As I’ve noted a few times already, the taped conversations between William Thompson at the CDC and Brian Hooker, proponent of the failed autism/vaccine notion, are very telling. There are certainly aspects of these conversations which I doubt Mr. Hooker’s team would like to be made public (and, as we will see, may be keeping out of the public eye). For example, when Hooker pressed Thompson to state that the CDC team worked to dilute an apparent association between the MMR vaccine and autism, Mr. Thompson declined (discussed here).
Here’s another statement by Mr. Thompson. This time it is in relation to Mark and David Geier, a father/son team that has written a great deal of junk science trying to promote the idea that thimerosal in vaccines and autism are linked. The Geiers have been criticized in many venues, being called “intellectually dishonest” as one of the more polite ways of characterizing their work. Brian Hooker relies upon the Geiers for his own beliefs about autism and thimerosal and even calls the Geiers his friends.
Dr. Thompson: But it’s a marketing thing. It’s a marketing thing. You have to figure out how to market this. And this has to come from other voices, it can’t just come from you because you…they made you the poster boy of, they want to portray you as crazy and you know um, and honestly I think, you’ve been persistent. You have been right most of the time. I will say the Geiers were not right and the Geiers…you know the Geiers; I do not know them personally. But, I know the things they did. They took exact copies of papers we wrote and published them under their own names. Word for word and I just thought that [UI].
Want to bet this quote doesn’t end up in the “documentary” Andrew Wakefield is making on Thompson?
[UI] likely means unintelligible. As in, “we can’t provide the transcript here because we can’t understand the recording.” I really have to wonder if [UI] means, “Thompson harshed on the Geiers even more and we decided to edit here.”
Who knows. We have enough to see that Thompson clearly thought the Geiers were wrong. And calls them out for their unethical attempt at getting a paper by copying the CDC’s team’s work.
There’s a list of papers out there that people claim shows there’s a link between vaccines and autism. I bet a lot of papers on that list are authored by the Geiers. And even their own hero, the “CDC Whistleblower” calls those papers out as junk.
The Geiers–the team that claimed that chemical castration was an autism treatment–criticized by Mark Blaxill* (another vocal proponent of the idea that vaccines cause autism) and now by the new hero to the movement.
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By Matt Carey
*Although it must be said that Mr. Blaxill never showed the courage to make his opinion public.
Left Brain Right Brain 
This book is the gift that keeps on giving and the anti-vaxxers themselves offered this up. And they wonder why no mainstream media outlets are interested in this tosh. They should actually be thankful given how unbelievably foolish it makes them look as well as their worship of their precious “whistleblower”.
What is surprising to me is that no one involved with publishing this book appears to have actually read the transcripts and weeded out what was unfavorable to them. Hooker could have a problem with comprehension if he believes that Thompson was always in agreement with the AV talking points. More likely, Hooker is so used to filtering out things that don’t agree with his mind-set that he just doesn’t remember those bits.
I think they did weed out some stuff. There are more [UI]’s in there, as well as a lot of [affirmative response]’s from Brian Hooker. Why not just leave in “heck yeah!” or “sure Bill”? Why edit responses out and leave “affirmative response”? That is, unless they don’t want us to read what the affirmative responses are.
That said, there are many comments in those conversations that aren’t really complementary to Brian Hooker’s cause.
It’s the same story as Dan Olmsted pulled over the father of one of Wakefield’s Lancet 12 children. The father directly stated – and the documents proved it – that Wakefield’s paper was “an outright fabrication”. The father wrote to Olmsted telling him that. “Outright fabrication”.
So Olmsted put on his blog that the father had attacked me and denounced my investigation.
Hopefully, the message is beginning to circulate that these people are utter crooks.
Well, to be fair, couldn’t [affirmative response] be a simple affirmative noise (“hmm hmm”) ? Translating these as “[affirmative response]” is a bit more elegant than phonetically transcribing them. I’m not there really is anything hidden behind these words. [/devilsadvocate]
The other points you made in this article and the others, I do agree with.