Profiles · Autism · Vaccines

Mark and David Geier: From the AAPS Journal to HHS

A father and son who spent twenty years arguing that vaccines cause autism. Their first big paper ran in the AAPS journal. Courts rejected their testimony, Mark Geier lost his medical licence in every state over a hormone-blocking “autism treatment” for children, and David Geier was fined for practising medicine without a licence. In 2025 the US Health Secretary hired David to analyze the government's vaccine safety data.

By Terry Polevoy, MD · QuackeryWatch.com · October 2026

The AAPS papers

In Spring 2003 the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons published “Thimerosal in Childhood Vaccines, Neurodevelopment Disorders, and Heart Disease in the United States” by Mark and David Geier. Using reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), it claimed a link between the mercury-based preservative and autism. It drew press attention, and the American Academy of Pediatrics answered it directly. The paper, the AAP told doctors, misused VAERS data and “contains abundant conceptual and scientific flaws,” with omitted facts, inaccuracies and misstatements.

VAERS is a passive reporting system: anyone can file a report, and a report is not proof that a vaccine caused anything. The Geiers' method, counting reports and comparing them with doses, cannot separate cause from coincidence, lawyer-driven reporting, or the simple fact that older children have had both more vaccines and more time to be diagnosed.

In 2006 the journal ran a second Geier paper arguing that autism diagnoses had begun to fall after thimerosal was removed. They had not. Thimerosal was out of routine US childhood vaccines by 2001, and autism diagnoses kept rising, in California and nationally, for the next two decades. The Institute of Medicine reviewed the evidence in 2004 and rejected a causal link.

Both papers remain on the AAPS journal's website, jpands.org, in the Spring 2003 (vol. 8, no. 1) and Spring 2006 (vol. 11, no. 1) issues. AAPS has never withdrawn them. Its home page is aapsonline.org.

Vaccine court: “a professional witness”

Mark Geier testified for families in the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program for years. The special masters who hear those claims were not impressed. In October 2003 Special Master Laura Millman struck parts of his testimony in the Weiss case and called him “a professional witness in areas for which he has no training, expertise, and experience.” She listed nine earlier cases in which his testimony had been given “no weight”. In one, it was “not reliable, or grounded in scientific methodology and procedure”; in another, “of limited value to the court.”

Civil courts reached the same view. By 2006, by Barrett's count, Geier had testified in about 100 vaccine-injury cases that thimerosal caused autism. That year a federal judge in North Carolina, hearing a family's claim that the thimerosal in RhoGAM shots given in pregnancy had caused their child's autism, barred his testimony and dismissed the suit. Under cross-examination, Judge James Beaty wrote, Geier “could not point to a single study that conclusively determined that any amount of mercury could cause the specific neurological disorder of autism,” and his reading of the literature was “flatly contradicted by all of the epidemiological studies available at this time.” The judge noted that one special master had called him “intellectually dishonest.”

The Vaccine Safety Datalink, 2003–2004

The Geiers were approved, through the ethics board at Kaiser Permanente Northern California, to analyze records from the CDC's Vaccine Safety Datalink at its secure Research Data Center in Hyattsville, Maryland. The approved question was whether the DTaP vaccine raised the risk of fifteen listed adverse events. On 13 February 2004 the CDC's National Immunization Program wrote to Kaiser describing what its technical monitors had seen on the Geiers' two visits:

October 2003: “Instead, the Geiers compared autism rates” in children who had received thimerosal from DTaP with those who had not — an analysis they had not been approved to run.
January 2004: told that merging data sets was not allowed, they ran a program to merge them anyway, intended to hold “more than 8 million records,” which staff cancelled after 45 minutes. Merged files, the CDC said, “could have increased the risk of a breach of confidentiality.”
Before leaving, they renamed data files with the extension reserved for program files, which “would have allowed the external researchers to remove data files” from the centre. “Had it gone undetected, this would have constituted a breach of the rules about confidentiality.”

On 19 February 2004 Kaiser's ethics board suspended the project. Its letter of 25 February told Mark Geier that it viewed “with great concern the reported attempt to breach confidentiality,” and barred him and his co-investigator from Kaiser's data. The same year the Geiers told an Institute of Medicine panel that CDC data showed vaccines were linked to autism; scientists at the meeting pointed out that their analysis did not account for children's ages.

Lupron: “endangers autistic children and exploits their parents”

By the late 2000s the Geiers had a new theory: that testosterone bound to mercury and made it harder to remove, so lowering testosterone would help autistic children. Their treatment was Lupron, a drug used to halt precocious puberty and, in adult men, for chemical castration, at doses about ten times those used for precocious puberty, often combined with chelation. Testing cost about $12,000; treatment $5,000 to $6,000 a month, which, Geier said, insurance would cover once precocious puberty was diagnosed. The Maryland board alleged that he had misdiagnosed autistic children with precocious puberty to justify the drug; pediatric endocrinologists said the protocol had no scientific support.

Mark Geier described the result on the radio in 2006: Lupron was “99% natural,” and children treated for precocious puberty “not only lose their precocious puberty, they lose a good deal of their autism.” He told the Chicago Tribune in 2009: “We plan to open everywhere. I am going to treat as many as I can.”

The research was approved by an ethics board the Geiers set up themselves. Mark Geier founded the Institute of Chronic Illness around 2006; David Geier was its “Founder and Vice-President”; and both sat on its institutional review board, the body meant to protect research subjects. The Maryland board found it met neither federal nor state standards. Their company, ASD Centers, LLC, ran clinics in Maryland, Illinois, Indiana, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, Missouri, Kentucky and Washington.

On 27 April 2011 the Maryland Board of Physicians suspended Mark Geier's licence on an emergency basis. Its summary said his treatment “endangers autistic children and exploits their parents” and was “neither consistent with evidence-based medicine nor generally accepted in the relevant scientific community.” The board found inadequate informed consent, and that he had told at least one family his protocol had federal ethics approval. It reviewed nine autistic patients: in six, it said, he had inappropriately diagnosed precocious puberty and given Lupron; in three, inappropriate chelation. His own studies, it said, had been “wholly discredited by the Institute of Medicine and denounced by the American Academy of Pediatrics.” And while he was certified by the American Board of Medical Genetics as a genetic counselor, he had “falsely claimed to be a board-certified geneticist and a board-certified epidemiologist.”

April 2011 — Maryland: emergency suspension. Upheld on appeal March 2012; licence revoked August 2012.
After Maryland — Washington, Virginia and California suspend his licence (California in August 2011). Missouri and Illinois revoke it, 5 November 2012. All nine other states where he held a licence act on it.
2012 — Maryland charges him with violating the emergency suspension order.
12 April 2013 — Hawaii revokes his last US medical licence.
2012 — David Geier, who had been working alongside his father, is fined $10,000 for practising medicine without a licence, an amount the board tied to what he had earned from it.

Two postscripts. In 2013 the Geiers sued the lawyers who had run the autism cases in vaccine court for about $600,000 in fees, though they had not been experts in those cases; the court dismissed the suit, calling their conspiracy allegations “threadbare accusations.” And in 2017 a Maryland judge awarded the family $2.5 million because the board had published the names of patients and their drugs in a public order. That was a privacy ruling, not a finding about the treatment, and on 26 June 2019 an appeals court overturned the award in full.

2025: a desk at HHS

In March 2025 The Washington Post and NBC News reported that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had brought David Geier into HHS, where the staff directory listed him as a “senior data analyst”. Sources said he would analyze CDC vaccine safety data, including raw data from the Vaccine Safety Datalink he and his father had been barred from. Former acting CDC director Richard Besser called it a “deeply irresponsible choice.” Mark Geier died that same month.

Fourteen months later HHS was still not saying. On 21 May 2026 Mother Jones reported that the department had refused to describe his work, and that the contract Kennedy had promised senators in April had not been delivered.

What Stephen Barrett and NCAHF said

Dr. Stephen Barrett tracked the Geiers on Quackwatch for years, and posted the primary documents: the CDC and Kaiser letters, the RhoGAM ruling and the Maryland suspension order. His summary in “Dr. Mark Geier Severely Criticized” (2012) put the record in three lines: a special master's finding that he was “a professional witness in areas for which he has no training, expertise, and experience”; that “in 2004, Geier was ordered to stop a research project because of alleged improprieties in data collection”; and the Maryland order finding that he “misrepresented his credentials, operated an institutional review board that did not meet state and federal regulations, and rendered substandard care to nine autistic patients.” He also noted that David Geier ran MedCon, a medical-legal consulting firm helping vaccine-injury claimants seek money from the compensation program and through civil suits.

Writing up the RhoGAM ruling in 2006, Barrett was blunter: “There is no scientific evidence that mercury is a causative factor.”

When HHS hired David Geier, Consumer Health Digest, the weekly newsletter that grew out of the National Council Against Health Fraud and is now edited by William M. London with Barrett's help, reported it (#25-13, 30 March 2025): Geier, “who has no medical degree and who was once disciplined by the Maryland State Board of Physicians for practicing medicine without a license,” had been hired to lead an HHS study of vaccines and autism “despite dozens of previous studies showing no such relationship.” It quoted Dr. Paul Offit: “I think one can expect that with David Geier at the helm and Kennedy as head of HHS, we may soon see a study that shows that vaccines cause autism, even though they don't.” The Digest noted that the Geiers founded the Coalition for Mercury-free Drugs (CoMeD). In January 2026 (#26-04) it reported that the FDA had quietly deleted its page warning parents about bogus autism therapies, including chelation, and that Kennedy had hired “chelation promoter David Geier.”

Why it matters

The Geiers' story runs through every stage this site documents. A fringe journal gives a claim a citation. The claim is repeated in court and turned down. It becomes a treatment, sold to frightened parents at $5,000 a month. Regulators act, slowly, state by state. And then the claim's author is given access to national vaccine data by the government's own Health Secretary. The journal that published the first paper now holds a liaison seat on the CDC's vaccine committee.

Related on QuackeryWatch

Sources

Mark R. Geier and David A. Geier, “Thimerosal in Childhood Vaccines, Neurodevelopment Disorders, and Heart Disease in the United States.” Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons 8(1), Spring 2003. Archive: jpands.org.
“AAP: Study Fails to Demonstrate a Connection Between Thimerosal and Autism.” IZ Express no. 388, Immunization Action Coalition, 2 June 2003.
Stephen Barrett. “Dr. Mark Geier Severely Criticized.” Quackwatch, revised 11 July 2012 (the Weiss ruling, Case No. 03-190V, 9 October 2003).
Stephen Barrett. “CDC Warning Letter re: Dr. Mark Geier” (letter of 13 February 2004, posted 28 March 2005) and “KPNC Warning Letter re: Dr. Mark Geier” (letter of 25 February 2004, posted 15 April 2005). Quackwatch.
Stephen Barrett. “RhoGAM Autism Suit Dismissed after Judge Bars Testimony of Dr. Mark Geier.” Quackwatch, 11 July 2006, reproducing Doe 2 v. Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics, No. 1:03-cv-00669 (M.D.N.C., 6 July 2006).
Stephen Barrett. “Maryland Medical Board Suspends Dr. Mark Geier's License.” Quackwatch, 8 May 2011, reproducing the Maryland State Board of Physicians' Order for Summary Suspension (Cases 2007-0083, 2008-0454 & 2009-0308).
Consumer Health Digest #25-13 (30 March 2025) and #26-04 (25 January 2026), Quackwatch.
David Gorski. “Chemical castration of autistic children leads to the downfall of Dr. Mark Geier.” Science-Based Medicine, 9 May 2011.
“Mark Geier” and “David Geier.” Wikipedia, consulted 27 October 2026, and the licensing records they cite.
Steven Novella. “David Geier Fined.” NeuroLogica Blog, 14 August 2012.
“Geiers lose case against PSC.” Left Brain Right Brain, 20 October 2013.
David Gorski. “Antivaccine quack Mark Geier has not been exonerated.” Respectful Insolence, 6 February 2018; and Lead Stories, February 2020, on the 2019 reversal.
Erika Edwards and Brandy Zadrozny. “HHS taps anti-vaccine activist to look at debunked links between autism and vaccines.” NBC News, 26 March 2025.
Anna Merlan. “HHS Refuses to Say What an Anti-Vaccine Activist Is Doing at the Agency.” Mother Jones, 21 May 2026.

Licensing actions are taken from the public records and reports cited. The 2017 damages award, later reversed, concerned the board's disclosure of patient information and made no finding about the Geiers' treatment. Corrections are welcome and are recorded on the page.