Meet Ralph Lee Abraham, the CDC’s new second-in-command who believes the Affordable Care Act should be repealed and called vaccines ‘dangerous’
Dr. Ralph Lee Abraham, the Louisiana surgeon general who halted his state’s vaccine promotion campaigns and delayed warning the public about a deadly whooping cough outbreak, has quietly been installed as the second-highest official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Department of Health and Human Services did not announce this appointment. The news was
first spotted by Dr. Jeremy Faust, who runs the Substack called
Inside Medicine.
Abraham, a 70-year-old
former Republican congressman who served three terms representing Louisiana’s 5th congressional district, started in his new role as principal deputy director on November 23, according to the agency’s internal database. The
HHS has since confirmed Abraham’s appointment.
The selection aligns the CDC’s senior leadership with the views of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
a longtime vaccine skeptic. Abraham has promoted discredited COVID-19 treatments including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, and,
according to Faust, Abraham was the seventh-highest prescriber of ivermectin among Louisiana’s roughly 12,000 practicing physicians in 2021, personally accounting for 1.1% of the state’s prescriptions for the anti-parasitic drug. Clinical studies had already demonstrated ivermectin’s ineffectiveness against COVID-19 by that time.