Scientists Alarmed As US Picks David Geier To Lead Controversial New Vaccine And Autism Study

Now, scientists are sounding the alarm after the Department of Health and Human Services has reportedly picked well-known and highly controversial vaccine skeptic David Geier to lead the new study. Among other problems, Geier was once disciplined by Maryland regulators for practicing medicine without a license.

“This is a worst-case scenario for public health,” Jessica Steier, head of the nonprofit Science Literacy Lab, told the Washington Post, saying that Geier, along with his father Mark Geier, had “demonstrated patterns of an anti-vaccine agenda.”

“It’s a slap in the face to the decades of actual credible research we have,” she added.

Vaccines are an astonishing achievement of modern science, saving an estimated 154 million lives (including 101 million infants) over the last 50 years, according to a major study led by the World Health Organization last year. Of these, the measles vaccine (often grouped with mumps and rubella in the MMR jab) is the biggest contributor, accounting for around 60 percent of the lives saved by vaccination.

But unfortunately, over the last few decades, skepticism about vaccines has risen, largely stemming from a now-retracted study that claimed there was a connection between autism and the MMR vaccine.

In 1998, Andrew Wakefield published a paper based on just 12 children that linked the MMR vaccine to autism. The results have not been replicated, and it later transpired that he had falsified data, for which his medical license was revoked.

“The Lancet completely retracted the Wakefield et al. paper in February 2010, admitting that several elements in the paper were incorrect, contrary to the findings of the earlier investigation. Wakefield et al. were held guilty of ethical violations (they had conducted invasive investigations on the children without obtaining the necessary ethical clearances) and scientific misrepresentation (they reported that their sampling was consecutive when, in fact, it was selective),” a report into the case explains.

“The final episode in the saga is the revelation that Wakefield et al. were guilty of deliberate fraud (they picked and chose data that suited their case; they falsified facts). The British Medical Journal has published a series of articles on the exposure of the fraud, which appears to have taken place for financial gain.”

But the damage was done, as the press around the world continued to push the idea. Since then, there have been many large studies investigating potential links between vaccines and autism, consistently finding no link whatsoever.

Despite this, the US is planning on conducting research through the NIH (though it had previously been assigned to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). The Trump administration, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., lead of the Department of Health and Human Services (HSS), and President Trump himself, have long expressed vaccine-skeptic views. 

Speaking in Congress earlier this month, Trump cited rising autism diagnoses – largely thought to be due to better diagnosis and broader criteria for diagnosis, as well as different survey techniques – as a reason for further investigation.

While more scientific research in the area of autism couldn’t hurt, the stress there is on scientific research. Geier, working with his father Mark Geier, has authored a number of papers (some retracted) claiming that vaccines cause autism. Respected journal Nature named the duo as two of the top science-deniers in 2010, a not-so-coveted title.

“This father-son duo, based in Washington, DC, was among the first to publish claims that the thimerosal preservative used in certain vaccines causes autism,” the journal explained. “Mark Geier holds a doctorate in genetics; his son, David, has a bachelor’s degree in biology. Together, they promote therapies for autism including chelation, the use of chemicals to remove heavy metals from the body, and Lupron, a drug used to treat [prostate] cancer and chemically castrate sex offenders. Mark Geier has testified in support of the thimerosal-autism link as an expert witness at vaccine trials across the US; numerous rigorous studies, however, have dismissed this link.”

Mark Geier’s medical license has been suspended or revoked in every state where he has the license to practice, over concerns over his autism treatments, research with “serious methodological flaws”, and that he had “falsely claimed to be a board-certified geneticist and a board-certified epidemiologist”. Meanwhile, David Geier was disciplined by Maryland regulators for practicing medicine without a license at all.

In one of the many available examples of less than rigorous science conducted by the pair, the Geiers’ institutional review board on one paper was found to be somewhat lacking.

“The seven-member IRB [institutional review board] consists of Mark and David Geier; Dr Geier’s wife; two of Dr Geier’s business associates; and two mothers of autistic children, one of whom has publicly acknowledged that her son is a patient/subject of Dr Geier, and the other of whom is plaintiff in three pending vaccine injury claims,” Kathleen Seidel, writer and researcher of autism explained following the publication and subsequent retraction of the paper.

In 2017, a paper the two were authors on claimed that conflicts of interest may be influencing research into the link between vaccines and autism. 

“The editors retracted the paper without the authors’ agreement, because the authors had a host of personal and professional interests in the field they didn’t declare, such as being associated with organizations involved in autism and vaccine safety,” Retraction Watch explains. “What’s more, the article also contained ‘a number of errors, and mistakes of various types that raise concerns about the validity of the conclusion’.”

It remains to be seen what form this new research will take, and whether it will cost more money on top of the $419 million already spent on autism research by the US annually. But the real concern is that the research will not be conducted properly, and given Geier’s track record, scientists and researchers are not confident that we could see otherwise.

“The methodology used in the studies was completely invalid, and the studies fatally flawed,” Professor Jeffrey S. Morris, Director of the Division of Biostatistics at the Perelman School of Medicine wrote on X, after outlining the flaws in one of Geier’s papers.

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“I hope they do better in the upcoming studies,” Morris added. “Ideally they should include experienced biostatisticians and epidemiologists to help use a valid study design and analysis, and ensure that their interpretation of the study is supported by the empirical evidence in the data.”

While proper research would be welcomed by scientists – on top of all the other research that has already disproved the link between vaccines and autism – many fear that the study is being set up to find a link where there isn’t one. Alison Singer, president of the nonprofit organization Autism Science Foundation, told the Washington Post that the Trump administration’s aim “is to prove that vaccines cause autism, even though they don’t.”

In the midst of a measles outbreak, that seems like a very dangerous plan indeed.