Vaccines and Autism: Perpetuating a Populist Agenda

Media outlets are reporting that Robert F. Kennedy Junior (RFK Jr.) has used taxpayer dollars to hire well-known vaccine skeptic David Geier to conduct a study on the long debunked link between vaccines and autism. There has been no official confirmation of the hire, but many experts are sounding the alarm. 

Who is David Geier?
 

David Geier, alongside his father, physician Mark Geier, and Janet K. Kern, a neuroscientist and independent researcher, is the author of the study: “Increased risk for an atypical autism diagnosis following Thimerosal-containing vaccine exposure in the United States: A prospective longitudinal case-control study in the Vaccine Safety Datalink,” published in the Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology in 2017. All three co-authored a 2015 study, titled “Systematic Assessment of Research on Autism Spectrum Disorder and Mercury Reveals Conflicts of Interest and the Need for Transparency in Autism Research,” which was retracted because of a failure to declare adequate conflicts of interest.

In the 2017 study, Geier et al concluded that “routine childhood vaccination is an important public health tool to reduce infectious diseases.” However, they also said: “the present study provides important epidemiological evidence significantly associating increasing Hg exposure from Thimerosal-containing childhood vaccines and the subsequent risk of atypical autism diagnosis, and suggests that Thimerosal should be eliminated from vaccines.”

Thimerosal, an organomercurial compound used for decades to preserve vaccines, was agreed by US government officials and vaccine manufacturers to be reduced or removed from vaccines as long ago as 1999.

David Geier appears to be a man looking for things that are not there, through the use of qualifications that he does not have. According to the Washington Post, “David Geier was disciplined by Maryland regulators more than a decade ago for practicing medicine without a license,” with the court officially stating that he “has never obtained a license to practice medicine” and that he “has not attended any medical school.” All this despite acting in the capacity of a consultant (and forging his father’s signature) to a pediatric patient from July 2005 to October 2008, for which he was fined $10,000.

An ongoing agenda
 

The anti-vaccine movement is not a product of social media or the 21st century. The American Red Cross’s Measles & Rubella Partnership dates early anti-vax demonstrations as long ago as 1763. Childhood smallpox vaccinations became compulsory in the UK in 1853, later becoming strictly enforced and resulting in mass protests. Simply put, the human condition dictates that many of us will refuse to do what those in authority say we must – even if such actions save our lives and go against all known medical science and data. What is different now is the fact that we are more vulnerable to the ubiquitous voices of the vaccine skeptics who are in government and using public funds to provide “evidence” that “proves” what the skeptics have apparently “known” all along – in this case, that vaccines cause autism.

In a 2017 study titled “Vaccination as a cause of autism – myths and controversies,” author Michael Davidson argues that modern concerns associating autism with vaccines and mercury “have been amplified by misguided scientists; frustrated, but effective parent groups; and politicians,” and that parental refusal to vaccinate a child – especially an autistic child – will render them vulnerable to diseases that are far worse, have been eradicated, or are on the brink of eradication.

The populist political movement is born of a longing, a nostalgia, for simpler, apparently happier times. The conventional wisdom of the past appears to have a louder, yet more comforting voice than the scientific knowledge of the future. But the growing evidence of cases of measles in high-income countries, and the non-scientific endorsement of vitamin A as a “cure,” suggests that a blatant ignorance of scientific knowledge will not equate to a return to those “good old days.”