In her faithful recitation of Big Pharma’s talking points, @WSJ @l_e_whyte parrots the defamation that an @HHSgov contract researcher David Geier was disciplined by the Maryland Board of Physicians for practicing medicine without a license. Whyte’s exercise in character assassination is part of the vaccine industry’s 23-year crusade to discredit Geier and his father, Dr. Mark Geier, an internationally revered physician and scientist, whose only crime was publishing a series of peer-reviewed research papers linking mercury in vaccines to neurological injuries in children. The Maryland Board’s inquisition against the Geiers was part of that vendetta. While Whyte’s characterization of the Maryland Medical Board’s disciplinary action against Geier is technically true, Whyte chose to omit some important context: Here is the whole truth. In 2011, the Maryland Board of Physicians brought charges against David Geier for the unlicensed practice of medicine because he had occasionally assisted his father when Dr. Geier treated challenging children with autism. The Board alleged no harm to nor complaints from patients. The Board’s own appointed Administrative Law Judge who presided over the court proceedings with attorneys, witnesses, and evidence, found David Geier innocent of all charges. Nevertheless, the Maryland Board of Physicians, without additional evidence or court proceedings, took the unprecedented step of overturning their own Administrative Law Judge, summarily declaring David Geier violated the Maryland Health Occupations Article. In response, David and his father filed a civil case in Maryland State Court against the Maryland Board of Physicians for violating their civil rights. During a lengthy trial, the Maryland Board of Physicians prosecutor and the lead investigator apologized to Geier in open court for engaging in unprofessional misconduct in their official capacities. The presiding State Court judge, Ronald Rubin found the prosecutor, investigator, and multiple members of the Maryland Board of Physicians acted with “actual malice” against David Geier and awarded the Geiers $2.5 million in compensation and an additional $2.5 million in legal fees. The Maryland Appeals Court later reversed the damages judgment finding that the defendants were absolutely immune from civil actions, but the court did NOT overturn the findings of malice. Liz Whyte chose to ignore this judicial exoneration of the Geiers in her biased reporting. David Geier has an extensive background as a research scientist. He has published nearly 200 studies in peer-reviewed academic journals as well as medical textbook chapters, and other publications, and has made numerous invited presentations regarding his scientific research at prestigious worldwide academic conferences including two presentations to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences on the topic of vaccines. Liz Whyte calls Geier a “vaccine opponent” and an “anti-vaccine activist.” But David Geier has never been anti-vaccine. To the contrary, he has published numerous studies supporting the use of routine vaccines. To bolster her case, Whyte quotes Dr. Walter Orenstein, the longtime former Director of CDC’s National Immunization Program, saying “[David Geier] has no record in the scientific community of doing valid work.” Yet in 2019, Orenstein himself positively peer-reviewed Geier’s study validating measles vaccine effectiveness, commenting, “The authors are to be commended for undertaking this study and the research should be very helpful.” A few of Dr. Geier’s studies have revealed inconvenient facts about the use of mercury in American vaccines. These offenses precipitated the vicious campaign to vilify and marginalize the Geiers. These sorts of public persecutions and gaslightings are now familiar to thousands of doctors and scientists who asked questions about COVID vaccines. Among those targeted for similar abuse are Dr. @NIHDirector_Jay Bhattacharya, @DrMakaryFDA, @DrOzCMS, and CBER Director Dr. Vinay Prasad, all of whom help me run this Department. I brought Geier into HHS specifically because of his unique expertise on the Vaccine Safety Datalink. The CDC maintains the VSD at an annual cost of approximately $20 million as a tool for surveillance of vaccine injuries. In 1999, an in-house study of the VSD by CDC showed an alarming and elevated risk for autism and other neurological diseases among children receiving certain vaccines early in life. The CDC in-house researchers found an astronomical increased 11.35x risk in one run of the raw data and reduced that in a subsequent iteration to a still frightening 2.68x increased risk by unethically altering study protocols. CDC has repeatedly claimed to have lost the critical data underlying that research. Those alarming findings prompted CDC to terminate the VSD data sharing program and take draconian steps to prevent outside researchers from ever again accessing the VSD. Beginning in 2001, CDC created an architecture of byzantine rules to block independent scientists from access. CDC also disaggregated the VSD data and put it under control of private corporations to further ensure that it could never be studied by external researchers. In 2002, the U.S. Congress Government Oversight Committee ordered CDC to allow Dr. Geier and his son to access the VSD data, which the agency maintains at enormous expense to the U.S. taxpayers. In extraordinary acts of insubordination, CDC repeatedly refused that Congressional order. When a frustrated Committee Chair, Representative Dan Burton, threatened to come personally to the CDC’s Research Data Center (RDC) in Hyattsville to force the CDC to allow the Geiers to examine the data, the CDC responded that it would repel the Chairman with armed guards. After two years and multiple Congressional subpoenas, CDC officials finally allowed the Geiers access. However, CDC continually obstructed the Geiers’ ability to actually study the VSD. Among a long retinue of manufactured impediments, CDC assigned a pair of burly monitors to oversee the Geiers’ every movement. Government health officials whited out data before handing data sets to the Geiers. They forced the Geiers to review data in a windowless room heated to over 90 degrees Fahrenheit. They gave the researchers computers with no instructions on how to use them and no user interface. They wiped the Geiers’ hard disks and destroyed their hard drives when the researchers temporarily left the study room. Ultimately, CDC officials sent letters to the HMOs that now controlled the data, falsely accusing the Geiers of misusing the data. This is a scandal that the Wall Street Journal should consider investigating rather than Ms. Whyte’s knee-jerk defense of agency and corporate corruption. With help from Congress, the Geiers spent a decade in and out of the VSD banging heads with CDC stonewallers. Despite all of CDC’s efforts, they published 19 articles based upon their findings. In 2005, the Institute of Medicine took testimony regarding the Geiers’ ordeal and issued a scathing 140-page report with 27 recommendations for CDC to guarantee public access to the VSD. The CDC implemented none of these recommendations and continued to fight to keep the Geiers out of the VSD. As a result of CDC’s efforts, David Geier is the only living independent researcher to have had access to the VSD. HHS has now contracted Geier to advise other scientists on how to find the “lost” data and reaggregate the VSD datasets so that HHS can depersonalize them to protect patient privacy and make the “lost” datasets available on a public-facing website to any scientist who wants to study them. All future HHS studies on vaccine safety and effectiveness will be replicable. Whenever possible, we will depersonalize the data to protect patient privacy and make the data publicly available. Our protocols for all our in-house @NIH, @CDCgov, and @US_FDA studies will be published in advance. Everything we do will be transparent and replicable. This is our best strategy for restoring CDC’s historic commitment to gold-standard science. This is how we will revive public trust in our public health agencies.