Senator Hassan Sets Secretary Kennedy Straight

At Wednesday’s hearing of the Senate HELP Committee, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was questioned by numerous committee members on the ongoing measles outbreak, drastic cuts in department staffing, cancellation of ongoing studies and clinical trials, the evisceration of public health programs, cuts to the elimination of programs to monitor children’s lead exposure, and, most pointedly, his statements and actions regarding vaccines, their ingredients, and their hypothesized risks.

In an exchange about vaccines with Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, Kennedy stated, “I am not going to just tell people everything is safe and effective if I know that there are issues”—“issues” loudly trumpeted by Children’s Health Defense, the nonprofit organization he founded for the purpose of disseminating research that purports to demonstrate that vaccines are riskier than the diseases they are intended to prevent.

The Chairman Sets Him Straight

After the Secretary stated that only the COVID vaccine had been subjected to placebo-controlled testing, Senate HELP Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy demurred:

The secretary made the statement that no vaccines except for COVID have been evaluated against placebo. For the record, that’s not true; rotavirus, measles and HPV vaccines have been, and some vaccines are tested against previous versions. So just for the record, to set that straight. Next, Senator Hassan.

The Senator Sets Him Straight

Then, New Hampshire Senator Maggie Hassan spoke. Her exchange with Secretary Kennedy bears repeating in its entirety, and a little commentary, too.

Senator Hassan: Thank you. Mr. Chair and Secretary Kennedy, thank you for being here. I’d like to start by talking about the current measles outbreak which I know is a concern for all of us here today. Two children in Texas have tragically died from measles this year, the first children to die from measles in our country in more than twenty years. Measles is almost completely preventable with the measles vaccine. As you know, it’s critical that families hear directly and clearly from healthcare leaders about how they can best protect their children. So, Mr. Secretary, I’d like to give you an opportunity to say clearly here today to any parents who are watching that the best way to protect their children from measles is to vaccinate them.
Secretary Kennedy: Yeah, I’ve said that that the best way to stop the spread of measles is through vaccination. I would say this: we have handled this measles outbreak. We get a measles outbreak every year, we’ve handled this measles outbreak better than any other nation.

Here, the Secretary minimizes the significance and threat of the ongoing measles outbreak by falsely stating that “we get a measles outbreak every year.” This year’s epidemic cannot be compared to previous outbreaks. Thanks to widespread vaccination against measles, in 2000, the CDC declared the disease virtually eliminated in the United States. Between 2000 and 2010, fewer than two hundred cases were reported each year; spikes in 2014 and 2019 were followed by a return to the average. However, in the first five months of 2025, measles has afflicted over 1,000 individuals, mostly children and teenagers who were unvaccinated or whose vaccination status is uncertain, and it continues to spread across the United States.

A Request for Commitment

Senator Hassan then challenged the Secretary to make an unequivocal statement encouraging parents to vaccinate their children against measles.

Senator Hassan: What I was interested in, you can say… what I asked you to do was to say straight to the camera, as you did on social media, that it is your position that the best way for parents to prevent their kids from getting measles is to vaccinate them. And that is your statement today.
Secretary Kennedy: I said that.
Senator Hassan: All right. Well, that is great, thank you.

Secretary Kennedy’s testy affirmation that he had stated that “the best way for parents to prevent their kids from getting measles is to vaccinate them” is also undermined by his hotly defended public assertions that the measles vaccine was never fully tested for safety (the inaccuracy corrected by Committee Chairman Cassidy) and that the measles vaccine contained “fetal debris,” and his statement that he would prefer to present the “pros and cons” of vaccines and let parents “do their own research“ rather than unequivocally recommend vaccination.

Scrutinizing a Staffing Selection

Senator Hassan then began to question the Secretary about his appointment of David Geier to lead a study of autism and vaccines.

Senator Hassan: Now, you lead the nation’s health department, so let me ask you a couple of questions. Do you think HHS should employ anyone who has endangered the health of children?
Secretary Kennedy: No.
Senator Hassan: You hired David Geier to lead autism research at HHS, an individual who fraudulently posed as a doctor and gave dangerous medications and medical tests to children with autism. According to the state of Maryland’s investigation, David Geier, who has no medical license or training, gave hormone blocker injections to children with autism who were as young as 8 years old, which the Maryland Board of Medicine said poses a substantial risk of harm. Secretary Kennedy, yes or no, will you fire David Geier?

Senator Hassan was correct in her assertion that the Maryland Board of Physicians found that David Geier had engaged in the unlicensed practice of medicine. Although it wasn’t established that he had administered injections to his and his father’s young research subjects himself, it was established that he had collaborated with his father in the promotion and administration of their jointly-patented “Lupron protocol” to autistic children in a manner that subjected them to substantial risk of harm, and that his responsibilities at his father’s practice included holding children down for injections.

Doubling Down

The exchange continued, with the Secretary growing as flamingly indignant about the Senator’s criticism of his new hire as if he were David Geier’s personal attorney.

Secretary Kennedy: First of all, what you’re saying is not true, and we did not hire David Geier to manage autism research at HHS.
Senator Hassan: So what is his job? What is his job, then?
Secretary Kennedy: You just said some very defamatory things about…
Senator Hassan: Well no, I…
Secretary Kennedy: … a person who by the way…
Senator Hassan: So, let me just be clear for the record…

The Secretary then directly accused the Senator of defaming David Geier. Senator Hassan remained firm.

Secretary Kennedy: Those charges, Senator, I am going to correct the record on this. You have defamed a person…
Senator Hassan: Let me tell you what, let me tell you what the record says, and then I will hear from you. Last week when Mr. O’Neill was here in his confirmation hearing, I submitted for the record the charge that the state of Maryland laid out. Now if you’d like also for me to submit to the record with unanimous consent today the findings of the state of Maryland, which fined him $10,000 for practicing medicine without a license–he does not have a medical license–and for providing and instructing and giving children hormone blockers. That is what the finding of the Maryland Department, the state of Maryland, its medical licensing board was, and I’ll submit that for the record, I hope with unanimous consent.
Secretary Kennedy: I’m assuming that you don’t know what I’m about to tell you or you wouldn’t say something that was so dishonest. You may or may not know that David Geier sued the American…
Senator Hassan: Oh I do know that; I do know that; that doesn’t change the findings, nor does it change the experience of the parents who testified.
Secretary Kennedy: That finding was reversed by a court and he was awarded $5 million against…
Senator Hassan: That is not true.

The Secretary Conflates

Secretary Kennedy seemed, for a moment, to conflate Mark and David Geier’s December 2012 lawsuit against the Maryland Board of Physicians with their September 2005 lawsuit against the American Academy of Pediatrics and the authors of Thimerosal-containing vaccines and autistic spectrum disorder, which raised questions about the provenance of certain data cited in the Geiers’ paper, Neurodevelopmental Disorders after Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines. In that exchange, Senator Kennedy became as irate towards Senator Hassan as Mark and David Geier had become towards the scientists who had critiqued their work twenty years ago. The Complaint in the 2005 suit repeatedly referred to Mark Geier and his 25-year-old son as if they were a single unit, of equal expertise and renown, so famous that the Pediatrics authors must certainly have been aware of their reputation, so notorious that the Pediatrics authors must certainly have intended to defame them, yet so vulnerable that even the most diplomatic criticism would imperil their shared professional trajectory.

As a consequence of dedicating substantial time and resources to serving as expert witnesses, the Geiers are dependent upon the compensation they receive as expert witnesses as a significant source of income.

…Defendants were aware (or should have been aware) when they published the Article that the Geiers will derive future income from those who would retain the Geiers to appear as expert witnesses in National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program proceedings and as expert witnesses in civil litigation

…It has been estimated that if thimerosal was determined to be a cause of the various neurological disorders, civil damages for the injury to hundreds of thousands of children could reach into the multiple billions of dollars, either paid for under the NVICP or in private civil litigation.

The suit was dismissed without prejudice due to their attorney’s health problems, but was never refiled.

What really happened

Nine years later, Mark and David Geier filed a lawsuit against the Maryland Board of Physicians. This action followed the online publication of a Cease and Desist order containing information about prescriptions written to Geier family members under Mark Geier’s license and their failure to promptly remove the Order from their website. In their complaint and at trial, Mark and David Geier alleged that the Board acted with malice and deliberately sought to humiliate them. The Board and its members sought to invoke their absolute immunity, and resisted disclosure of documents pertaining to their internal deliberations. However, Judge Ronald Rubin of the Circuit Court of Montgomery County, Maryland, was so outraged by the Board’s actions that he prevented defendants from rebutting charges of malice by announcing that he would “draw an adverse inference” from anyone who sought to invoke immunity or who benefited from someone else’s immunity.

Judge Rubin’s decision was highly prejudicial to the defendants; the Board appealed the judgment, and the Court of Special Appeals eventually reversed the lower court’s decision, including the finding of malice, which would never have occurred had the lower court respected the defendants’ immunity claims. Although some Board staffers may have been unprofessionally cheerful about the outcome of their case against Mark and David Geier, it is understandable that investigators who had gained in-depth knowledge of the unethical manner in which the Geiers conducted their research and medical practice would be gratified about having put a stop to it (if only temporarily). While the Board may have deserved to be excoriated for their lapses, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals held that the defendants were in fact entitled to immunity, and should not have been held at fault for raising that defense.

Return to the Fireworks Display

Senator Hassan: Now, let me let me ask you, so I just want confirmation. David Geier is still at HHS. I wrote you a letter ago and you have not responded.
Secretary Kennedy: Well, I apologize for that. That’s our bad, and I will respond. But David Geier is not managing autism research and…
Senator Hassan: What is his job?
Secretary Kennedy: …I never said that he was.
Senator Hassan: What is his job at HHS? This is somebody who gave parents the impression that he was a doctor and gave hormone blockers to children as young as eight, telling them that hormone blockers would somehow magically, magically help their kids with autism.
Secretary Kennedy: His father is a very, was…
Senator Hassan: His father is a doctor but he is not, and his father was not in the room and did not… and he faked his father’s signature, according to the state board of medicine.
Secretary Kennedy: And that ruling was overturned by a court. So what you’re saying is just wrong, it’s just a lie. They were actually… The court said that the Maryland Board of Physicians was guilty of actual malice in fabricating those charges against David Geier.
Senator Hassan: Well, we will pursue this.

The Pursuit of Accuracy

Let us pursue this here with some facts. Following lengthy evidentiary hearings and appeals, the Maryland Board of Physicians revoked Mark Geier’s license to practice medicine, and sanctioned David Geier for practicing medicine without a license. Although both Mark and David Geier appealed the rulings, they were both unsuccessful. The ruling by the Circuit Court of Montgomery County, however, did not address these disciplinary rulings, let alone overturn them, and the Court did not rule that the Maryland Board of Physicians had “fabricated” their extensively substantiated charges against David Geier.

Senator Hassan: Last, and I will submit for the record…
Secretary Kennedy: So, do you want to know why we brought David Geier in?
Senator Hassan: Sure.
Secretary Kennedy: Because it wasn’t to run autism research. In 2002, David, the… The CDC runs a Vaccine Safety Datalink, which is supposed to be the vaccine information for the biggest HMOs that are supposed to allow CDC to have a surveillance system for vaccine injury. It’s a backstop system. The CDC will not let any physicians in there to look at it or any independent scientist…
Senator Hassan: He’s neither a scientist nor a physician.
Secretary Kennedy: Right. Congress ordered CDC to open it to the Geiers, so they are the only scientists who have ever been in there.

Disregarded Protocols

The Secretary was correct in asserting that Mark and David Geier had previously been allowed to conduct research with the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), a program in which a consortium of managed care organizations share anonymized patient data for vaccine research. In 2002, after being pressured by Congressman Dan Burton to allow “independent researchers” to study the VSD, Mark and David Geier received approval to conduct their work at the secure Research Data Center in Hyattsville, Maryland. However, that work was cut short after the Geiers committed multiple breaches of research protocol. According to the CDC staffer responsible for Institutional Review Board oversight of researchers:

The researchers asked how to merge datasets across studies to create a composite data file. They were told the files were not set up for such a merger and that such a merger was not part of the approved analysis. Nevertheless, the researchers ran a program which attempted to merge datasets, and the visit ended with a cancellation of an SAS program that has been running for more than 45 minutes and was intended to have more than 8 million records in it (according to the programmer).

By attempting to merge data files, the researchers would have created more complete medical records on subjects, and if so, could have increased the risk of a breach of confidentiality.

External researchers are provided with a copy of their SAS programs at the conclusion of their visit to the RDC. On this occasion, the external researchers attempted renaming data files with the “.sas” extension reserved for program files. This would have allowed the external researchers to remove data files from the RDC, contrary to the rules of the RDC. The violation was detected and only the correct files were ultimately released. The programmer stated that the files were created by mistake.

A second trip by Mark and David Geier to the RDC, made in 2006 at the behest of the Petitioners’ Steering Committee (PSC) for the Omnibus Autism Proceeding, yielded a similar result. As one PSC motion put it,

The CDC and the MCOs [Managed Care Organizations] refused to allow the researchers involved in those ongoing studies to combine the datasets for multiple vaccines, and in August 2006 the CDC terminated the ongoing research by those investigators, seized work product already generated, and barred ongoing access to the VSD by the researchers.

What happens when you practice to deceive

In their reply to this self-serving characterization, attorneys for HHS clarified that,

The PSC further fails to reveal the true nature of the course of events: that its researchers had sought approval from the MCOs to alter their study design by combining datasets; that the MCOs did not approve the request; that the researchers combined the datasets anyway; and that when the RDC staff learned that the researchers were acting outside the scope of their IRB approved protocol, the RDC staff followed the instructions of MCOs and barred the unapproved work.

More detail comes from the Declaration of Robert Krasowski, the RDC staff member responsible for oversight of researchers working with data from MCOs. According to the declaration, following their arrival at the RDC, Mark and David Geier sought to modify their research protocol to expand the number of vaccines for which they could search, and to link datasets so that they could conduct searches across multiple vaccines. They were granted the former request and denied the latter. Then, the SAS programmer who was assisting the Geiers got to chatting with an RDC staffer, who in turn got to chatting with Mr. Krasowski, who was told that the Geiers had lied to their programmer about their research protocol and the permissible scope of her work.

When my colleague told me about analyses being performed, I recognized that searches across datasets were being conducted. I spoke with the programmer about the work she was performing, and she indicated that she had specifically requested a copy of the protocol from the Geiers and they had stated that there was none. Rather, they had informed her that there were no restrictions on the analyses she could do. Finally, she stated that, had she known of the parameters of the protocol, she would have never attempted analyses across datasets.

Mr. Krasowski then inspected the dataruns generated by the SAS programmer, which revealed that Mark and David Geier were attempting to do exactly what they had been expressly prohibited from doing—to search for outcomes across datasets. On August 16, 2006, The MCOs responsible for safeguarding their patients’ data terminated the Geiers’ access. In his Declaration, Mr. Krasowski concluded:

Although the PSC alleges that the CDC simply “terminated the ongoing research by [the Geiers], seized work product already generated, and barred ongoing access to the VSD by the researchers”  these actions were taken in response to the Geiers’ violation of the MCO-approved protocol and the express conditions of their access to Data Sharing Program data.

The Omnibus Autism Proceeding tests cases were dismissed in 2009 and 2010, not due to Mark and David Geier’s inability to conduct litigation-driven research at the VSD without violating their approved research protocols, but due to petitioners’ counsels’ inability to demonstrate that their clients’ autism was a result of vaccinations.

Three-time offenders?

Mark and David Geier may even have been booted from the RDC a third time. In a 2015 talk at a conference of the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology (an organization involved in anti-amalgam litigation), David Geier complained in a conspiratorial tone about their access to the VSD being cut off again, sometime in the then-recent past.

We have had access for many years now to a database called the Vaccine Safety Datalink or VSD database. This is a database that’s kept by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or CDC. It’s completely secret from the public. We’ve waged a campaign with lawyers, with parent activists and even members of Congress to see this data and we’ve had an opportunity to examine it quite thoroughly and be able to publish the first independent research examining this database.

And just add a neat little corollary: since we’ve been doing this, CDC is now, or the people affiliated with CDC in this database have now suspended our access to the data because we continue to publish data showing a link between mercury and vaccines and autism. They think that that’s been completely debunked and the science that we’re doing is no good, so they’ve suspended our ability to see it yet again.

Although David Geier alleged that the suspension of his and his father’s research was the result of the machinations of a shadowy cabal opposed to their published findings, the more likely explanation would be yet another attempt to merge datasets and otherwise disregard their IRB-approved research protocol.

For the Record

Senator Hassan: But again, Mr. Geier is not a scientist. Thank you.
Secretary Kennedy: Independent scientist.
Senator Hawley: Okay. Senator Hassan’s time’s expired, but before we move on, did you have a unanimous consent request that I heard in there, Senator?
Senator Hassan: Senator Hawley, I did—a unanimous consent request for the printout of the website that shows Dr Geier is in… not Dr Geier, that’s his father, Mr. Geier is employed, and also a unanimous consent request for the finding from the board of licensing in Maryland.
Senator Hawley: Without objection to both of those.

A Few More Fact-Free Moments

Senator Hawley then afforded the Secretary a few more seconds to fulminate:

Senator Hawley: And now, Mr. Kennedy, before we get to my time, do you want… if you’d like to finish your response, go ahead and I’ll recognize myself.
Secretary Kennedy: David Geier is the only living independent scientist who’s seen the VSD inside. There’s been a lot of monkey business with the VSD, including allegations of fraud. And he was hired by an independent contractor, not as an HHS employee but by an independent contractor, to look at the documents that we were getting to the VSD to see if they conformed with what he saw between 2002 and 2016. And that’s the only reason that he was brought in: to see if there was… There’s so much information that has disappeared from that database, the only way we could find out what information disappeared was because he was the one guy who saw it.

Secretary Kennedy provided no support for his assertion that “there’s a lot of monkey business with the VSD,” or for any allegations of fraud that have been made against HHS staff or MCOs responsible for safeguarding patient data, or for any allegations that data has “disappeared” from the VSD. Mark and David Geier’s shenanigans at the VSD are supported by contemporaneous documentation, and plenty of whining about the consequences in their published presentations. MCOs have no legal or moral obligation to approve access to their patient data by anyone who repeatedly fails to respect the legitimacy of rules and procedures intended to protect patient confidentiality.

The Secretary’s statement that David Geier is not an HHS employee is belied by the entry in the HHS Employee Directory, now entered into the hearing record, indicating that he is.

Senator Hassan Has the Last Word

Senator Hassan: And just let the record show he’s not a scientist. Thank you very much.

Many thanks to Senator Hassan, and to every member of the Senate HELP Committee who confronted Secretary Kennedy on his reckless insistence on undermining confidence in vaccines, and on his reckless elevation of the wholly unqualified David Geier to a potentially influential role at HHS. There are plenty of American citizens who have paid enough attention to developments in the field of vaccines and autism to know exactly what sort of “science” he is likely to produce. As former head of FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Peter Marks stated in a recent interview on Face the Nation:

What I think we can expect is the expected: that there will be an association determined between vaccines and autism because it’s already been determined. This is not how science is conducted.