A meeting of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and anti-vaccine campaigner David Geier with leaders of the country’s most robust database that tracks vaccine safety was abruptly canceled on Wednesday, just hours before they were likely to discuss using the data to investigate whether there is a link between autism and the national childhood vaccine schedule, according to a person who had been invited to attend.

Decades of research show that vaccines do not cause autism . Nevertheless, Kennedy hired Geier to reanalyze data that he and his father worked with in the early 2000s to try to find such a link, which Geier has long espoused. The duo quickly lost access to the Vaccine Safety Datalink in 2004 after managers of the database learned they were pursuing a research question

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