Tag Archives: Geier

WSJ: Vaccine Opponent Hired by RFK Jr. Scours Official Records for Link to Autism

9 Jun

For years, I’ve hoped major news outlets would shine a light on figures like David and Mark Geier—key players in the anti-vaccine movement that has harmed autism communities for decades. Now that attention has come, but since it’s due to Robert Kennedy being the Secretary of HHS, I wish it hadn’t.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that David Geier has been hired by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. The article, by Liz Essley Whyte and Dominique Mosbergen, titled “Vaccine Opponent Hired by RFK Jr. Scours Official Records for Link to Autism”, highlights what appears to be Mr. Kennedy’s plan to reanalyze CDC vaccine data—seeking to link vaccines to autism and allege CDC corruption.

Geier is aiming to reanalyze the data used in the CDC thimerosal study to see if it supports a link between vaccines and autism, people familiar with the matter said. But he is also interested in proving the CDC is corrupt, the people added.

The article is relatively short and it’s better for you to read it for yourself than for me to summarize it. Instead let me discuss my opinions of Mr. Kennedy and his decision to hire Mr. Geier.

People like to point out David Geier’s lack of credentials. While true (he has a B.A. and left graduate school without completing a degree), I would argue it’s very much secondary to the fact that he has a track record. And his track record in vaccine-related research is poor at best. There’s no reason for Mr. Kennedy to involve him again—unless, that is, the goal is to confirm a preexisting belief that vaccines cause autism. Ironically, that’s the very kind of bias and “corruption” Mr. Kennedy has accused public health institutions of engaging in.

Mr. Kennedy has access to skilled epidemiologists. If he truly wanted transparency and scientific rigor, he could commission a well-documented, peer-reviewed study. Instead, he brought on David Geier. The WSJ reports:

NIH researchers have been asked to help Geier, people familiar with the matter said. NIH employees recently requested that the CDC send over the entirety of the VSD—an ask that set off alarm bells at the CDC and among researchers at the healthcare networks, who worried whether their patients’ private health information would be adequately protected, according to other people familiar with the matter.

Which is backwards. Don’t have the experienced, qualified researchers help the unqualified guy with a bias. If he wants a quality study done and wants someone to ensure transparency, have Mr. Geier observe the actual researchers.

Sadly, this assumes an ideal world where researchers at NIH aren’t under threat of losing their jobs, their pensions and all, if they tell a clearly vindictive administration what it doesn’t want to hear. We don’t live in that ideal world.

As the saying goes, judge a person by their actions, not their words. Mr. Kennedy’s decision suggests he’s more interested in validating long-held beliefs than uncovering scientific truth. For years, he’s built influence and wealth off the backs of families like mine—families with autistic children. For years, he’s ignored good scientific results and instead promoted junk. Like that generated by David Geier.

Before I go on and on and completely lose the point of this article (the new WSJ article: Vaccine Opponent Hired by RFK Jr. Scours Official Records for Link to Autism), let me make three points:

  1. I have been following Mr. Geier, Mr. Kennedy and the anti-vaccine movement for 19 years now.
  2. I am the parent of an autistic adult. I have skin in this game. If there were evidence that vaccines caused an autism epidemic, I’d be shouting it out.
  3. I am a Ph.D. researcher with decades of experience. I’d say my publication record is better than Mr. Geier’s but that is a terribly low bar. I am well respected in my field. Mr. Geier’s publications are an affront to good scientists everywhere.

If there were real evidence linking vaccines to an autism epidemic, I would be the first to speak up. But what we’re seeing now is not a search for truth. It’s a continuation of a harmful agenda, now backed by the highest levels of government.

By Matt Carey

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James Terence Fisher: RFK Jr., autism and long-debunked theories

7 Apr

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has an article by James Terence Fisher: RFK Jr., autism and long-debunked theories. If I start quoting, I’ll copy the whole article. So, I’ll just recommend you follow the link and read the article in place.

Prof. Fisher mentions “Autism families of a certain vintage”. I am of that vintage. I’ve watched his son grow up through blog posts over the years. I too saw Robert Kennedy over decades and David Geier promote bad science and bad medicine. The harm they have caused is real and it can only get worse with them in positions of power. Prof. Fisher gives another perspective on the history, from an autism father’s point of view.

By Matt Carey

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How RFK Jr. could add $100B a year to the debt

31 Mar

If autism were a vaccine injury, i.e. if it was legitimate to add autism to the vaccine injury table, I would say, “change the schedule now and pay however many families deserve it, no matter the cost.” But autism is not a vaccine injury. I will note that if Mr. Kennedy truly believed autism is a vaccine injury, he wouldn’t have hired David Geier to do the studies. Having Mr. Geier run an autism study is the equivalent of using loaded dice in a game of craps. Mr. Kennedy is buying the outcome he wants to see. If he wants to do more autism/vaccine studies, let the science speak, to quote Mr. Kennedy himself. He’s not doing that.

Robert Kennedy is (rightly) getting a lot of attention for his vaccine related actions. Just last week he pushed out the FDA’s top vaccine official (Top US vaccine official forced to resign, reports say). I will suggest it’s past time to stop reacting and start looking ahead–ask ourselves what is going to happen and what will the fallout be? That said, if we’ve learned anything from Mr. Kennedy, it’s that one should be careful and not fall into the conspiracy theory trap. So I’ll be careful and conservative as I predict what I think Mr. Kennedy is planning.

One Kennedy goal that seems obvious to me (and many others): get autism recognized as a vaccine injury. Get autism added to the vaccine injury table* to allow families to obtain compensation from the vaccine program. Perhaps he’s made this statement outright. I wouldn’t be surprised. But even if he hasn’t, I doubt many who have followed Mr. Kennedy’s words and actions would argue that this is a likely goal for him.

Let’s say he’s successful. What would be the result? Specifically, what would this cost? The vaccine court, after all, awards monetary compensation. It’s a pretty simple calculation:

$17B is a lot, but it’s not the $100B in the title of the article. Where did I get that? The support needs for an autistic person vary greatly, but, I would argue, they are higher than the average vaccine injury recipient. Also, we are talking about very young autistic children here, so there will be a lot of uncertainty projecting the lifelong needs and the court may be convinced to provide payouts on the higher end of the scale. Often in the past, I saw payments of about $1m to provide support for a lifelong disability awarded by the court, so I chose that number when I wrote the title of this piece. If we take 104,000 autistic kids being awarded $1m a year, we get $104B a year in vaccine court awards.

Let’s state the obvious: that’s a huge amount of money. That’s about 8 aircraft carriers a year. If Elon Musk found $104B a year in savings, believe me, we’d be hearing about it.

To put this more in context, the vaccine program has a trust fund of about $4.3B. This would be gone in the first year (potentially the first month) of autism cases being handled as a table injury. Technically, the vaccine court would have no money after that, and the awards should stop. This would put congress in a tight spot: allocate more money, or tell their constituents that that they voted to deny compensation to disabled children. I suspect they would vote to allocate funds. So we are talking about somewhere between $17B and $100B a year added to the budget, which would be directly added to the national debt.

I will admit that this is a very rough estimate of the financial cost. We could argue how much the average award would be. We could argue that not all autistic kids would get awards, even if autism were added as a table injury. So, maybe the total would go down. However, I also would argue that more kids will be diagnosed as autistic should autism be added as a table injury. Many more. How that balances out in the end can be debated, but I think a reasonable person can see that the answer will be billions of dollars a year and very likely many billions of dollars a year.

If autism were a vaccine injury, i.e. if it was legitimate to add autism to the vaccine injury table, I would say, “change the schedule now and pay however many families deserve it, no matter the cost.” But autism is not a vaccine injury. I will note that if Mr. Kennedy truly believed autism is a vaccine injury, he would not have hired David Geier to do the studies. Having Mr. Geier run an autism study is the equivalent of using loaded dice in a game of craps. Mr. Kennedy is buying the outcome he wants to see. If he wants to do more autism/vaccine studies, he would let the science speak. To quote Mr. Kennedy himself. He’s not doing that.

As I stated at the outset, one has to be careful of relying upon conspiracy theories. I believe I’ve stayed away from that here. I’ve made assumptions of what I think Mr. Kennedy wants to accomplish, but I think those are valid assumptions. And the cost analysis is very simple and I’ve laid it out very clearly. No chance to hide some trick in the math. I could be off by a factor of 10 and the conclusion would be the same.

One could and should ask why I am focusing on the financial cost and not the human cost. First, because autism is not a vaccine injury, we aren’t talking about a real human cost. Second, the financial cost is what will get the attention of Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk and congress. Sad to say, but I believe that to be the case.

The most logical outcome of adding autism to the vaccine injury table, in my opinion, is that congress and the president would be forced to choose between keeping autism on the vaccine injury table and ending the infant vaccine program. End the infant vaccine program and many people in Mr. Kennedy’s community (possibly including Mr. Kennedy himself), will say “mission accomplished.”** Pull autism off the table and the net effect is pretty much the same. The idea that vaccines cause autism will be accepted and vaccine uptake will drop. Many states will stop mandating infant vaccines. The infant vaccine program would be effectively dead.

Either way, Mr. Kennedy will be able to say, “See, I’m not anti-vaccine. I didn’t direct the infant vaccine program to end. They just followed the “science” (that I directed be created when I hired David Geier).”

By Matt Carey

* The vaccine injury table lays out injuries that are presumed to be caused by a vaccine. For example, if one develops paralytic polio within 30 days of getting the oral polio vaccine, it is assumed to be caused by the vaccine. If you haven’t heard of this, that’s because the U.S. doesn’t use the oral polio vaccine anymore.

** Recall that one of the people at Mr. Kennedy’s “Children’s Health Defense” is JB Handley (Vice Chair in 2018). Recall that Mr. Handley once wrote: “With less than a half-dozen full-time activists, annual budgets of six figures or less, and umpteen thousand courageous, undaunted, and selfless volunteer parents, our community, held together with duct tape and bailing wire, is in the early to middle stages of bringing the U.S. vaccine program to its knees.”

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