbreaking to me.”
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.
Nonetheless, on the same day that Abraham canceled Louisiana’s mass vaccination program, Cassidy 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.”
