David Geier, a senior data analyst at the Department of Health and Human Services, has researched vaccines for years.
A researcher hired this year by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is working with other scientists to recover data missing from a vaccine safety system, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on June 7.
David Geier, the researcher, is working on recovering Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) data that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said are missing, Kennedy wrote on social media platform X.
“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,” Kennedy said.
The CDC and Geier have not responded to requests for comment.
VSD is a system involving the CDC and 13 health care sites, including six Kaiser Permanente organizations. The project carries out research on vaccine safety. The CDC and its partners regularly publish papers based on data from VSD, such as a May paper that they said found no link between COVID-19 vaccination and miscarriage.
Geier’s hiring by the HHS has drawn criticism, with Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) writing in a letter to Kennedy that Geier “lacks any scientific qualifications” and noting that he was found to have practiced medicine without a license.
Geier, who does not have any medical degrees, was found in 2012 to have practiced medicine in Maryland without a license while working for the practice of his late father, who was a doctor. He was fined $10,000 by the Maryland State Board of Physicians, which declined to adopt an administrative judge’s recommendation that the case be dismissed.
A Maryland judge later determined that the board acted unlawfully in the case and awarded millions in damages to the Geiers.
An appeals court later overturned the decision with regard to a tort claim, finding the board members enjoy absolute immunity, but did not rule on the conclusion that the board acted with malice.
