RFK Jr. Taps Man Who Harmfully Injected Autistic Children With Anti-Puberty Drug to Run His Autism Study
David Geier, RFK Jr.'s hand-picked autism expert, has long been a pariah in the medical community.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has tapped a man who used controversial and potentially dangerous puberty-delaying treatments on autistic children to help lead a new study on the causes of autism.
The move comes at a time when much of the Republican Party has been trying to outlaw the use of puberty blockers and related treatments for children experiencing gender dysphoria.
The study was announced by Kennedy during a cabinet meeting last week.
“By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we'll be able to eliminate those exposures,” he told Trump’s team and the general public.
Such a declaration is uncommon in the world of medical research because of how unorthodox it is: can you really solve a major medical mystery in the span of a few months?
Dorit Reiss, a legal specialist at the UCSF Law who has spent years working on legal issues around vaccines, told me that Kennedy’s statement contained a number of red flags.
“Nobody told us what the process will be. Nobody told us what kind of study they’re doing,” she said of Kennedy’s announcement.
She explained that studies of conditions like autism usually utilize a few different methodologies: you can take existing databases and run an analysis of them; you can go and collect new data; you can also do a meta-analysis of existing studies.
But Kennedy didn’t explain what his staff would be doing.
“The lack of transparency by itself raises some questions,” she said.
Reiss also took issue with Kennedy’s pledge to solve the mystery of autism in just a few months.
“You can’t guarantee you’ll have an answer in [five] months. You need to devise a methodology and ideally you devise it before you go in so that you’re not matching your methodology to the result. If you match it to the result, the results are unreliable,” she said.
With his declaration in the cabinet meeting, it seemed like Kennedy was very much looking to match his methodology to results.
He seemed to have already come to the conclusion that autism is called by some kind of environmental “exposures” that are within our power to eliminate.
Is the HHS Secretary trying to rig a study to give him the results he’s already made up his mind about? That conclusion is hard to avoid once you learn about the man he tapped to run the study.
A father and son who set out to cure autism
In 2006, a physician named Dr. Mark Geier and his son David Geier published a groundbreaking draft of a paper in the journal Autoimmunity Reviews. They had claimed to have conducted a series of laboratory tests that had concluded that thiomersal, a mercury-related preservative that was once common in vaccines, was driving the increase in autism and related conditions.
What made the draft — which was all of seven pages — all the more explosive is that not only had they uncovered one of the causes of autism, they had also happened upon a promising treatment.
They had treated autistic children with what’s called leuprorelin acetate, commonly referred to as lupron, which is used in hormone treatments to prevent early puberty and to treat prostate cancer and other conditions. They said the drug provided “very significant overall clinical improvements” for the children. Their theory was that the interaction between mercury and testosterone could be causing autism; lupron could help suppress it. They were so confident that this would be an effective treatment for autism that they even filed for a patent for it.
But one autism activist noticed something odd about the way the Geiers had conducted the study. When doing research with human subjects, it is typical to assemble what’s called an institutional review board, or IRB. As Oregon State University explains, an IRB is “charged with the responsibility of reviewing, prior to its initiation, all research (whether funded or not) involving human participants.” The goal is to protect the test subjects.
The IRB in the case of the Geiers consisted of, as the activist laid out in their written complaint to the journal’s editors and board:
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.
In other words, the Geiers picked their own family and friends to be their oversight.
“An institutional review board has to have no conflicts of interest,” explained Paul Offit, a pediatrician at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a specialist on childhood vaccination. “If they’re working with you or a member of your family, obviously, there are conflicts of interest.”
The study ended up being retracted.
The Geiers, however, continued to argue for the autism-vaccine link. Eventually, in 2011, the Maryland State Board of Physicians came to the conclusion that the Geiers had violated the standards of care.
The following year, Mark Geier was stripped of his medical license; David Geier never had one in the first place, but he was disciplined for practicing medicine without it.
In the court order stripping Mark Geier of his license, the board laid out some of the potential harms of using Lupron unnecessarily:
Adverse side effects of Lupron in children include, but are not limited to, risk of bone and heart damage…The Respondent endangers autistic children and exploits their parents by administering to the children a treatment protocol that has known substantial risk of serious harm and which is neither consistent with evidence-based medicine nor generally accepted in the relevant scientific community.
Despite this record, David Geier — who still holds no medical degree of any kind — is who RFK Jr. announced would be leading his department’s research into autism.
Like Reiss, Offit worried that RFK Jr. may be creating an illegitimate study to come to a conclusion he has already reached.
“He already knows what the cause of autism is. It’s what he’s been saying for the last 20 years, which is he thinks vaccines are the cause of autism. He doesn’t believe the studies that show that he’s wrong,” he said.
(As of this writing HHS did not respond to a request for comment.)
Is the GOP no longer worried about improper use of puberty blockers?
For the past half a dozen or so years, the Republican Party has been working nationwide to restrict the use of puberty blockers for minors who seek to transition from their biological gender.
The GOP crusade against hormone treatments for transgender youth has been occurring at the same time that parts of Western Europe have also hit the brakes on similar treatments, worrying that these sorts of procedures lack proper evidence.
But so far the GOP response to RFK Jr. elevating a man who was using very similar treatments in a misguided attempt to cure autism has been mute. If the Republican Party was so concerned about using puberty blockers and similar treatments to tackle gender dysphoria, why is it suddenly OK to use them to try to treat autism?
The time to speak up is now
Both Offit and Reiss told me that they worry that the new HHS Secretary will use the results of Geier’s analysis to force changes to the country’s approach to vaccination.
“He’ll use [the study] to take vaccines off the market or undo vaccine recommendations, bring back diseases that are starting to come back as vaccine rates drop and already harming people,” Reiss said.
Offit was concerned that RFK Jr. could use improper results to make it easier to litigate against vaccine makers.
“He could make it so onerous for companies to try and civilly defend vaccines that they get out,” he said.
Does anyone in the GOP worry that it appears that RFK Jr. is trying to manufacture consent for broad, sweeping changes to American vaccination and public health based off of a study run by a disgraced non-doctor?
If so, the time to speak up is now. Politics will always make politicians shut their mouths, even when they know better. But if they can’t draw the line at the health and welfare of American children, can they draw it anywhere?
I think the government's response to COVID exposed cracks in the edifice of "scientific authority" that had built up over time.
I also think RFK Jr. is there because Trump is a master of exploiting divisions. "Public health" has become just another political football. I'll even bet a poll would show more and more people are opting out of official government positions on illness and disease. I for one plan to ignore RFK Jr.'s highly motivated report on autism when it comes out.
Off topic, Zaid: we're being told that autism rates are increasing. Is that true or is it just that tests for autism are becoming more sensitive?
Thanks
"None so blind as them that will not see." Or, in this case, see what they want, oblivious to reality.