That vaccines do not cause autism is well-established. Scientists long ago debunked attempts to link the two, pushed back against the tide of misinformation and conspiracy theory, and countered the false narratives, "vaccine detox" supplements, therapies, and other grifts.
Nonetheless, Donald Trump's Department of Health and Human Services is going to waste countless dollars "researching" this connection, and they've chosen David Geier, a noted "vaccine skeptic," to lead the analysis. IFL Science quotes Jessica Steier, who heads up the nonprofit organization "Science Literacy Lab," who stated: "This is a worst-case scenario for public health. . . It's a slap in the face to the decades of actual credible research we have." She also stated that David Geier, who is listed as a "data analyst" in the HHS employee directory, and his father Mark—who have published multiple papers falsely claiming that vaccines increase the risk of developing autism—have "demonstrated patterns of an anti-vaccine agenda."
Geier is not a physician and only has an undergraduate degree. He and his father have a long history of peddling anti-vaccine disinformation, and were both disciplined in Maryland in 2011. David was charged with practicing medicine without a license and his father Mark got his license suspended for, as the Washington Post states, "allegedly putting autistic children at risk." The Washington Post further explains:
The Maryland Board of Physicians said Geier worked with his father using a hormonal drug therapy for prostate cancer and early-onset puberty to treat autistic children. Autism experts say the treatment is unproven and based on the debunked link to mercury in vaccines.
The Washington Post explains why hiring David Geier to head up a new "study" that will try to find links between vaccines and autism—links which, again, have been debunked over and over—is being denounced by scientists:
Public health and autism experts fear that choosing a researcher who has promoted false claims will produce a flawed study with far-reaching consequences. They fear it will undermine the importance of the lifesaving inoculations and further damage trust in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The government's premier public health agency has stressed vaccination as the safest and most effective measure to control the spread of some contagious diseases, including the growing measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico.
"It seems the goal of this administration is to prove that vaccines cause autism, even though they don't," said Alison Singer, president of the Autism Science Foundation, a nonprofit organization that funds autism research. "They are starting with the conclusion and looking to prove it. That's not how science is done."
And if you need to hear it one more time—vaccines do not cause autism, and we do NOT need to waste more money on yet another study about the issue. Here's a great overview of the numerous studies showing no connection between vaccines and autism and that specifically debunk some of the main false ideas underpinning most of the disinformation about vaccines and autism, including (1) that autism is caused by preservatives like thimerosal (it doesn't cause autism, and it's not even in vaccines anymore), and (2) that autism is caused by an immune response to the MMR vaccine (it's not—this idea was based on a critically flawed "research" study conducted by Andrew Wakefield and published in The Lancet in 1998, which was later retracted by the journal). Stat News concludes:
Scientists have responded to each of these arguments with many separate studies that both examined the mechanisms by which vaccines could allegedly cause autism and the broader question of whether children were more likely to develop autism if they had received vaccines. Again and again, the answer has been that they don't.
Share it with your anti-vax friends or relatives, please. I wish someone would share it with the folks heading up public health in the US, but something tells me they just don't care about scientific truth.
