Mark and David Geier were a father-and-son team of researchers who operated on the edge of the scientific establishment. They were known for promoting controversial treatment for autism and for publishing articles about the alleged damage of vaccines that experts were rejected as junk science. In 2004, the CDC accused them of violating research protocols. In 2012, the state of Maryland punished them. And in 2025 the health and human service secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. On one of them to investigate alleged misconduct in a crucial CDC database.
For years, Kennedy claims that the database, which follows negative reactions to immunisations and is known as the vaccine Safety Datalink, once contained vital information about the safety of vaccine – and that this information has been withheld from the public, scrubbed from the record or otherwise manipulated. He wants David Geier to investigate it because he and his deceased father, a doctor, studied the early 2000, after they had registered via a CDC program with which researchers outside the government have access to certain data sets.
When the Geiers were first allowed in this series of millions of anonymous health files, they would conduct a safety investigation from the DTAP vaccine. But the CDC discovered that instead they carried out unauthorized analyzes to hunt a connection between the vaccine and autism, and risked the confidentiality of patients in the process; The agency has withdrawn their access. (Destijds betaalden de Geiers de aanklacht dat ze de persoonlijke informatie van iedereen hadden bedreigd en in een brief van 2004 aan een institutioneel-review-bord beheerder hadden geschreven dat ze de “grootste aandacht” hadden voor de vertrouwelijkheid van de patiënt.) Zelfs nadat ze werden afgewerkt, gebruikten de Geiers die blijkbaar eenmaal in diskurs waren, een mercy, een mercy, een mercy, een mercy, een mercy, een mercy, A number of ordinary papers, one because of normal papers, one because of normal papers, a road in discredit, a number of normal papers, one because of normal papers, one because of normal papers, one because of normal papers, one because of normal papers, one because of normal papers, a weighing. In vaccines in children is linked, among other things, to autism.
Researchers in the field have long criticized the Geiers methodology as sloppy and noted that their conclusions are at odds with those of countless studies of higher quality. Since March, when The Washington Post Reported that David Geier had been brought to the Ministry of Health and Human Services, the work of him and his father is undernicated. One scientist discovered that several of their articles – based on information from the CDC database that Kennedy Geier has instructed to investigate – contains a statistical error so fundamentally that it doubts the skills of Geier and intentions in assessing data. That scientist and another with whom I spoke could not believe that part of Geier’s work was once published in the first place.
David Geier is currently mentioned as a senior data analyst in the HHS personnel directory, although what he does exactly for the department is unclear. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Geier uses his new position to continue his search for a link between Thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism. New York Magazine drove the possibility that he will try to repeat a study from the early 2000s that anti-vaccin activists mention evidence that vaccinations harm the development of brain. Kennedy has denied that Geier manages the project of the agency to find out what autism causes and testified that he was hired by a contractor instead to determine whether information has disappeared from the database. (Mark Geier died in March and David Geier did not respond to interview requests. Provide commentary, a spokesperson for HHS pointed out on it A long x post By Kennedy in which he defends Geier’s record and notices his ‘extensive background as a research scientist’.
Under any other administration, Geier’s history would almost certainly have disqualified him from a role at HHS. In the mid -2000s, after Mark Geier had established a profitable secondary activity of witnesses as an expert witnessed in lawsuits who were claimed by vaccines, the father and son claimed to have discovered a method to treat autism. What they praised as a panacea was Lupron, a testosterone-oppressive medicine that was used in many cases of premature puberty. They ran a laboratory from the basement of their house in Maryland and granted the medicine to children based on their unfounded theory and advertised their supposed breakthrough on the autism-conference circuit. In 2012, Mark, a doctor, was stripped of his license and David was punished for practicing medicines without one. (De Geiers suggested the Maryland Board of Physicians in 2012 for releasing information about medicines that Mark Geier had prescribed to family members. They received a total of almost $ 5 million for the invasion of their privacy and lawyer’shonoraria, but that judgment was reversed after another court ruled that Maryland)))
The work of De Geiers is known to researchers of autism, although not well respected. “They were seen as not representing the best autism science,” said Craig New Schaaffer, a scientist from Penn State who studied how genetics and environmental factors contribute to autism, who placed it softer than others I spoke to. Marie McCormick met De Geiers when she was chairman of an assessment of the immunization safety from 2004 by the Institute of Medicine (now known as the National Academy of Medicine), a non -profit group that advises the federal government. McCormick, now an emeritus professor at the Harvard’s School of Public Health, reminded that the presentation of the Geiers “really didn’t make sense”: it was a slide presentation of Vaccinflaci with labels that indicate that they contain mercury, but it didn’t have much different in the way of evidence. The committee’s report identified a large number of “serious methodological defects” in Geiers’s study, such as not explaining how they had sorted their subjects in groups.
The work of Geiers from the years 2010 also has such striking errors that the experts with whom I spoke were stunned about how the studies were published at all. Jeffrey Morris, professor of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania, recently investigated a series of articles on which the Geiers authors were that data from the vaccine Safety Datalink used. A representative study from 2017 reportedly showed that the Hepatitis B vaccine was associated with an increased risk of autism.
Morris soon noticed that the approach to the newspaper made his findings meaningless. It compared a group of children with autism with a control group of children without the diagnosis, to see how vaccination rates differed between the two. But these groups of children also differed in another crucial way: the children with the autism diagnosis were born during the eight-year wingspan from 1991 to 1998, while the control group children were not diagnosed with Autism-Werden born in 1991 or 1992.
That is more than a small inconsistency. In 1991, the CDC’s Vaccin-Advisory Committee provided that all infants in the United States receive the Hepatitis B vaccine, and therefore the percentage of vaccinated children increased steadily during the decade, of less than 10 to about 90 percent. That meant that babies who were born later in the 90s (who were over -represented in the autism group) were very likely to have received the shot, while those who were born earlier in the decade (who were over -represented in the control group) were not. By choosing a control group in which relatively few children would have been vaccinated, and an autistic population in which most were, the Geiers made finding a connection between immunization and autism inevitable.
With the help of this approach you can blame the vaccine for all kinds of ailments. According to Morris, the Geiers did exactly that in at least nine articles, published from 2015 to 2018, used data from the vaccine safety database. One of their studies linked HEP-B vaccination to obesity in children. Others showed an association with tic disorders, emotional disruption and premature puberty, among other things, some of which in the 90s and early 2000s at least partially because of new diagnostic criteria and increased awareness. That probably also explains why the autism figures started to rise considerably in the 90s.
Many inadequate scientific articles include a regrettable but understandable supervision, Morris told me, but the Geiers used “an absolutely invalid design that things are so huge that you could throw away the results of all these articles.” Newschaffer assessed Morris’ criticism and told me that he did not believe that a study with such a serious problem should have been published in the first place. “I would characterize that as a ‘miss’ in the Peer review,” he said. (I also contacted Dirk Schaumlöffel, the editor -in -chief of the Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and BiologyHe published Geiers’s paper that the HEP-B vaccine connects with autism. He founded himself with the ‘polemic allegations’ of Morris and defended the newspaper and noted that it ‘does not argue against vaccination, but only asks the role of Thimerosal’. He told me he would rather be that the issue is discussed on the pages of his diary.)
If David Geier were only an independent researcher who published in lesser known magazines, his mistakes, although Egregious, would be of little more than academic concern. But his influence on Kennedy runs deep. In 2005, Kennedy emphasized Geiers’ research in an essay in which it was explained how he would believe that thimerosally containing vaccines could cause autism. He wrote again that year about them in ‘Deadly Immunity’, an article – eventually withdrawn by both Salon And Rolling stone After several corrections and intense criticism – who claimed that the health authorities of the government had covered evidence that indicate that Thimerosal was to blame for the rise in autism in vaccines. In his book 2014, Thimerosal: Let science speakKennedy quotes the Geiers dozens of times and portrays them as determined truthfulers who are fighting that Kennedy against non-cooperative government agencies now to supervise.
Thanks to Kennedy, Geier apparently is handed over the keys to the same database that he has turned out to be unsuitable for studying. People who are familiar with Geier’s history are concerned that he will use his position on the inside so as not to defend the truth, but to rise the claims thoroughly, so that the data is twisted to support what he and Kennedy have long believed.
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