ROCKVILLE, Md. • Mark Geier built a medical practice in Rockville, Md., and a national reputation for propagating the discredited theory that vaccines cause autism. The Maryland Board of Physicians suspended his license seven years ago because he was treating autistic children with a drug considered dangerous for young people and not known to alleviate symptoms of the disorder.
But the regulators who stripped Geier's credentials are now in the hot seat, ordered to each personally pay tens of thousands of dollars in damages by a judge who says the board abused its power in an attempt to humiliate the doctor and his family.
The board posted a cease-and-desist order on its website in 2012 alleging that Geier had improperly prescribed medication for himself, his wife and his son while his license was suspended. In an unusual move, the order named the drugs in question. Online critics of Geier took notice, mocking the doctor and his family in blogs and comments for their use of the medications.
The Geiers say Maryland regulators publicized those details for vengeance, to punish a doctor with unconventional ideas. State officials say it was an honest mistake.
But Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge Ronald Rubin sided with the Geiers, awarding them $2.5 million in damages. He called the order a significant breach of medical privacy and accused the board and its staff of failing to preserve emails related to the case and pleading ignorance about the order on the witness stand.
"If their testimony were to be believed, which the court does not, it is the worst case of collective amnesia in the history of Maryland government and on par with the collective memory failure on display at the Watergate hearings," Rubin wrote in a December opinion.
He ordered 14 board appointees, the board's lead attorney and the lead investigator on the Geier case to pay half of the damages out of their own pockets, between $10,000 and $200,000 apiece, depending on their net worth.
A spokeswoman for the state health department, which oversees the board, says the agency tries to balance privacy with a responsibility to inform the public of risks.
The defendants, who are appealing the decision, mostly declined to comment or did not respond to interview requests. Three of them told The Washington Post that the judge's version of the facts was wrong, and accused him of coming down too hard on volunteers who were donating their time.
"I felt Judge Rubin had a bone to pick with the Board of Physicians. Some of the stuff he came up with is outlandish," said Jonathan Lerner, who left the board last year. "He set the tone for the future that no one else would want to serve on a board."
Raquel Coombs, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Attorney General's Office, which represents the board, said of the ruling: "We believe there are serious errors in both the facts and the law and will vigorously pursue those on appeal."
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Mark Geier developed a national following — and drew widespread criticism — for espousing his belief that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative formerly used in childhood vaccines, contributes to autism.
(Geier opened eight autism treatment centers across the U.S., including in St. Peters and Springfield, Ill., but faced disciplinary action after running into trouble in Maryland. He lost his license to practice medicine in both Illinois and Missouri in 2012, the Post-Dispatch reported.)
The move follows similar disciplinary actions in at least nine other states.
Multiple medical groups and judges dismissed his research as seriously flawed, and the vaccine-autism link has been repeatedly debunked. But a growing movement that sees vaccine requirements as an intrusion on parental rights has taken hold in California, Texas and other states, emboldened by President Trump's embrace during the 2016 campaign of the discredited vaccines-and-autism link.
Public health experts consider "anti-vaxxers" as a grave threat to one of the most significant medical developments in human history. Some Facebook users share Geier's videos to urge against flu shots, even amid the worst flu outbreak in nearly a decade.
But it was Geier's treatment of autistic children that caught the attention of the Board of Physicians in 2006.
Geier believed mercury from vaccines caused early puberty, aggression and symptoms of autism, and that suppressing testosterone with the drug Lupron — which is approved to treat prostate cancer, endometriosis and fibroids, but also is also used to chemically castrate sex offenders — would reverse those effects.
No credible medical research showed this treatment to be effective for autism, the Board of Physicians noted. The board suspended Geier's medical license in 2011 and revoked it the next year, citing his methods and saying he had misrepresented his credentials. Several other states also revoked Geier's medical license, and regulators targeted his son for practicing medicine without a license.
Maryland officials continued to track Mark Geier's activities, according to the lawsuit the Geiers filed in 2012.
Much of the case records remain under seal. But Rubin's order shows that board staff were tracking blogs and news articles chronicling Geier's downfall, mocking him and his son in emails and reveling in their humiliation.
When they got a tip that Mark Geier may have still been prescribing medication, they vowed to look into it. Before holding an evidence hearing, board attorney Victoria Pepper drafted the cease-and-desist order.
Rubin described the decision to name the drugs in the order as an extraordinary breach of privacy for an agency that should know better than anyone else the importance of confidentiality in the medical profession. He pointed to emails sent later on during the probe as evidence of the board's motivation to embarrass the Geiers.
Pepper referred derisively to the Geiers as "Daddy G" and "Baby G" in emails to Josh Shafer, the board investigator leading the probe of the Geiers.
"Maybe we can help make it a bad month" for the Geiers, Shafer wrote back, using a derogatory reference to the drugs they were using.
