Viewpoint: Here’s a backgrounder on the anti-vaccine quack RFK, Jr. has drafted to prove vaccines cause autism

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The longer President Donald Trump and his lackeys, particularly his Secretary of Health and Human Services, longtime antivax activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., are in power, the more and more US federal science policy and infrastructure descend into a Lysenkoist dystopian hellscape. …  I must admit that I did not foresee how low RFK would go, just how hard he’d scrape the bottom of the barrel of antivax “researchers” to find someone to provide him with his long-sought study showing vaccines to cause autism. He chose David Geier.

Even worse than David Geier’s scientific and medical incompetence is his lack of ethics. … Specifically, they set up a fake research “institute,” named the Institute for Chronic Illnesses,” complete with a fake IRB to rubber-stamp their clinical “research” and oversee the ethics and human research subject protections of protocols as though it were a real IRB, rather than filled with Geier cronies.

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[David Geier] and his father are hardcore antivax, have published all sorts of statistically incompetent analyses of data from various databases, made money representing parents who thought that vaccines had caused their child’s autism, and are so unethical that they were “trailblazers” in setting up a fake research institute with a fake IRB. … Indeed, I have to wonder if, deep down in his heart, RFK Jr. actually does realize that there’s no scientifically demonstrable link between vaccines and autism. After all, if he really believed there is a link, wouldn’t he want to use the best science to look for it?  … Hiring David Geier is the sort of thing that you do when you want a preordained result.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here

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