Donald Trump first installed the drug addict, sadist and antivaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr (RFK Jr) as United States Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). Predictably, RFK Jr immediately proceeded to sabotage measles vaccinations, causing a measles epidemic in USA, and least two measles deaths, and injuries of several children with his Vitamin A quack cure.

Fascism is a death cult, and death is all it can ever deliver, both to its victims and its supporters. It is therefore hardly a surprised that while the Mump regime of Trump and Elon Musk are mass-sacking public healthcare employees, RFK Jr is preparing the stage for measles, polio, mumps and other infectious diseases. The new Secretary of HHS already forced the resignation of FDA’s top vaccine official Peter Marks, and prior to that he installed a certain David Geier as “senior data analyst” at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to run clinical trials to investigate the alleged link between autism or vaccine, i.e. to confirm the worst antivax insanity postulated originally by Andrew Wakefield.

It is David Geier whom this article by Smut Clyde and Elizabeth Woeckner is about.

Now, David Geier is beyond incompetent. His only medical qualification is having being sentenced for practising medicine without licence. To call him stupid would be an insult to all stupid people. His anti-vaxxer credentials are all due to the criminal energy of his infamous father, Mark Geier. Who died just recently, on 20 March 2025, and was therefore unable to provide his child abuser expertise to RFK Jr and the Mump regime. So Geier Jr will do, presumably because Jeff Bradstreet is dead too, and Wakefield is a foreigner.

Before passing the proverbial mic to Smut Clyde, allow me to vent on a pet peeve of mine. You all heard the saying: Science is outside of politics! Well, that claim is just f***ing stupid. It’s not like Nazi Germany had no science going on, they did very much, even after all Jewish professors were pre-emptively sacked by German universities. And don’t forget the research of Dr Josef Mengele. USSR had its Trofim Lysenko and masses of executed and imprisoned geneticists because genetics was a “pseudoscience” which contradicted Stalin’s science views.

Science is never outside of politics, in fact it is politics which defines science. In a free society, also science is free, yet freedom is most certainly not the natural or default state of society or science, quite the opposite. In a fascist regime like the one Trump is now establishing in USA, science is just one branch of control and indoctrination.

Now US scientists are in shock to find out that science is in fact subject to politics just like everything else. It is a historical fact that schools and universities is where every totalitarian regime starts with, and so far, the US universities pre-emptively obey and surrender to Trump’s orders, beginning with Columbia, with Harvard and Brown next in line. At the same time, students are grabbed off the streets and deported, visiting scientists who disapprove of Trump are barred from entering USA. By “Restoring Truth and sanity“, American history can now only be taught from the perspective of the colonial white master race. Climate change studies are verboten, and you aren’t allowed to use words like “inclusive”, “diversity” or “women”. Which drove US biomedical researchers to subserviently complain that they can’t refer to diverse microbiomes or use female mice anymore.

David Geier will deliver the exact kind of vaccine science which RFK Jr and the Mump regime want to see.

---

A classic example of Nominal Determinism (he never had the Latin for the judging)

By Smut Clyde

In a totalitarian regime – this is not a novel or contentious observation! – nothing is gained by pointing out hypocrisy among the leadership. When kleptocrats and theocrats make up morality and impose it on everyone else, flouting the laws themselves becomes simply another way of displaying their Strength and Authority. Strongly-held principles are fine as a pretext for punishing people, but to follow them oneself is a form of weakness; if you are indeed cursed with moral integrity, you should at least pretend to be duplicitous. ‘Consistency’ and ‘a capacity for shame’ are two of the three demons one must slay in order to prosper within a fascist state.

So it was inevitable that America’s leaders would find a medical-malpractice grifter who built his career on a foundation of puberty-blocker-drugs misuse, and then reward him: after all, part of their path to power was the fabrication of a witch-sniffing moral panic in which imaginary doctors are abusing puberty blockers to feminise young men in the cause of their Trans Agenda. Here I’m referring, of course, to David Geier – appointed by echt-antivaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr to the well-remunerated task of making up antivax propaganda and policy.

I imagine Geier taking on the mantle of carney geek while quoting the Stanton Carlisle character at the end of Nightmare Alley: “Mister, I was born for it”. His special achievement in the field of Disease Revivalism is shared with his father, Mark Geier der Ältere – for there are two Geiers here; David is Geier der Jüngere.

That achievement was the insight – or whatever is the opposite to ‘insight’ – that autism is caused by a combination of mercury atoms and testosterone molecules, somehow precipitating in the brain in the glial sheets around neurons. Explaining why the majority of autism diagnoses are in boys (which is totally nothing to do with reporting biases or cultural gender expectations). It further stood to reason that feminising autistic boys will normalise their neurodiversity. So the Geiers ran a lucrative grift treating autistic ‘patients’ with a cocktail of chelation drugs and chemical-castration testosterone suppressants – seldom bothering to examine them first.

The scare-quotes are around ‘patients’ because though Geier d.Ä. had a medical degree (he was progressively disbarred from using it in a succession of states), Geier d.J. was unable to acquire any qualification higher than a B.A. – he “never had the Latin for the judging” – and all his diagnosis / prescription activities were fraudulent cosplay.

[…]

This ‘Lupron protocol‘ was received by mainstream scientists with equal parts of scorn, incredulity and horror. But the Geiers thought of themselves as Serious Disinterested Searchers for the Truth (rather than as scammers promoting their grift by torturing data until it confessed to what they wanted to hear); so they bedecked themselves in all of Science’s dress-up finery, like clinical trials, with ethical approvals – granted by an Institutional Review Board consisting of the Geiers, their coauthors, and an ambulance-chasing lawyer.

“Mercury?” asks the reader in puzzled consternation. “Why would anyone link autism to mercury?!” But link they did: autism was revealed to be a previously-unrecognised form of heavy-metal poisoning caused by (1) mercury-amalgam dental fillings and (2) trace elements of a mercury-based disinfectant, present at the time in multi-dose vaccine vials to keep the contents sterile between injections. This brainfart even found an outlet in the august pages of Elsevier’s Medical Hypotheses.

S. Bernard , A. Enayati , L. Redwood , H. Roger , T. Binstock Autism: a novel form of mercury poisoning Medical Hypotheses (2001) doi: 10.1054/mehy.2000.1281 

Then every two-bit motor-mouthed scammer leapt aboard the gravy train as a professional Expert Witness for litigation or as peddler of occasionally-lethal metal-stripping drugs. Boyd Haley comes to mind, who pimped an industrial-waste chelator as a food supplement to cure autism; and Rashid Buttar with his “Buttar Butter” skin cream. The Geiers were as invested as anyone, paying themselves through their non-profit group CoMeD – ‘Coalition for Mercury-free Drugs’. The pharmaceutical industry were happy to phase out thimerosal to appease the growing concerns, and starting in 2001, multi-dose vials were replaced with pricier disinfectant-free single-use packaging.

This curious chapter in the annals of the antivax endarkenment culminated in 2005 with a certain R. F. Kennedy Jr achieving his 15 minutes of fame by stove-piping the notion into Rolling Stone and Salon (an archived copy is here). In effect he injected himself as leader of the angry torch-and-pitchfork-waving mob once they had already achieved what they wanted. Kennedy had previously been a lawyer, remarkable only for the scale of his hard-drug habit, until his well-connected family arranged for him to take on pro-bono environmental-advocacy work as a form of community service – thereby escaping a prison sentence for a drugs bust. He promptly reinvented himself as Progressive Champion, Defender of the Little People against Big Business, grasping the grifting opportunities opened up by the pose. It fooled the editors who gave Kennedy a platform for his mercury mendacity, and by the time they retracted his article the damage had been done.

When the rate of autism diagnoses did not promptly plummet, the mercury alarmists admitted that they had been wrong all along NO WAIT of course they didn’t. No-one likes to see a beautiful cash-cow theory destroyed by ugly facts. All the classic Kübler-Ross stages of grieving ensued, but especially Denial, Anger and Bargaining.

The Geiers teamed up with Haley in a veritable Voltron of Derp. We know about the MDPI spigot IJERPH, and about Hindawi journals.

• Janet K Kern, Boyd E Haley , David A Geier , Lisa K Sykes , Paul G King , Mark R Geier Thimerosal exposure and the role of sulfation chemistry and thiol availability in autism International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2013) doi: 10.3390/ijerph10083771
• Brian Hooker , Janet Kern , David Geier , Boyd Haley , Lisa Sykes , Paul King , Mark Geier Methodological issues and evidence of malfeasance in research purporting to show thimerosal in vaccines is safe BioMed Research International (2014) doi: 10.1155/2014/247218 

Eventually the Mercury Militia retrained as the Aluminati. By 2016 David Geier had moved on from his lack of expertise on mercury toxicity, and in his new capacity as self-taught Autoimmunologist, we find him addressing the 4th International Symposium on Vaccines (shorter version: the aluminium-based adjuvants in HPV vaccines are what’s killing our children). The panel was chaired by aluminium vaccine truther Chris Exley of Keele University, and you can read about him and this very conference in this article on For Better Science. More about the so-called Shoenfeld’s Syndrome, named after its discoverer, the Israeli academician and university president Yehuda Shoenfeld, here:

This loftier stance that all vaccines are injurious and need to be banned (not just the disinfected ones) has many advantages. But it takes time to adopt… the paperwork alone is incredible. It took RFK Jr until 2018 to relabel his ‘World Mercury Project’ lobby-group / income stream as ‘Children’s Health Defense‘ and chelate scrub all references to ‘mercury’ from its website and literature. Conspicuously absent here is anyone admitting to the parents of ‘patients’ that the $$$ they spent on mercury removal had all been pissed down a rat-hole.

A side-note: RFK Jr’s commitment to children’s health is such that in 2019 he visited American Samoa to preach the gospel of vaccine refusal. 83 people, most of them children, died in the inevitable measles outbreak. With that on one’s conscience, any functioning human being with a capacity for shame would spend the rest of their lives rocking back and forth sobbing in a corner, but see above about the second demon to slay. RFK Jr still insists that all those deaths were only because Samoans are brown people and therefore too poor and too stupid to eat a healthy diet.

To end that digression, here is another early Geier co-production:

David A. Geier , Mark R. Geier The biochemical basis and treatment of autism: Interactions between mercury, transsulfuration, and androgens Autoimmunity Reviews (2006) doi: 10.1016/j.autrev.2006.09.014 

It is an early version of the 2013 IJERPH paper above. Why it was ever accepted for Autoimmunity Reviews is an open question, what with its absence of anything about autoimmunity. The story goes that Eric Gershwin, the journal’s co-Editor-in-Chief – who shared the Geiers’ belief system and was their colleague in Expert Witnessing in vaccine litigation – invited them to write it. At any rate, the other Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Shoenfeld, found out about the paper and it was silently retracted. This later escalated to Withdrawn when the publisher used the paper’s unpaginated state as an excuse to deny that it had ever really been published at all (Brian Deer has a copy of the RETRACTED-watermark version on his website). No explanation was given for depublication, but it might be linked to a letter, sent to all the journal’s Editorial Board by the redoubtable Kathleen Seidel, pointing out its flaws. These include lack of ethical approval and [SHOCK] Geier d.J. laying claim to an institutional affiliation that he did not possess.

The Geiers’ second retraction received a lot of attention on account of its comedic value.

Janet K. Kern, David A. Geier , Richard C. Deth , Lisa K. Sykes , Brian S. Hooker , James M. Love , Geir Bjørklund , Carmen G. Chaigneau , Boyd E. Haley , Mark R. Geier Systematic Assessment of Research on Autism Spectrum Disorder and Mercury Reveals Conflicts of Interest and the Need for Transparency in Autism Research Science and Engineering Ethics (2015) doi: 10.1007/s11948-015-9713-6 

“Based on an assessment by the Editors, the Conflict of Interest statement of this article is inadequate because it fails to disclose conflicts of interest in addition to the declaration that “the authors have been involved in vaccine/biologic litigation.” In particular, Janet Kern is a board member of CONEM (Council for Nutritional and Environmental Medicine) and Geir Bjorklund is that organization’s founder and President. Mark Geier and David Geier do work under the auspices of the non-profit Institute for Chronic Illnesses, Inc. Lisa Sykes, Mark Geier and David Geier are officers of the Coalition for Mercury-free Drugs (CoMeD, Inc). Richard Deth is on the scientific advisory board of the National Autism Association. Brian Hooker is on the board of Focus for Health. James Love has been involved in amalgam litigation. Boyd Haley is involved in the development of a mercury-chelating agent. Some of the authors have a personal as well as a professional interest in autism. In addition, some authors are or have been involved in litigation related to vaccines and autism. Furthermore, the article itself contains a number of errors, and mistakes of various types that raise concerns about the validity of the conclusion. As a result, this article is being retracted by the editors without the agreement of the authors.”

Retraction notice from 2017

The authors are convinced that money one receives as donations and court-testimony fees and quack-treatment charges do not amount to a ‘Conflict of Interest’ that could be declared to journal readers (they are merely an inadequate recompense for one’s efforts for the good of the public). So they omitted those irrelevant details when they wrote about the COIs that must affect the mainstream of autism researchers, to explain why those researchers were so blind to the mercury / autism link.

Dr Geier was a prolific author of sciency-looking papers, first on his own, then with young David as first author (David does not seem to have published anything without Dad). Thus they are prominent in the lists that circulate around the Anti-Vaxxosphere (which is a combination of Ouroboros and The Human Centipede) – lists of “X Peer-Reviewed Papers that PROVE that vaccines cause autism”. The Listomanic influencers who compile these lists know that their followers will forward them without ever noticing the duplicate, falsified and irrelevant entries. I blogged about this phenomenon once, relying heavily on the prior work of Liz Ditz and ‘Kathy‘, and here I am again indebted to their efforts.

Below, the level of defiance increases in two papers from early and late in the ‘decade of denial’. Pay attention to the 2005 artifact on the left, with Med.Sci.Monitor as its conduit; we’ll come back to it.

• David A Geier , Mark R Geier A two-phased population epidemiological study of the safety of thimerosal-containing vaccines: a follow-up analysis Medical science monitor (2005) 11(4): CR160-170 :: ID: 15878
• David A Geier, Brian S Hooker, Janet K Kern, Paul G King, Lisa K Sykes, Mark R Geier A dose-response relationship between organic mercury exposure from thimerosal-containing vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2014) doi: 10.3390/ijerph110909156 

Despite the confidence that rates of autism were already plummeting after the 2001-onwards reformulation of vaccines, below we find a different iatrogenic exposure to mercury being blamed as the cause of autism… this time it’s Rho(D) immune globulin, sometimes given to mothers to prevent Rh disease. One of the brands on the market uses thimerosal as disinfectant, so the Geiers were already laying the groundwork to continue the treatment and lawsuit-expert-witnessing income streams. Alert readers will notice that Mark Geier had diagnosed all the subjects as autistic himself before delving into his sock-puppet drawer to confer an ethical blessing on his treatment of them.

• David A. Geier , Mark R. Geier A Case Series of Children with Apparent Mercury Toxic Encephalopathies Manifesting with Clinical Symptoms of Regressive Autistic Disorders∗ Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health Part A (2007) doi: 10.1080/15287390701212141 
• David A. Geier , Mark R. Geier A prospective study of thimerosal-containing Rho(D)-immune globulin administration as a risk factor for autistic disorders The journal of maternal-fetal & neonatal medicine (2007) doi: 10.1080/14767050701228057 

This is a convenient point to introduce another member of the circensis personae: a certain Dave Weldon, Christian conservative physician and politician, erstwhile Congressperson as a Representative for Florida (what it takes to represent Florida doesn’t bear thinking about). In November 2024, Trump nominated Weldon to direct the Centers of Disease Control (CDC), presumably on RFK Jr’s urging, only to withdraw the nomination in March 2025.

Weldon responded with a Formal Statement of Butthurt which is quite amazing in its candour. I make no claim to a diagnosis of sanity myself, and my personality has been described as a bundle of psychotic symptoms loosely held together with duct-tape and #8 fencing wire, but at least I am high-functioning X (where X is yet to be determined) and I have the “Shut Up Smut” inner voice to remind me that some things do not need to be said aloud. Weldon’s Shut Up Dave filter isn’t working.

Weldon’s contribution to the present farce was to arrange an entrez for the Geiers into the Vaccine Safety Datalink, the VSD. This being an archive of patient records from a consortium of US health-provision / insurance companies, curated by the CDC on behalf of those companies, and only industry or government researchers had accessed the records until Weldon wielded political clout to get the Geiers into the ‘Research Data Center’ secure facility.

This was back in October 2003. The Geiers had obtained permission (and ethical approval) from the health-provider Kaiser Permanente (KP) to ask certain specific questions about possible adverse effects in infants who received the DTaP vaccine, within Kaiser Permanente’s sector of the archives. Now I don’t know how they intended to pose those questions, once they had run the gauntlet of security checks and armed guards and Maxwell-Smart-style corridors of sliding doors in order to enter the building. Perhaps they expected to meet a veiled oracle, enthroned in a rock-hewn chamber deep underground where the smoke of incense forms curtains in the air. Or a wise old tribal shaman who would enter an ecstatic trance by way of dancing and chanting and drum-beating. What they were not prepared for was a computer terminal, running SAS statistical software in command-line mode; so they had to call off the interrogation of the records and reschedule a second visit in January 2004.

For that repeat consultation they recruited a third stooge, Vale Krenik: a like-minded True Believer, vaguely acquainted with computers and their arcane arts, who spent two weeks learning the rudiments of SAS. And it emerged that the Geiers really planned to compare autism rates between recipients of disinfected and disinfectant-free DTaP vaccines: quite a different fishing expedition than the one for which KP had granted permission. Their request to broaden the data-trawling to other data-sets was turned down, but they tried it on anyway, with the third stooge camouflaging the purloined data as a command file in the hope of taking it away with them as their own program. They were caught, and evicted from the Sanctum Sanctorum without results or data. All described in detail here.

All this accounts for the curious features of “A two-phased population epidemiological study…” (2005) [earlier], which purports to show that autism diagnoses were dropping, as predicted by the Mercury hypothesis. The Geiers had keenly anticipated vindication from the VSD’s records… but their ineptitude in both the analysis and the theft of data tripped them up. So they went ahead with the paper anyway and simply stole results from “Safety of Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines: A Two-Phased Study of Computerized Health Maintenance Organization Databases” (Verstraeten et al. 2003) – to be more accurate, from a 2000 draft – samples are different but swathes of text and table after table of results are identical. Verstraeten’s 2000 draft was a preliminary version, deprecated by the authors when more comprehensive data reversed its conclusions. The Editor-in-Chief of Medical Science Monitor has been appraised of the piracy but his supine inaction will not surprise For Better Science readers.

Another outcome was that KP blacklisted the Geiers from future collaborations. It follows that all the subsequent Geier extrusions that claim to be based on KP data in the VSD are equally fraudulent – such as ‘A dose-response relationship…‘ (2014) [earlier].

Remarkably, despite the 2004 debacle, Weldon re-wielded his clout and the Geiers were allowed back into the VSD secure facility to access data a second time in 2006. Again they were escorted through the corridors to the Bridge of Death where the Bridgekeeper asked these questions three… one of the questions being “Did you steal data this time?”

More precisely, an unspecified ‘law firm’ that sponsored this 2006 data-trawl also provided the Geiers with a competent SAS programmer instead of their self-taught mate. This new software-wrangler was uneasy about some of the things that her clients were asking her to do (merging tables, extending the inquiry beyond its approved scope, etc.) and mentioned them to VSD management. So out they went.

We know all this from Robert Krazowski’s Declaration (19 January 2007) to the US Court of Federal Claims. A group of petitioners, convinced by the Mercury Militia that their autistic children had been injured by vaccines, wanted Special Master Hastings to compel the CDC to let the Geiers back into the Facility a third time; this time with freedom to do whatever they liked with all these health records that don’t belong to the CDC, none of these ‘IRB’ restrictions. Special Master Hastings read the law, and read the affidavits about the Geiers’ previous antics, and told the Petitioners to take a flying fuck at a moving doughnut.

Twenty years later, this unconcealed contempt for confidentiality of personal information must have endeared the Geiers to the post-industrial tech-lords whose data-pillage social-media and AI services are what the US has now instead of an economy. They share the view that privacy is a luxury that only they can afford.

One lesson to draw from this whole lamentable litany is that David Geier has no skills, no training, no scientific background (he did begin an MA at GWU but dropped out because the biochemistry was too rigorous). Even his administrative experience is limited to deciding how much to pay himself out of the family non-profit dark-money slush-funds like CoMeD, Genetic Centers of America, MedCon, ICI etc. It is as if Dr Mark Geier, aware of his failson’s inadequacy and worried how he would cope on his own, was trying to create a sheltered, secure niche for David when he added him as first author on so many papers. Dr Mark died in March 2025 (Reverend Lisa Sykes wrote the obituary) but he had the consolation of knowing that David is now embedded in the HHS as Senior Data Analyst answering to the Assistant Secretary for Financial Resources, even as entire limbs of that organisation are amputated elsewhere. Ready to benefit from the new policy of “We’re accessing your health records, citizen, because we can; go to the courts if you think that’s illegal, and how many militia do the courts have?”

David Geier is the ideal fit to the purposes of RFK Jr. For the only reliably loyal underlings are incompetent ones who know they have no future anywhere else. Competence breeds independence; the owner of valuable skills might take them elsewhere and is less indebted to the boss. I like to cite “Gambetta’s theory of the signalling benefits of incompetence in Italian academia” (shorter version: Two feudal Italian institutions, Academia and the Mafioso, have much in common), though Hannah Arendt probably put it better. All of which is to say, in order to prosper in a totalitarian state, the third demon to slay is ‘competence’.

Data point #2: RFK Jr’s ascension from Head of the Clowns to ringmaster of his own circus. It would be nice if this were a quid-pro-quo for the effort he invested in the Trump election campaign, but crime families are unclear on the concept of ‘gratitude’ and the obligations only flow uphill to the Don. RFK Jr’s employment is contingent on his continued usefulness to the operation and its goals.

Neither RFK Jnr nor the Trump administration would have hired Geier d.Ä., were he still alive. In some ways he was competent and that would make him unpredictable.

None of this would have been possible without all the work carried out over the years by Kathleen Seidel at her Neurodiversity blog, and Matt Carey at leftbrainrightbrain.

---