EBD Blog

Judge Stuart R. Berger of the Circuit Court for Baltimore City (MD, US) barred testimony by Mark Geier in a case based on the idea that thimerosal in a vaccine causes Autism. Depending heavily on expert testimony by Dr. Geier and others, Jamarr Blackwell’s parents sued the vaccine maker, Wyeth. On 21 December 2007 Judge Berger found that Dr. Geier’s epidemiological research did not employ “generally accepted epidemiological methods” and that his methods of differential diagnosis are “fundamentally flawed.”

The case is reminiscent of an earlier case involving Dr. Geier in which his expertise was also dismissed. More on that after a quick review of this case.

The plaintiffs allege that their son, Jamarr Blackwell, was injured in 1985 and 1986 by, among other things, the thimerosal preservative in FDA-approved vaccines manufactured by Wyeth. The plaintiffs maintain that the injuries suffered by Jamarr Blackwell were proximately caused by the administration of various childhood vaccines containing the preservative thimerosal, the composition of which contains mercury.

Defendant Wyeth has sought to preclude plaintiffs’ proposed experts from offering testimony on general causation under both a Frye-Reed analysis, and separately, under Md. Rule 5-702. The plaintiffs, as well, have moved to exclude certain defense experts and various expert testimony.

Dr. Geier was one of only several experts whose expertise was questioned in this case. Without going deeply into the others’ problems in this case, it’s instructive to focus the reasons for dismissing Dr. Geier’s claims of expertise. Here are the two major reasons for rejecting his testimony:

1. Based on Institute of Medicine’s reports from 2004, the court found that the generally accepted view is that Autism is caused by genetic anomalies, not by thimerosal in vaccines. Judge Berger found that Dr. Geier’s “epidemiological studies purporting to show an association between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism were not conducted in accordance with generally accepted epidemiological methods” and that his “studies provide no competent evidence of causation.”
2. Dr. Geier claimed to make a differential diagnosis by using methods that are not generally accepted in the area of differential diagnosis: Dr. Geier’s method “of differential diagnosis is fundamentally flawed, because he improperly ‘rules in’ thimerosal as a potential cause of autism, and he cannot rule out the high likelihood that autism in any given individual was caused purely by genetic factors that do not require an environmental trigger.”

As I noted earlier in this entry, this is not the first time that Dr. Geier’s expertise has been discounted. In a North Carolina suit that contended that a child’s Autism was caused by thimerosal injections given to the child’s mother during her pregnancy with the child, another jurist found his expertise too questionable to permit it as evidence. As reflected in the folloing extract from that June 2006 post, in that case Judge James A. Beaty, Jr., issued a Memorandum Opinion about Dr. Geier’s credibility as an expert witness in the matter:

In pages 8-22 of his analysis, Judge Beaty systematically explains why he would not allow Dr. Mark Geier’s testimony. He found that Dr. Geier’s methods for establishing that thimerosal in RhoGAM could cause autism did not met the Daubert standard. In addition, Judge Beaty found that Dr. Geier’s assertion that the injections given to “Jane Doe” specifically caused the Doe child’s autism, because Dr. Geier did not have the expertise to perform a differential diagnosis nor did his diganostic study sufficiently rule out other possible causes of the child’s autism.

In the North Carolina case, the decision was based on the Daubert analysis (the experts do not qualify as experts or that they used junk science to obtain the data on which they base their claims of expertise). In this case, the legal standard that was applied is call the Frye-Reed test. “Under the Frye-Reed test, a party must establish first that any novel scientific method is reliable and accepted generally in the scientific community before the court will admit expert testimony based upon the application of the questioned scientific technique” (see Frye v. United States, 293 F.1013, D.C. Cir. 1923).

According to a Maryland case that makes the Frye-Reid standard applicable, the party that recommends an expert’s testimony to the court has the burden of proving that the expert’s testimony meets this test. In this case, the responsible party was the legal team representing Jamarr Blackwell and his parents. They clearly picked the wrong experts for proving this.

One can obtain a PDF copy of Judge Berger’s holding in Case No: 24-C-04-004829. Kathleen (as usual) has an informative entry at neurodiversity.com. Link to my entry on the North Carolina case.