Hiltzik: RFK Jr. reportedly puts anti-vaxxer in charge of studying debunked link between vaccines and autism

Yahoo

01-04-2025

Given that a hallmark of the Trump administration is the gulf between its appointees' responsibilities and their qualifications for their jobs, it may be hard to pick out the quintessential example of the wrong person in the wrong place.
But the Department of Health and Human Services may have a winner. He's David A. Geier, a well-known anti-vaccine activist who has reportedly been assigned the job of reviewing the supposed link between vaccination and autism.
In fact, Geier — along with his late father, Mar k— had long been among the promoters of that very claim, despite overwhelming evidence from scientifically validated research that there is no such link.
It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.
Former FDA official Peter Marks, referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Geier's assignment to review the purported link was first reported by the Washington Post last week. Since then, HHS has not commented on the assignment, either to confirm or deny it. I asked Geier to confirm his assignment, and also to state whether he still believes in the link and if so, what evidence he would cite to establish it. I received no reply from the HHS or Geier.
What is known, however, is that Geier is an employee of HHS. In the agency directory he is listed as a "senior data analyst" with an official HHS email address, which I used to reach him.
One other thing should be understood: Given his history with healthcare regulatory agencies, there's no way he should be permitted anywhere near healthcare policy-making. More on that in a moment.
The reported accession of Geier isn't the only indication of how HHS, the programs of which were until recently celebrated as the gold standard of government science, has become a haven of a repugnant anti-science mythmaking and a threat to public health.
Read more: Hiltzik: Trump's assault on science will make Americans dumber and sicker
On Friday, Peter Marks, the top vaccine scientist at the Food and Drug Administration, announced his resignation in a scathing letter to the acting FDA commissioner, citing "the unprecedented assault on scientific truth" at the agency.
"Undermining confidence in well established vaccines that have met the high standards for quality, safety, and effectiveness that have been in place for decades at FDA is irresponsible, detrimental to public health, and a clear danger to our nation's health, safety, and security," Marks wrote.
He stated that he had tried to develop a modus vivendi with Kennedy, but "it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies."
That brings us back to Geier. He and his father, Mark, collaborated for years on articles claiming a connection between vaccines containing a compound called thimerosal as a preservative and a rise in autism diagnoses.
No such connection was ever established. Studies by the Geiers that claimed to have found one were widely refuted and their methodology questioned. At least one paper was retracted.
Both Geiers ran afoul of medical regulators in Maryland, their home state. The Maryland State Board of Physicians revoked Mark Geier's license to practice medicine in 2012, after finding that he had been treating young patients with Lupron, a drug commonly prescribed for patients with precocious puberty, and with chelation, a procedure aimed at clearing heavy metals from the body.
Those treatments corresponded to a pet theory of the Geiers that autism stemmed from the interaction of mercury in thimerosal with testosterone, and therefore that reducing testosterone would address autism. That theory has never been scientifically validated.
The mercury scare related to thimerosal, moreover, was something of a red herring. Thimerosal degrades into ethylmercury, which was judged not to be a danger at the level that would come from a vaccine. No study ever established a link between thimerosal and autism.
Read more: Hiltzik: Opposing vaccine mandates, Trump exposes kids to disease
To address public concerns, thimerosal was removed from childhood vaccines in 2001, In any case, as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted, thimerosal was never present in the measles/mumps/rubella vaccine that was most commonly blamed for autism. Nor was it ever used in vaccines against chicken pox, polio or pneumonia.
After Maryland's revocation of his license, Mark Geier's medical license was also suspended or revoked by California, Indiana, Virginia, Texas, Missouri, Washington, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, Florida and Kentucky. Geier died March 20, according to an obituary published by Children's Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
As for David Geier, the Maryland medical authorities charged him in 2011 with practicing medicine without a license. He never had held a medical license or attended a medical school, according to the state board. But he met and consulted with an autistic patient and the patient's mother, who apparently was under the impression that he was a doctor.
According to the board, David Geier advised that the patient undergo 22 blood tests; the mother balked when lab technicians told her the blood work would require "an insane amount of blood." The medical board fined Geier $10,000.
RFK Jr.'s relationship with the Geiers dates back at least to 2005, when he cited their vaccine studies in a discredited article he wrote titled "Deadly Immunity," an anti-vax screed published by both Salon.com and Rolling Stone.
Both publications eventually retracted the article. In the piece, Kennedy asserted that "the Geiers have completed six studies that demonstrate a powerful correlation between thimerosal and neurological damage in children." The correlation proved to be untrue.
The Geier record in itself would invalidate any "finding" from HHS claiming evidence of a vaccine-autism link. The absence of any such link is as close to settled science as one could hope for, given the volume of evidence against it. That in itself makes the HHS venture a waste of time and money, as well as a danger to public health. Anyway, why would a secretary of Health and Human Services want to put on his payroll someone found to have practiced medicine without a license?
These recent personnel moves at HHS raise the question of whether Kennedy gaslighted Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a physician, when he pledged to Cassidy that he and Cassidy would have what Cassidy described to his colleagues as "an unprecedentedly close collaborative working relationship if [RFK Jr.] is confirmed."
In explaining his vote to confirm Kennedy on Feb. 4, Cassidy said further, "We will meet or speak multiple times a month. ... Mr. Kennedy has asked for my input into hiring decisions at HHS, beyond Senate-confirmed positions."
I asked Cassidy's office if Cassidy actually had input into the changes and, if not, if he felt rooked by Kennedy. I haven't received a reply.
Read more: Hiltzik: After smearing Anthony Fauci, House Republicans proceed to defame a prominent vaccine scientist
A couple of crucial points about the supposed connection between vaccinations and autism. As I reported in 2014, its original source was an article published in 1998 in the British medical journal the Lancet by a group led by physician Andrew Wakefield. The study involved 12 children.
The paper has been retracted by the Lancet, 10 of its 12 authors have disavowed its findings, and Wakefield was stripped of his medical license in the U.K.
The British Medical Journal in 2011 documented how Wakefield systematically falsified the data about his subjects to fabricate an association between the vaccine and autism. The goal? To help a group that hoped to profit by suing the vaccine makers. The paper was 'fatally flawed both scientifically and ethically,' the BMJ stated.
Despite these revelations, the Wakefield study has caused no end of problems for public health. It led to a long-term decline in measles vaccinations in Britain and necessitated years of costly studies to analyze and, ultimately, refute its claims. Nevertheless, it remains the father of the vaccine-autism claims.
One further driver of the supposed vaccine-autism connection is that autism is far more frequently diagnosed today than in the past. Trump himself has cited this supposedly inexplicable trend. In a Feb. 18 executive order, he asserted that "autism spectrum disorder now affects 1 in 36 children in the United States — a staggering increase from rates of 1 to 4 out of 10,000 children identified with the condition during the 1980s."
The truth is that there is no mystery about the rise in autism diagnoses; it's the result of a reconsideration of the very nature of autism.
As Holden Thorp, the editor in chief of Science, wrote recently, "The rise in diagnoses is the result of greater awareness, better identification (especially among women and girls) and a broader definition that now includes a range of neurodevelopmental conditions under the umbrella of autism spectrum disorder."
Thorp didn't come to this conclusion casually. He was diagnosed with autism — at the age of 53, seven years ago. The diagnosis prompted him to think about how thinking about autism has changed over the decades, including how the diagnosis no longer carries the stigma that it did during his childhood in the 1960s.
In part that's because of greater recognition of the diversity of autism itself — "neurodiversity," as it's often termed. During his childhood, he wrote, "autism was mostly diagnosed among children who had huge difficulties in daily functioning and needed extensive support. I wasn't flagged for evaluation or diagnosis, but that might be different today."
It is becoming plain that Kennedy is turning HHS from a beacon of science-based medicine and public health into a hive of conspiracy theorists and, as Marks wrote, peddlers of "misinformation and lies."
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.