The CDC’s Atlanta headquarters. Photograph via the CDC.

On Thursday morning, President Trump backtracked on his nomination of David Weldon—a physician and former seven-term Florida congressman—to direct the Centers for Disease Control. This revocation, first reported by Axios, marks the third time that the White House has squashed one of its initial administration appointments before sending them to the Senate for a vote (but so far, this is the only time it’s happened mere hours before the confirmation hearing—Weldon was on his way to the Capitol when he learned his nomination had been yanked, the Wall Street Journal reports.)

An anonymous source told the Associated Press that the White House didn’t believe Weldon had the votes to be confirmed. One source familiar with the matter told Axios that even Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said Weldon “wasn’t ready” to take on the role—ouch, because as the Washington Post reported in December, it was RFK Jr. who suggested Weldon for the job in the first place.

Although Weldon has expressed lukewarm support for vaccines in the past—“I give shots, I believe in vaccination,” he told the New York Times after his nomination was announced—he has some history with Andrew Wakefield, who published (and ultimately lost his medical license over) the infamous debunked study linking the MMR vaccine to autism. Back in 2001, when he was in Congress, Weldon invited both Wakefield and Jeff Bradstreet—a doctor who used alternative medicine to treat autistic children, and who died in 2015 of a via self-inflicted gunshot wound following a US Food and Drug Administration raid of his office—before Congress on vaccine safety. He later appeared in Wakefield’s 2016 documentary Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe.