First Thought, Worst Thought: Why David Geier Was RFK Jr.’s Pick to Lead His Autism Study

When pseudoscience meets power, it’s not about truth—it’s about control.

RFK Jr. chose a disgraced figure to lead a “national autism study.” This isn’t about science—it’s about control, eugenics, and silencing autistic lives. We were never broken. We don’t need fixing. We need justice.

Introduction

When the news first broke that David Geier had been appointed to lead RFK Jr.’s national “autism study,” I felt the floor drop out from under me. Geier is not just controversial—he’s been banned from practising medicine, fined for unethical conduct, and discredited by both the scientific mainstream and his own ideological peers. He is perhaps best known for “chemically castrating” autistic children using Lupron, a drug meant for prostate cancer and sex offenders. He holds no medical degree. And yet, despite this horrific legacy, he was the first person RFK Jr. thought of to lead a study that will reportedly involve creating a centralised registry of autistic people in the United States and collecting our data. The official purpose of the study hasn’t been clearly stated—but for those of us who’ve studied history, we know what comes next.

By the time you're reading this, Geier may already have been removed from the project—one can only hope. But that doesn’t change the fact that he was the first name that came to mind. That tells us everything we need to know. This wasn’t a careless appointment, or an admin error. It was a signal. A choice like this isn’t made by accident—it reveals the framework, the ideology, the roadmap. RFK Jr. didn’t want a scientist. He wanted someone who would confirm a belief he already holds: that autism is damage, that it has an external cause, and that those of us who are autistic must be studied, managed, or removed from the equation altogether.

We must not be lulled into thinking that incompetence is the greatest threat. This was never about rigour—it was always about narrative. The question isn’t just “Why David Geier?” The real question is: what does it mean that RFK Jr. thought he was the right person for the job?

Who Is David Geier? A History of Harm

David Geier has never held a medical licence. Yet for decades, he positioned himself as an authority in autism research, conducting invasive and dangerous procedures on autistic children under the guise of treatment. Working alongside his father, Dr Mark Geier—a physician whose own licence was later revoked—David helped promote one of the most disturbing pseudoscientific narratives in recent memory: that autism is caused by mercury toxicity from vaccines, and that the effects of this toxicity are exacerbated by testosterone. From this flawed and thoroughly debunked premise, they developed what they called a “treatment protocol”—but in reality, it was human experimentation.

The Geiers’ protocol involved administering Lupron, a powerful hormone-blocking drug most commonly used to chemically castrate sex offenders. They claimed that by lowering testosterone in autistic children, they could reduce the impact of mercury on the brain. There was no clinical evidence to support this theory, and certainly no ethical justification for administering such a drug to children—many of whom could not meaningfully consent. As someone who chairs an Independent Review Board (IRB), I have written extensively here about consent and the ethical obligations we owe to children and vulnerable populations. I can say with absolute certainty: the Geiers’ work should never have passed even a preliminary review.

The ethical violations here are staggering. Administering off-label hormone suppressants to children with no valid clinical indication. Failing to obtain informed consent—or, in many cases, securing it from desperate parents who had been sold a lie about “recovery” from autism. Using autistic children as test subjects for a theory rooted not in science but in fear, ableism, and profit. And what of the parents who enrolled their children in these trials? It’s a hard thing to ask, but a necessary one. What kind of desperation—what kind of internalised belief that their child is broken beyond repair—must lead someone to sign off on chemical castration? That is the legacy David Geier carries.

And still, in 2025, this person was RFK Jr.’s first choice to lead a new national autism study. Not someone with a track record of ethical inquiry. Not a neurodivergent-led research collective. Not even a licensed medical professional. He chose Geier—someone so thoroughly disgraced that even other vaccine-sceptical figures distanced themselves from him. His clinics were shut down. His research was torn apart in peer-reviewed journals. His name became synonymous with what happens when pseudoscience meets parental fear. And yet RFK Jr. didn’t just dust him off—he handed him the keys.

This choice is not just reckless. It’s revealing. The study in question is intended to create a registry of autistic people across the United States, along with our medical data. The stated purpose is murky—but the implications are chilling. Data collection without safeguards. Classification without consent. It’s a model we've seen before in history, and it never ends well for the marginalised.

If you want to know the ethics of this study, you need only look at its architect. And if David Geier is the blueprint, then we are not looking at science—we are looking at sanctioned harm.

The Geiers’ “Research”: Bad Science in Service of Eugenics

In 2005, David Geier and his father sat for an interview to publicly promote their central hypothesis: that autism is a form of mercury poisoning, and that testosterone acts as a kind of “magnifier” for the neurological damage. They proposed that thimerosal—a mercury-based preservative used in some childhood vaccines—was the root cause of autism, and that boys were more affected because of their naturally higher testosterone levels. From this grotesque logic, they developed a theory so convoluted and gendered that it sounded less like science and more like science fiction laced with eugenics.

Their argument went like this: mercury is toxic (true), thimerosal contains mercury (also true), therefore thimerosal causes autism (false). Then: testosterone enhances mercury’s toxicity in the brain (unproven), so boys suffer more severely (an oversimplification of a complex issue), and thus, reducing testosterone could reduce autism symptoms (dangerously speculative). On the basis of this junk logic, they proposed using Lupron—a hormone suppressant used to “chemically castrate” sex offenders—as a treatment for autism in boys.

This wasn’t science. It was desperation weaponised into a theory. And worse, it was a theory tailor-made to justify the most invasive kinds of interventions. It took root in a cultural context already primed to see autism as a tragedy and a toxin rather than a neurotype. And by offering a simple explanation—mercury and hormones—the Geiers provided exactly what many parents, and figures like RFK Jr., were desperate to hear: that autism wasn’t a natural variation but an injury. Something to be undone. Something to be extracted.

Their claims were never supported by robust data. They were widely discredited in both scientific and medical communities. But they didn’t need to be rigorous—they only needed to be convincing to the right audience. The Geiers didn’t publish high-quality research; they published propaganda wrapped in the appearance of science. And to this day, that pseudoscience persists. The testosterone-mercury link is still cited in fringe corners of the internet. The Geiers’ work lives on not because it’s valid, but because it offers a narrative—one that says autism is a fixable mistake, not a legitimate way of being.

This narrative has always been seductive to those looking to externalise blame, and especially to those seeking to profit from fear. And it’s a narrative that RFK Jr. has championed for decades. His books, his speeches, his lawsuits—all frame autism as an environmental injury, a public health crisis caused by corporate negligence. In that light, David Geier wasn’t an unfortunate choice. He was a perfect fit. His work, if we can call it that, already aligns with the outcome RFK Jr. appears to be seeking. He doesn’t need someone to investigate the truth—he needs someone to affirm what he already believes.

What the Geiers did wasn’t just bad science. It was eugenic in both form and function. It pathologised autistic bodies, medicalised gender variance, and cast neurodivergence as a condition to be treated with suppression, silence, and control. And now, in 2025, that same ideology is poised to shape federal policy under the guise of “research.” We have seen this before. We know where it leads.

Even the Fringe Said No: Deth (2012) and Internal Rejection

It says something when even your ideological peers—those working in the same controversial space—draw a line and say, this is too far. That’s precisely what happened in 2012 when Dr Richard Deth published a public rebuttal to one of the Geiers’ lesser-known but equally dubious theories: that autism might be linked to imbalances in B12 and cobalt. Deth, himself no stranger to fringe biomedical theories around autism, issued a scathing letter to the editor, calling out the Geiers’ work for what it was—methodologically unsound, biochemically incoherent, and entirely lacking scientific credibility.

What’s striking about this moment is that Deth didn’t come to bury the entire field of “environmental autism” research. He simply couldn’t abide the Geiers’ misuse of science. Their interpretation of biochemical pathways was not just speculative—it was dangerously wrong. The experiments they conducted to support their conclusions weren’t just flawed—they were unethical. And the fact that this critique came from someone within the same broader research ecosystem is what makes it matter so deeply.

When RFK Jr. champions David Geier as a misunderstood truth-teller, he leans heavily on the myth of censorship. He paints Geier as someone “cancelled” for daring to speak inconvenient truths, buried by Big Pharma and the medical establishment. But that narrative collapses under scrutiny. Geier wasn’t shut out by elites afraid of what he might uncover—he was rejected by his own allies for fabricating conclusions and endangering lives. He wasn’t silenced. He was discredited. And not by shadowy institutions, but by people like Deth who shared many of his suspicions but refused to abandon scientific integrity.

This matters to me on more than a theoretical level. I wasn’t vaccinated as a child. My diagnosis of autism came long before I received any of the routine immunisations now so often blamed for triggering neurodivergence. It wasn’t until 2020—during the COVID pandemic—that I finally received the full slate of modern vaccines. By that point, I had long known I was autistic. My neurotype wasn’t caused by anything. It simply was. And whilst I know personal anecdotes are not evidence, they are reminders of something essential: autistic people are not puzzles to be solved or pathologies to be traced. We are not the collateral damage of a medical mistake. We exist, and have always existed.

RFK Jr. doesn’t need Geier to conduct “research.” He needs him to confirm a belief. But even that belief is built on rubble. When the most sympathetic voices in the alt-biomed community have publicly rejected Geier’s work, there’s nowhere left to hide. This isn’t suppression. It’s accountability. And it’s long overdue.

Why Geier Was the First Thought

Of all the titles RFK Jr. could have assigned to David Geier, “Senior Data Analyst” might be the most chilling. It evokes the image of someone quietly working behind the scenes, sifting through vast datasets, shaping narratives through numbers. But David Geier is not a neutral technician. He is not a scientist in any meaningful sense. He is an operator—someone with a long and well-documented history of manipulating data, bodies, and public perception in service of a singular belief: that autistic people are not born, but broken. That we are damaged by vaccines, contaminated by chemicals, and in need of fixing—by any means necessary.

Geier’s entire career has been constructed around this premise. The so-called “studies” he conducted with his father weren’t open-ended inquiries. They were predetermined narratives searching for evidence—desperately cobbling together charts, anecdotes, and wildly speculative biochemistry to justify dangerous interventions. He was not testing a hypothesis. He was building a case. That distinction matters. It marks the line between science and propaganda. And RFK Jr. knows exactly what side of that line Geier stands on.

That’s why Geier wasn’t some obscure figure dredged up from a forgotten controversy. He was the first thought. When RFK Jr. set out to build a study and a data set—ostensibly to investigate the link between vaccines and autism—he didn’t look to ethical researchers, or to autistic-led inquiry, or to scholars who understand data ethics and disability justice. He reached instead for someone whose track record shows an absolute disregard for consent, rigour, and truth. Because RFK Jr. didn’t want a scientist. He wanted someone who already agreed with him. Someone who wouldn’t ask questions. Someone who would deliver.

This is what makes the “Senior Data Analyst” role so dangerous. Geier’s job isn’t to discover truth. It’s to construct it. To find patterns that support a foregone conclusion. To mine data from an autistic population he has never seen as fully human. His position isn’t advisory—it’s ideological. He is there to legitimise a belief, not to challenge it.

In that sense, Geier isn’t RFK Jr.’s colleague. He’s his avatar. His appointment reflects not an error in judgment, but a mirror held up to the project’s true intent. The study isn’t asking whether autism is injury. It’s seeking to prove it. And David Geier is the man tasked with running the numbers until they say exactly that.

Functioning Labels as the Smokescreen

RFK Jr.’s rhetoric around autism hinges on one of the oldest, most insidious tricks in the eugenics playbook: divide and devalue. His use of functioning labels—framing “low-functioning” autistic people as tragic, and “high-functioning” ones as inconvenient—creates a moral hierarchy of worth. It primes the public to see some of us as burdens, others as threats, but none of us as fully human. And it opens the door to interventions that would otherwise be unthinkable. Because once you believe someone’s life is a tragedy—or a mistake—you can justify almost anything in the name of “mercy.”

We’ve seen this strategy before. Hans Asperger himself carved out supposed “high-functioning” children for survival, whilst sending others to their deaths under Aktion T4—the German Reich’s regime’s extermination programme for disabled people. The language of utility, of social value, of burden and contribution, was used then too. It sounded clinical, even benevolent. Just as it does now when RFK Jr. speaks of “saving” autistic children from being institutionalised, unable to marry, unable to work. It is not a coincidence that this framing always leads back to containment, correction, or erasure. It always ends in the same place.

What’s different now is the machinery. In 1940, the Nazis had IBM. As Edwin Black has documented in forensic detail, IBM provided the punch card technology that made data-driven extermination possible. The company has never truly been held accountable. Today, companies like Palantir stand ready to inherit that mantle. Palantir’s systems have already been deployed by the IOF in Gaza and by the LAPD here in Los Angeles—used to surveil, predict, and pre-emptively suppress entire populations. Their software is fast, opaque, and ruthlessly efficient. And with a centralised autism registry in the works, they are the likeliest bidder for the contract. It is chilling to imagine what they could do with biometric data, behavioural histories, social media posts, and social patterns harvested from autistic lives.

In that context, David Geier’s past experiments don’t just become forgivable—they become logical. Necessary, even. When you’ve convinced the public that autistic people are poisoned, damaged, or fated for ruin, coercion starts to look like care. Suppression begins to look like safety. And data extraction begins to look like service. This is how eugenics hides in plain sight—not in the language of hate, but in the language of help. Not in blunt declarations, but in soothing reassurances that something must be done for our own good.

Functioning labels are not descriptive. They are directives. They tell the public who deserves empathy and who should disappear. They are the rhetorical foundation for a war against the very idea of autistic life. And now, in 2025, that war is being data-modelled, federalised, and dressed up as progress.

This Is Not Fringe—It’s Failing Up

David Geier should have remained a byword for scientific misconduct—a cautionary tale of what happens when unethical experimentation is allowed to masquerade as medical innovation. Instead, in 2025, he has been brought back into public life and handed a title—Senior Data Analyst—that sounds technical but is anything but neutral. He’s not crunching numbers. He’s constructing narratives. And that narrative is chilling: autism as injury, autistic people as contaminated, and surveillance as care.

What makes this resurrection all the more disturbing is who sanctioned it. RFK Jr., the heir to a family legacy deeply entwined with disability reform, has chosen not to build upon that legacy but to betray it. His uncle, President John F. Kennedy, signed the Community Mental Health Act of 1963, a landmark piece of legislation that marked the beginning of deinstitutionalisation in the United States. It was a profound shift—from isolating people with disabilities in remote, often abusive institutions to supporting them within their own communities. It was imperfect, underfunded, and unevenly implemented, but its intent was clear: a more humane and inclusive society.

That act was not born from abstract policy planning. It was born from lived experience. Rosemary Kennedy, JFK’s sister, was institutionalised and lobotomised in her early twenties—a punishment for being “difficult,” for not fitting the mould of acceptable womanhood in a patriarchal, ableist society. Today, we would likely understand Rosemary as perhaps intellectually disabled. Her life, and the violence done to it, shaped JFK’s understanding of the system’s failures. Her story pushed the Kennedy family to become advocates—not just for medical reform, but for dignity. Eunice Kennedy Shriver went on to found the Special Olympics, and the family helped establish the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, both grounded in a vision of inclusion.

And yet here stands RFK Jr., propping up a man who “chemically castrated” autistic children. Geier is not just unqualified—he is the antithesis of what the Kennedy family once stood for. His appointment is not a glitch. It’s a declaration. And it comes in the face of sharp condemnation from RFK Jr.’s own siblings and extended family, who distanced themselves from his presidential campaign in 2024 and denounced his conspiracy-driven politics. His choices are not only a break from science—they are a break from his family’s legacy of hard-won, if partial, progress.

This isn’t about autism. It’s about control. About leveraging public health not as a shield, but as a weapon. Geier’s return signals that the margins of extremism have not just crept inward—they’ve been invited to build the blueprint. And this isn’t a dog whistle—it’s a foghorn. It’s the loud, brash announcement that what was once fringe is now on the agenda.

What RFK Jr. is building is not “an autism study.” It’s a theatre of compliance, disguised as care. It is public health as a performance—one where surveillance replaces support, coercion replaces consent, and lives like mine are quietly written out of the script.

Final thoughts …

RFK Jr. didn’t stumble into this. He didn’t choose David Geier by accident or out of ignorance. He chose someone who has been discredited not only by the medical establishment but by his own peers within the fringe biomedical movement. Someone whose experiments on autistic children were so ethically indefensible that even those sympathetic to his broader worldview were forced to draw a line. That choice tells us everything we need to know about the kind of “study” RFK Jr. intends to run—and the kind of society he imagines.

It’s not a society grounded in inclusion, support, or dignity. It’s one where autistic people are tracked, categorised, and subjected to scrutiny not for our benefit, but for theirs. It’s a society where disability is still framed as defect, where functioning labels become ration cards for compassion, and where data becomes a stand-in for consent. It is a regression dressed up as innovation. A public health campaign built not on care, but on control.

We don’t need more research on how to fix autistic people. We were never broken. What we need—what we have always needed—are systems that stop recycling the same harms under new names. Systems that centre access, autonomy, and respect. Systems that listen to autistic people first, and do not mistake our refusal to conform for pathology.

Geier should have been left in history’s dustbin. RFK Jr. chose to pull him out, dust him off, and put him at the helm of a project that will shape how this country treats autistic people for years to come. Believe what this tells you. Because it is telling us something loud and clear: we are not meant to be studied. We are meant to be silenced. And that’s exactly why we must keep speaking.