The White House has pulled President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, former Rep. Dave Weldon, the Senate’s Health committee confirmed Thursday.

The move came just hours before the former Florida lawmaker, a vaccine critic, was set to appear before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions for a confirmation hearing. The panel said the hearing, which had been scheduled for 10 a.m. ET, is canceled.

Axios first reported the decision on Thursday. Robert F. Kennedy, who leads the Department of Health and Human Services, said Weldon wasn’t ready for the role, Axios reported. HHS oversees the CDC and all other federal health agencies.

Weldon had not heard that his nomination would be withdrawn when a reporter from the Wall Street Journal reached him at 9:01 a.m. ET on Thursday, the paper reported.

But Weldon’s views align closely with Kennedy, a notorious vaccine skeptic. Weldon, 71, has long questioned the safety of certain vaccines, promoting the false claim linking vaccines to autism. In 2006, Weldon appeared with parents who claimed that the CDC had covered up evidence tying vaccines to children developing autism.

The CDC will reportedly re-examine that link under Kennedy despite decades of research debunking it.

While in Congress, Weldon sponsored a bill that would transfer responsibility for vaccine safety away from the CDC. He claimed the agency had a conflict of interest because it purchases and promotes vaccines. The bill never made it past committees. 

Weldon is an internal medicine doctor who served in Congress for 14 years, from 1995 to 2009. 

Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington and HELP committee member, has said she was “deeply disturbed” by Weldon’s false claims about vaccines.

In a statement on Thursday, Murray said “while I have little to no confidence in the Trump administration to do so, they should immediately nominate someone for this position who at bare minimum believes in basic science and will help lead CDC’s important work to monitor and prevent deadly outbreaks.”

She added that Kennedy is already doing “incalculable damage by spreading lies and disinformation as the top health official in America.”