Mark and David Geier have been a father-and-son workforce of researchers who operated on the fringes of the scientific institution. They have been identified for selling a controversial remedy for autism, and for publishing papers on the purported harms of vaccines that consultants dismissed as junk science. In 2004, the CDC accused them of violating analysis protocols. In 2012, the state of Maryland sanctioned them. And in 2025, Well being and Human Providers Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tapped one among them to research alleged wrongdoing in an important CDC database.
For years, Kennedy has claimed that the database, which tracks hostile reactions to immunizations and is called the Vaccine Security Datalink, as soon as contained important details about vaccine security—and that this data has been withheld from the general public, scrubbed from the report, or in any other case manipulated. He needs David Geier to research it as a result of he and his late father, a doctor, studied it within the early 2000s, after they utilized via a CDC program that permits researchers exterior the federal government to entry sure knowledge units.
When the Geiers have been first allowed into this trove of hundreds of thousands of anonymized well being information, they have been presupposed to be finishing up a security research of the DTaP vaccine. However the CDC discovered that they have been as a substitute conducting unauthorized analyses to hunt for a hyperlink between the vaccine and autism, and risked breaching sufferers’ confidentiality within the course of; the company revoked their entry. (On the time, the Geiers disputed the cost that they’d endangered anybody’s private data, writing in a 2004 letter to an institutional-review-board administrator that they held the “utmost regard” for affected person confidentiality.) Even after they have been ousted, the Geiers used data they’d apparently held on to from that database to publish a collection of scientific papers advancing the extensively discredited principle that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative as soon as widespread in childhood vaccines, is linked to autism, amongst different situations.
Researchers within the discipline have lengthy criticized the Geiers’ methodology as sloppy, and famous that their conclusions are at odds with these of quite a few higher-quality research. Since March, when The Washington Publish reported that David Geier had been introduced into the Division of Well being and Human Providers, his and his father’s work has come underneath renewed scrutiny. One scientist discovered that a number of of their papers—based mostly on data from the very CDC database that Kennedy has tasked Geier with investigating—comprise a statistical error so elementary that it casts doubt on Geier’s talents and intentions in assessing knowledge. That scientist and one other I spoke with couldn’t imagine that a few of Geier’s work had ever been revealed within the first place.
David Geier is at the moment listed as a senior knowledge analyst in HHS’s employees listing, although what precisely he’s doing for the division is unclear. The Wall Avenue Journal has reported that Geier is utilizing his new place to proceed his seek for a hyperlink between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism. New York journal floated the likelihood that he’ll try to repeat a research from the early 2000s that anti-vaccine activists cite as proof that inoculations hurt growing brains. Kennedy has denied that Geier is operating the company’s mission to search out out what causes autism, and testified that he has as a substitute been employed by a contractor to find out whether or not data disappeared from the database. (Mark Geier died in March, and David Geier didn’t reply to interview requests. Reached for remark, an HHS spokesperson pointed to a prolonged X submit by Kennedy through which he defends Geier’s report and notes his “in depth background as a analysis scientist.”)
Underneath every other administration, Geier’s historical past would virtually definitely have disqualified him from any position at HHS. Within the mid-2000s, after Mark Geier had established a worthwhile sideline of testifying as an professional witness in lawsuits that alleged harm from vaccines, the daddy and son claimed to have found a technique of treating autism. What they touted as a miracle drug was Lupron, a testosterone-suppressing remedy utilized in many instances of untimely puberty. They ran a laboratory out of the basement of their Maryland dwelling and administered the drug to youngsters based mostly on their unfounded principle, promoting their supposed breakthrough on the autism-conference circuit. In 2012, Mark, a doctor, was stripped of his license, and David was sanctioned for training drugs with out one. (The Geiers sued the Maryland Board of Physicians in 2012 for releasing details about drugs Mark Geier had prescribed to members of the family. They have been awarded a complete of almost $5 million for the invasion of their privateness and attorneys’ charges, however that judgment was reversed after a distinct court docket dominated that Maryland Board of Physicians members have been immune from such claims.)
The Geiers’ work is well-known amongst autism researchers, although not properly revered. “They have been seen as not representing the most effective of autism science,” Craig Newschaffer, a Penn State scientist who has studied how genetics and environmental components contribute to autism, instructed me, placing it extra gently than others I spoke with. Marie McCormick met the Geiers when she chaired a 2004 assessment of immunization security by the Institute of Drugs (now often called the Nationwide Academy of Drugs), a nonprofit group that advises the federal authorities. McCormick, now an emeritus professor at Harvard’s Faculty of Public Well being, recalled that the Geiers’ presentation had “actually made no sense”: It was a slideshow of vaccine vials with labels indicating that they contained mercury, nevertheless it didn’t have a lot else in the best way of proof. The committee’s report recognized a number of “critical methodological flaws” within the Geiers’ analysis, resembling a failure to elucidate how they’d sorted their topics into teams.
The Geiers’ work from the 2010s likewise has such evident flaws that the consultants I spoke with have been baffled as to how the research had been revealed in any respect. Jeffrey Morris, a biostatistics professor on the College of Pennsylvania, lately examined a collection of papers on which the Geiers have been authors that used knowledge from the Vaccine Security Datalink. One consultant 2017 research purportedly confirmed that the hepatitis B vaccine was related to an elevated danger of autism.
Morris rapidly seen that the paper’s strategy rendered its findings meaningless. It in contrast a bunch of youngsters with autism to a management group of youngsters with out the analysis, to see how vaccination charges differed between the 2. However these teams of youngsters additionally differed in one other essential method: The youngsters recognized with autism have been born in the course of the eight-year span from 1991 to 1998, whereas the management group—youngsters not recognized with autism—have been born in 1991 or 1992.
That’s greater than a minor inconsistency. In 1991, the CDC’s vaccine-advisory committee really helpful that each one infants in america obtain the hepatitis B vaccine, and so the share of vaccinated youngsters rose steadily all through the last decade, from fewer than 10 p.c to roughly 90 p.c. That meant that infants born later within the ’90s (who have been overrepresented within the autism group) have been very more likely to have gotten the shot, whereas these born earlier within the decade (who have been overrepresented within the management group) weren’t. By selecting a management group through which comparatively few youngsters would have been vaccinated, and an autistic inhabitants through which most have been, the Geiers made discovering a connection between immunization and autism inevitable.
Utilizing this strategy, you can blame the vaccine for all method of maladies. In response to Morris, the Geiers did precisely that in no less than 9 papers, revealed from 2015 to 2018, that used knowledge from the vaccine-safety database. One in all their research linked hep-B vaccination to childhood weight problems. Others confirmed an affiliation with tic problems, emotional disturbance, and untimely puberty, amongst different situations, a few of which rose in the course of the ’90s and early 2000s no less than partly due to new diagnostic standards and elevated consciousness. That possible additionally explains why autism charges started to climb considerably within the ’90s.
Many flawed scientific papers embrace a regrettable however comprehensible oversight, Morris instructed me, however the Geiers employed “a fully invalid design that biases issues so enormously that you can throw out the outcomes of all these papers.” Newschaffer reviewed Morris’s critique and instructed me he doesn’t imagine {that a} research with such a significant issue ought to have been revealed within the first place. “I might characterize that as a ‘miss’ within the peer assessment,” he stated. (I additionally contacted Dirk Schaumlöffel, the editor in chief of the Journal of Hint Parts in Drugs and Biology, which revealed the Geiers’ paper connecting the hep-B vaccine to autism. He took subject with Morris’s “polemical allegations” and defended the paper, noting that it “doesn’t argue towards vaccination, however merely questions the position of thimerosal.” He instructed me that he would like that the matter be debated within the pages of his journal.)
If David Geier have been merely an impartial researcher publishing in lesser-known journals, his errors, though egregious, can be of little greater than tutorial concern. However his affect on Kennedy runs deep. In 2005, Kennedy highlighted the Geiers’ analysis in an essay outlining how he’d come to imagine that thimerosal-containing vaccines may trigger autism. He wrote about them once more that 12 months in “Lethal Immunity,” an article—ultimately retracted by each Salon and Rolling Stone after a number of corrections and intense criticism—that alleged that authorities well being businesses had lined up proof indicating that thimerosal in vaccines was responsible for the rise in autism charges. In his 2014 ebook, Thimerosal: Let the Science Communicate, Kennedy cites the Geiers dozens of occasions, portraying them as decided truth-tellers battling uncooperative authorities businesses—the very ones Kennedy has now been appointed to supervise.
Due to Kennedy, Geier seemingly is being handed the keys to the identical database he’s proved himself unfit to review. People who find themselves accustomed to Geier’s historical past fear that he’ll use his place on the within to not defend the reality however to resurrect completely debunked claims, twisting the information to help what he and Kennedy have lengthy believed.