Evidence of Harm by David Kirby

Author:David Kirby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2012-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

DR. MARK GEIER is the kind of guy you would want to have dinner with. Quick-minded and affable, with smiling eyes behind wire-framed glasses and a wicked sense of sarcasm, the geneticist and physician never shies away from speaking his mind, especially when the subject is vaccine safety.

Geier is president of the Genetic Centers of America, a private consulting firm in Silver Spring, Maryland. He received a Ph.D. in genetics and an M.D. from George Washington University. Geier was an early critic of the whole-cell pertussis vaccine and is an expert on the biological effects of vaccine-induced infant death. He has published papers in over thirty different peer-reviewed journals, including Annals of Internal Medicine and Rheumatology, on safety issues concerning hepatitis-B, rubella, pertussis, Lyme disease, rotavirus, anthrax, and smallpox vaccines.

His son, David, followed in his scientific footsteps, founding a medical-legal consultancy called MedCon. David Geier was a graduate student at the National Institutes of Health. Both men had testified before the VICP Vaccine Court on behalf of families. Mark and David do much of their vaccine investigative work out of their home, which is filled with medical documents and other papers.

Lyn met the Geiers in the fall of 2002, at a conference sponsored by the National Vaccine Information Center in Washington. The pair, who sometimes come across as a father-son science tag team, interrupting to finish each other’s sentences, had come to the meeting to present their findings from a vaccine safety study.

The two men had obtained access to another database maintained by the government, called the Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting System, or VAERS. Unlike the Vaccine Safety Datalink, the VAERS system only records problems that are voluntarily reported by doctors or parents. Because it is a “passive” reporting system, it is considered not nearly as reliable as the Vaccine Safety Datalink, which ostensibly records every adverse outcome. But the VAERS database does serve to at least identify, if not prove, associations between certain vaccines and their ill effects.

Mark and David Geier had compared adverse outcomes from the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccine (DTP) and its newer, safer cousin, the diphtheria-tetanus-acellular-pertussis vaccine (DTaP). DTP contains whole-cell pertussis, while DTaP uses a purified formulation, to reduce side effects like convulsions and high fever.

They had expected to find a higher rate of side effects from DTP than DTaP, but did not. What they did report, however, was a highly significant difference in adverse outcomes between DTaP vaccines that contained thimerosal and those that were preservative-free. This surprised them. For months, parents had been urging them to investigate vaccine mercury as a possible cause of autism and other childhood disorders, but the two men had ignored their pleas, writing off the allegations as little more than the emotional outbursts of distraught parents.

“Our initial reaction was, we didn’t believe it,” Mark Geier said at the vaccine conference that Lyn attended, “even when parents told us that the rise in autism coincided with a similar increase in the use of thimerosal-containing vaccines.” After all, television viewing had also risen significantly during the same period.

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