David Geier: A blast from the antivax past hired to “prove” vaccines cause autism

The longer President Donald Trump and his lackeys, particularly his Secretary of Health and Human Services, longtime antivax activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., are in power, the more and more US federal science policy and infrastructure descend into a Lysenkoist dystopian hellscape. Sure, a couple of GOP Senators got cold feet about confirming antivax doc Dave Weldon as CDC Director, leading to his nomination being unexpectedly and suddenly pulled, but they had already voted to confirm RFK Jr. The Damage had been done and continues to be done, as Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary were just confirmed as NIH Director and FDA Commissioner, respectively. As you might recall, the CDC announced not too long ago that it would undertake an entirely unnecessary and useless study to test yet again the longtime favorite—and debunked—antivax hypothesis that vaccines cause autism. Of course, they didn’t describe it that way, but given the overwhelming evidence that vaccines do not cause or increase the risk of autism, that’s what the proposed study is: unnecessary, duplicative, and a pointless waste of resources. When I first learned of the study, I predicted that its outcome had been preordained and that it would be positive, because anyone RFK Jr. might pick to lead the study would guarantee it. I must admit that I did not foresee how low RFK would go, just how hard he’d scrape the bottom of the barrel of antivax “researchers” to find someone to provide him with his long-sought study showing vaccines to cause autism. He chose David Geier.

David Geier: A blast from the antivaccine past

Courtesy of The Washington Post, which did what drives me up a wall about the press and its sanewashing of antivaxxers and referred to a rabid antivax grifter as a “vaccine skeptic” in its headline Vaccine skeptic hired to head federal study of immunizations and autism:

A vaccine skeptic who has long promoted false claims about the connection between immunizations and autism has been tapped by the federal government to conduct a critical study of possible links between the two, according to current and former federal health officials.

The Department of Health and Human Services has hired David Geier to conduct the analysis, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Geier and his father, Mark Geier, have published papers claiming vaccines increase the risk of autism, a theory that has been studied for decades and scientifically debunked.

Remember how I keep saying that “everything old is new again”? Holy hell, I didn’t have David Geier on my antivax Bingo card for this year. When I first heard that RFK Jr. was going to force the CDC to undertake a sham study to “prove” that vaccines cause autism, I figured he’d pick someone somewhat less disreputable. For instance, I figured he wouldn’t pick Andrew Wakefield, if only because even RFK Jr. knows that Wakefield’s reputation is so shattered and his brand so toxic that he has zero credibility, even among people who are only vaguely aware of the antivax movement. Instead, I speculated that RFK Jr. might pick someone like the “scientific advisor” of his old antivax group Children’s Health Defense. I’m referring to Brian Hooker, the chemical engineer turned incompetent epidemiologist and statistician. His comically inept “reanalysis” of a 2004 study at the behest of a disgruntled CDC employee birthed the “CDC whistleblower” conspiracy theory in 2014 that ultimately ended up two years later as the central premise of a highly influential antivax propaganda film disguised as a documentary, VAXXED. Let’s just put it this way. Brian Hooker would have been perfect for the job because he has a patina of seeming respectability, while having, time and time again, proclaimed his love of “simplicity” in statistics, which in his case meant not bothering to account for pesky confounding variable that might eliminate the positive associations he wanted to find.

Come to think of it, that’s exactly what he did reanalyzing that 2004 study of MMR uptake as a risk factor of autism, as well as taking data collected for a case-control study, in which one looks at cases (in this case children with autism) and controls (without autism) and compare exposures (in this case vaccines) and incorrectly analyzed it in what looked like a cohort study, in which researchers look at groups of people who vary in exposure to a given putative risk factor (for instance, vaccines), each controlled for every other potential risk factor that the authors can control for, and then determine if the condition for which that putative risk factor is suspected to be a risk factor for. It turns out that David Geier is a major step down from even Brian Hooker.

I swear, reading the headlines these days is like being transported back in time 20 years ago, back when David Geier and his father Dr. Mark Geier were major players in the antivax movement, specifically the “mercury militia.” (This was the branch of the antivax movement convinced that the mercury-containing preservative that had been in many childhood vaccines until around 2001 or 2002 was a major cause of an “autism epidemic.” It wasn’t.) Indeed, they were among the very first antivax “investigators” whom I ever encountered; I even coined a term based on their studies that I still use today: Dumpster diving. (More on that later.) Let’s just say that, back in the early days of this blog, say, the latter half of the aughts, The Geiers and their crapfest studies were frequent topics for Orac’s not-so-Respectful Insolence.

Indeed, here’s a little known fact about the Geiers. They had a fume hood and makeshift laboratory in Mark Geier’s basement, along with their office work area. I kid you not. SEED Magazine, to its eternal shame, featured a rather credulous article about the Geiers in 2004. Here’s a link to the PDF, and here’s a photo of the lab from the article:

If you read the article, see how many antivax names pop up that you recognize. For example, Dr. Dave Weldon’s name appears 14 times. (I counted.)

I supposed that I shouldn’t be that surprised that RFK picked David Geier, even though I haven’t thought much about the Geiers, Père et Fils, in a long time. Even so, my first question was: Why did RFK Jr. choose the son David instead of the father Mark? After all, Mark Geier was actually a physician, and, as the WaPo story notes, David is…not—and never has been:

David Geier was disciplined by Maryland regulators more than a decade ago for practicing medicine without a license. He is listed as a data analyst in the HHS employee directory.

In brief, David Geier worked so closely with his father at his quack autism clinics that patients assumed that he was a doctor, and he also directed a lot of the activities at these clinics. I’ll go into more detail later about just how bonkers these autism treatments were. For now, suffice to say that Mark and David Geier were big fans of chelation therapy (which was a very common quack “autism biomed” treatment back then), with their own bizarre twist based on some of the most outrageously stupid extrapolation of basic science that I’ve ever seen.

Unethical and incompetent antivax quacks

My best guess about why he wasn’t chosen is that Mark Geier is retired and likely too old (although, in fairness, he is a couple of years younger than President Trump). It’s also possible that Mark Geier is almost as toxic as Wakefield, even though he’s much less well-known, because he holds what must be a record for the number of states that revoked his medical license, including his home state of Maryland, as well as Washington, Virginia, California, Missouri, Illinois, and Hawaii.

David’s cosplaying his father’s profession aside, at least before several states started taking away his father’s license to practice medicine, David Geier does not have an MD or an advanced degree. He does have a Bachelors Degree in Biology and apparently did take a couple of graduate-level classes in biochemistry and three courses in public health around 20 years ag, but that’s it. (Well, he also reportedly misrepresented himself as a graduate student at George Washington University.) That means that he has no relevant qualifications to be able to carry out a scientifically credible epidemiological study of vaccines as a risk factor for autism, which is probably why RFK Jr. chose him. Also, going back over my deconstruction of RFK Jr.’s “coming out” as an antivaxxer, namely his conspiracy-fest of an article co-published in 2005 in Rolling Stone and Salon.com, Deadly Immunity, I remembered that the “work” of the Geiers featured prominently in it, which I had forgotten about. Let’s harken back to the 20-year-old words of Orac about the Geiers:

RFK Jr. goes on and on about alleged conflicts of interest by vaccine researchers who accept funding from pharmaceutical companies, going so far as to imply that the Institute of Medicine reports of 2001 and 2004 that stated that there is no link between mercury and autism were basically done at the behest of the pharmaceutical companies, never mind the comprehensive review of the literature in 2004 that also failed to find a link. It’s the usual conspiracy-mongering insinuations we hear from antivaccination activists and other types of cranks. However, in marked contrast, RFK Jr. approvingly cites the research of Dr. Mark Geier and his son David, both of whom are activists for the mercury-autism crowd, never once mentioning that Dr. Geier is a professional expert witness for vaccine plantiffs, who has been involved in over 100 legal cases brought against vaccine manufacturers and the government on behalf of parents and whose testimony has been disallowedin some for not being sufficiently qualified. Dr. Geier’s son David runs a company called MedCon, a medical–legal consulting firm that helps vaccine injury claimants to obtain money from both the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and through civil litigation.

Hmmm. Sounds to me as though the Geiers have a definite financial conflict of interest when it comes to vaccine studies, and they have published several studies that are widely cited by antivaccination activists as “proof” of a mercury-autism link. None of their studies has ever failed to show such a link. I wonder why RFK didn’t see fit to mention that, given his great concern over conflicts of interest in vaccine research. He also didn’t mention that the Geiers have used shoddy study methodology and also engaged in data collection irregularities, drawing a rebuke from the CDC and suspension of Dr. Geier’s IRB approval from Kaiser-Permanente. Overall, RFK Jr. seems pretty selective in his outrage over conflicts of interest and shoddy research, doesn’t he?

I can’t help but express a bit of puzzlement here about something. That last incident is one of the most famous bits of research malfeasance, incompetence, and unethical practices by the Geiers; yet there’s nothing in the WaPo article about it, as good as it is otherwise in describing all the other antivax research chicanery indulged in by the Geiers. In brief,  the FDA wrote a warning letter to the IRB chair at the North California Kaiser Permanente after the Geiers’ October 2003 and January 2004 visits to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Research Data Center) in Hyattsville, Maryland to use the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) database. During those visits, the Geiers were busted for making queries that were not in the original protocol approved by the institutional review board (IRB) overseeing the study. Then, on their second visit, they were caught trying to merge datasets in a way that would compromise the confidentiality of the patients whose records were contained in the VSD. Specifically, the National Immunization Program found that “during the first visit the researchers conducted unapproved analysis on their datasets and on the second visit attempted to carry out unapproved analyses but did not complete this attempt. This analysis, had it been completed, could have increased the risk of confidentiality breach. Before leaving, the researchers renamed files for removal which were not allowed to be removed. Had it gone undetected, this would have constituted a breach of the rules about confidentiality.”

That’s right. Mark and David Geier tried to take some files from the VSD with them. That’s why you should be afraid—be very afraid—to learn this from WaPo:

HHS instructed the CDC in early March to conduct the vaccine-autism study. The request came two days after Trump, in an address to a joint session to Congress, described the growing prevalence of autism in American children.

But in recent weeks, HHS officials directed the CDC to turn over vaccine safety data to the National Institutes of Health so that agency could conduct the analysis instead, according to three current and one former federal health officials. Geier was identified as the person who “would be the one analyzing the data,” said one official.

It’s unclear why HHS officials turned to NIH to conduct the study. Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist, has long criticized the CDC and, in particular, vaccine safety.

And:

The information that the CDC has turned over to NIH includes the underlying data from four studies on vaccines and autism published in the 2000s, three current officials said. None of the papers found any link.

Basically, David Geier will likely soon have full access to all HHS vaccine safety databases, including the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) and VSD. This brings me to “dumpster-diving,” a term that I’m pretty sure I was the first to coin about how antivaxxers abuse VAERS by using it improperly to “prove” that vaccines cause all sorts of horrible things that they don’t cause. The first time I ever used the term was in 2006 in a post entitled The Geiers go dumpster diving yet again. It’s kind of useful to look back at the study they did and published in, hilariously enough, the crank journal, The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JPANDS). Remember, as far back as 2006, I was noting how antivax and quacky the fake medical society, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) was; indeed, even then I was referring to it as the John Birch Society of fake medical societies, and since then the Geiers and Andrew Wakefield have published there.

Still, let’s take a look at the statistical sophistication of a typical Geier study. You can read my 2006 post for details why this was such a terrible, incompetently done, study, but the CliffsNotes version is that the Geiers took VAERS database and the California Department of Developmental Services (CDDS) database. The latter database tracks all cases of autism—i.e., autism prevalance—not just new cases. (Remember, to demonstrate a change in the trajectory of autism incidence, you need to know the number of new cases per year.) In brief, they plotted the data as autism cases against time period by quarter and then used a statistics package to do linear regression of the data from 1994 to the end of 2002 and then to do it again from the beginning of 2002 until October 2005. Why that date? All thimerosal-containing childhood vaccines expired by the end of 2002. The Geiers then compared the slopes of the two lines derived from linear regression for each graph and concluded that the slope of the line after 2002 had changed from positive (increasing) to negative (decreasing). If this had been a scientifically valid result, it would have suggested that mercury in vaccines might indeed have contributed to autism, because it would suggest that the number of new autism cases started to decline after thimerosal had nearly completely disappeared from childhood vaccines. As I said at the time:

Geez, couldn’t these guys at least have bothered to hire a biostatistician? (Certainly no statistician is listed in the authors, just Mark and David Geier.) If they had, they would have found out that doing interrupted time series analysis is fraught with difficulty, and that the appropriate way to look at such effects over time is not by simplistically comparing slopes before and after a time point, but rather by using one of these techniques, depending upon the specific question and data. Also, choosing the end of 2002 is a bit of a stretch; after all, autism is most commonly diagnosed between ages 3-5, which means that around now is the period in which we should start to see a dramatic drop in autism rates if mercury in vaccines is truly the cause of autism. But it’s still even worse than that, so bad that it’s funny. Basically, what the Geiers have done is to take contiguous data and make up trendlines to “prove a point,” even if the data don’t support it, and it’s hard not to note that the r-squared value of the latter data is very much lower than the r-squared for the earlier data, meaning a much poorer fit to the linear regression. Indeed, Bartholemew Cubbins has made a useful video to show you why this is an invalid statistical technique, and Autism Diva has described it.

I look forward to David Geier applying the same level of statistical chops to re-“analyzing” data from VAERS, VSD, and the four CDC studies to whose raw data he will soon have access as he did in 2006. I could go on, but I’ve written about so many badly designed and executed studies by the Geiers that I’ve forgotten about them all. Interestingly, having to write about David Geier again let me go back and see just how bad their “science” and epidemiology were.

Even worse than David Geier’s scientific and medical incompetence is his lack of ethics. Unfortunately, the WaPo article failed to mention how, like cancer quack Stanislaw Burzynski, the Geiers “pioneered” a quack technique of science denial that has become common today. Specifically, they set up a fake research “institute,” named the Institute for Chronic Illnesses,” complete with a fake IRB to rubber-stamp their clinical “research” and oversee the ethics and human research subject protections of protocols as though it were a real IRB, rather than filled with Geier cronies.

I first learned of the Institute for Chronic Illnesses and its “IRB” back in 2006 when the Geiers were using what they referred to as the “Lupron protocol” to treat autistic children. I discussed this protocol in detail back then, and you can read my original post if you want the contemporaneous details. The CliffsNotes version is that this “protocol” involved misdiagnosing autistic children with precocious puberty and treating them with the powerful puberty blocking drug Lupron combined with chelation therapy. WTF? It gets worse

One concept behind this paper is, of course, the old antivax idea that mercury causes autism, hence the chelation therapy to treat the “mercury poisoning” supposedly behind the autism. The second idea is the bonkers one, namely that lowering testosterone levels would somehow increase the efficacy of the chelation therapy. Why. The Geiers proposed a scientifically unsupported—to put it kindly—idea that somehow testosterone binds the mercury from vaccines and makes it more difficult to chelate. I kid you not. The Geiers called this nonexistent phenomenon “testosterone sheets.” Never mind that there has never been any convincing scientific evidence that chelation therapy does anything to help the behavioral symptoms of autism or that mercury in vaccines causes autism, and never mind that there is no physiological evidence that testosterone in any way binds mercury in the body, much less makes it inaccessible to chelation therapy. Unbelievably, the Geiers based their concept of “testosterone sheets” on a paper from 1968 looking at the crystal structure of testosterone and mercuric chloride derived from crystals made by boiling equimolar amounts of testosterone and mercuric chloride in hot benzene.

Let’s just put it this way. Such conditions are far from physiologic. Pulling nonsensical ideals out of their nether regions, the Geiers just speculated that testosterone binds mercury and that lowering testosterone would free up the mercury for chelation, even though, once again, there was no evidence for this concept. Neither the extreme scientific implausibility of their idea nor the lack of scientific evidence for it deterred them in the least from franchising their protocol as clinics and trying to patent it.

At least Ars Technica gets it, noting that the Lupron protocol was Mark Geier’s downfall, although the Geiers got away with it for five or six years:

The board found that the elder Geier “misdiagnosed autistic children with precocious puberty and other genetic abnormalities and treated them with a potent hormonal therapy (“Lupron Therapy” or “Lupron Protocol”), and in some instances chelation therapy, both of which have substantial risks of both short-term and long-term adverse side effects. [Mark Geier’s] treatment exposed the children to needless risk of harm.”

Lupron is a drug that suppresses sex hormones (a gonadotropin-releasing hormone [GnRH] agonist) and is used to treat prostate cancer, endometriosis, and precocious (early) puberty.

It’s also used in the gender-affirming care of transgender adolescents, which has led some to attack me for inconsistency about the harsh words I had in 2006 for the Geiers relative to my having defended evidence-based gender-affirming care against dubious attacks from “gender critical” transphobes. It’s a deeply disingenuous attack, as though there isn’t a huge difference between using Lupron in an evidence-based manner to treat gender dysphoria in adolescents and using it in a most definitely quacky manner to treat autism in children misdiagnosed as having precocious puberty because you think it will allow chelation therapy to bind mercury in the brain better by getting all those pesky (nonexistent) testosterone sheets out of the way. Let’s just say that the Geiers were in the latter category.

Combine bad science and bad medicine with extreme antivax bias, a huge conflict of intrerest, an d and a lack of ethics, and you have David Geier:

The journal Science and Engineering Ethics retracted a 2015 paper co-authored by the Geiers that contended public health officials have conflicts of interest in studying whether mercury exposure triggers autism. The journal cited errors and failures to disclose the authors’ own conflicts of interest, including the Geiers’ involvement in a mercury-free-drugs coalition.

In a 2015 interview at a gathering of AutismOne, an organization that promotes the discredited link between vaccines and the condition, David Geier described CDC research on vaccines as compromised. He said the federal government sees its role as increasing vaccine uptake and quashing research that undermines immunization.

“This seems to be ubiquitous, that the government scientists are assigned to do a study, and invariably they find harm,” he said.

In addition to conducting research, Geier helped people who claimed injuries from vaccines seek compensation from the federal government and co-founded an organization that sued federal health officials, alleging harm from the use of thimerosal.

If you want an example of the Geiers’ MO, Prof. Jeffrey Morris provides an example and how, by the very design of their studies, the Geiers guarantee a positive association between vaccines and autism. It’s hard to tell if this is intentional or just incompetence—probably mostly incompetence and a desire for “simplicity” that ignores confounders or introduces them unnecessarily, but, either way, the Geiers were masters of finding “correlations” between vaccines and autism risk, whether there was a correlation or not. (There wasn’t.)

David Geier has apparently been commissioned by HHS secretary RFK, Jr. to study potential links between vaccination and autism.

He has papers in the past using vaccine safety datalink (VSD) data to perform case-control studies assessing potential links between exposure to… pic.twitter.com/0gN4PnfbbC

— Prof Jeffrey S Morris (@jsm2334) March 26, 2025

The whole thread is worth reading, as Dr. Morris creates an example to demonstrate how there can be a seemingly strong and statistically significant association in data where there is no real correlation, but the money post is this one, where he compares his example of cell phone use in Sri Lanka as a predictor of the number of live births:

The 2017 Geier paper found OR=5.00, concluding vaccine (exposure) greatly increased risk of autism (case),

But they had the exact same type of time bias in this illustration,

since they counted cases (autism) from 1991-1998 and controls (no autism) from 1991-1992,

and… pic.twitter.com/FB1iXFhjBJ

— Prof Jeffrey S Morris (@jsm2334) March 26, 2025

The Geiers were masters of this sort of nonsense using noncomparable timeframes that introduced confounders.

As several experts quoted in the WaPo and Ars Technica articles point out, if the goal is to produce a crappy or fake study to provide scientific “evidence” that vaccines cause autism, RFK Jr. would have been hard pressed to find a better minion to carry the study out than David Geier. He and his father are hardcore antivax, have published all sorts of statistically incompetent analyses of data from various databases, made money representing parents who thought that vaccines had caused their child’s autism, and are so unethical that they were “trailblazers” in setting up a fake research institute with a fake IRB. One might think that the conclusion of this study is preordained.

Indeed, I have to wonder if, deep down in his heart, RFK Jr. actually does realize that there’s no scientifically demonstrable link between vaccines and autism. After all, if he really believed there is a link, wouldn’t he want to use the best science to look for it?  I would if I were that confident. Wouldn’t he want the best epidemiologists he can find to do a study like this, which the CDC and NIH are chock full of, rather than hire an outside hack like David Geier, whose history is little but doing poorly designed and executed studies that claim to identify vaccines as a risk factor for autism but really don’t? Hiring David Geier is the sort of thing that you do when you want a preordained result.