Not how science works

When RFK Jr announced that he’d be launching a study on vaccines and autism in the early days of his tenure as Secretary of HHS, it appeared certain that he plans on working backwards from the conclusion that the MMR vaccine does, indeed, “cause autism.”

The man has spent decades chipping away at public trust in vaccines while making millions of dollars from lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers. He founded the most influential anti-vax organization in the country—one that is laser-focused on spreading FUD about the current measles outbreak.

One that, incredibly, recently tried creating a CDC clone site.

A CDC clone website is filled with false and misleading vaccine claims against a backdrop of false balance. An NGO led by the current HHS Secretary until December 2024 is hosting content for the CDC clone. The domain realcdc[.]org currently redirects to this CDC clone, which is staged on chdstaging[.]org.

Kennedy took another step toward “proving” vaccines cause autism by assigning longtime anti-vaxxer David Geier to head up the “study.”

Geier, who was disciplined for practicing medicine without a license over a decade ago, has published flawed papers claiming to have found a vaccines-autism link alongside his father in the past.

It gets worse.

The disciplinary action came after the two men used a drug called Lupron, which is sometimes used to chemically castrate sex offenders, to “treat” autistic children. They were also charged with fraudulent billing practices and failure to maintain proper medical records.

David Gorski covered this malicious practice back in 2008:

Geier claimed that testosterone binds mercury from vaccines, making it more “toxic” to the brain and also making it harder to get rid of the mercury using chelation therapy. Never mind that the only paper showing testosterone binding to mercury did it in benzene (hint: your blood is not benzene) under extreme conditions. What was worse, however, was the Geiers’ “solution” to this problem, which was to add to the autism quackery known as chelation therapy another potentially harmful form of quackery, namely chemical castration using Lupron, a drug that shuts down the production of sex hormones, including testosterone. It’s a drug that’s used to treat metastatic prostate cancer, a treatment that replaced the old treatment for metastatic prostate cancer, namely surgical castration. (Not coincidentally, it’s also used to chemically castrate sex offenders.)

Now Geier will be running what is certain to be one of the most consequential research projects of our time.

The tragedy is we can see it coming straight at us: he’s going to discover a “link,” right wing media is going to share the findings without actually looking at the methodologies or digging into the evidence, and trust in vaccines will be further eroded.

Speaking of distrust, let’s turn to the organization that brokers in and monetizes it. The Children’s Health Defense’s newsletter hits my inbox every morning with more fear-mongering junk science.

Here’s just the first two of seven stories featured this morning:

The supposed “manipulation” is that the young girl in Texas didn’t die from measles, she died “with measles”—popular Covid jujitsu. CHD reports that she died from pneumonia after doctors failed to treat her with the right antibiotic. They never flag that measles can lead to secondary pneumonia, meaning that the girl wouldn’t have contracted the latter if not for the former infection.

Instead, they’ve weaponized the suffering of the parents, who were already in the anti-vax pipeline: they claimed three of their four children recovered from measles infection, so the death of their daughter must have been “god’s plan.” They also advised parents not to vaccinate their children.

Get ready for a whole lot more of this.

In between playing tennis with anti-vaxxer Novak Djokovic, hiking in Coachella Valley, and visiting his niece on the softball field, Bobby apparently had time to seek out Geier’s counsel.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of scientists, researchers, and students are scrambling as numerous HHS agencies cut off funding to essential projects. We’re about to lose an entire generation of scientists, from home and abroad, due to lack of opportunities to actually do science.

Since January, a rapid-fire slurry of executive orders have driven huge cuts to federal funding, hiring freezes, and thousands of layoffs across the research sector, with thousands more job losses expected. For students and graduates, the knock-on effect is a big reduction in opportunities to gain the experience and placements needed to enter and progress in the field.

Meanwhile, the MAHA movement appears ready to capitalize on their version of science: pick a conclusion you want, figure out how to get there, and rely on a weaponized media ecosystem to spread more fear and distrust.

Which is not how science works.

But is what happens when you put people not trained in science in charge.