RFK Jr. Says Analyst Working to Find Lost Vaccine Safety Data

David Geier, a senior data analyst at the Department of Health and Human Services, has researched vaccines for years.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies on Capitol Hill on May 14, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

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.

Geier has for years researched vaccines with his father, including data from VSD. They have testified several times to the Institute of Medicine about their research. Now known as the National Academy of Medicine, the organization in a 2005 report recommended broader access to VSD data. Kennedy said the CDC did not adopt the recommendations and has fought to keep independent researchers from accessing data from the system.

“As a result of CDC’s efforts, David Geier is the only living independent researcher to have had access to the VSD,” he said, before describing the work Geier is doing.

“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,” Kennedy stated.

Kennedy defended Geier’s hiring during a congressional hearing in May, during which Hassan called on him to fire Geier.

Kennedy said then that Geier was hired as a contractor because “there’s been a lot of monkey business with the VSD, including allegations of fraud.”

Geier is listed as an HHS senior data analyst in the department’s employee directory. HHS has not yet delivered employment records for Geier that The Epoch Times requested through the Freedom of Information Act.

An HHS spokesperson declined to provide evidence to support Kennedy’s assertions concerning VSD. Instead, the spokesperson told The Epoch Times in a recent email that VSD “is virtually unusable for serious research” and that the department is building new surveillance systems.