According to published reports, Danish vaccine researcher Poul Thorsen will plead guilty on September 1, 2026 to federal charges that he stole over one million dollars in grant funding he received from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Thorsen is accused of using Centers of Disease Control and Prevention money, earmarked for autism research, for his own purposes; the Danish-born researcher was studying the possible link between vaccines and the rise of autism rates.
Charges against him raise questions about whether he was deliberately falsifying vaccine data to ‘prove’ that vaccines do not cause autism and have nothing to do with the rise of autism in the United States.
The news was first reported on Saturday in the Danish newspaper, Berlingske.
On May 7, Thorsen was returned to the U.S. in custody, 15 years after he fled to Europe to avoid arrest here. He was arrested by authorities in Germany on his way back from a vacation in Austria. According to Georgia authorities, Germany agreed to extradite Thorsen. He’s being held in Atlanta, Georgia, where he’ll enter his plea.
“The next court proceeding is a change of plea hearing, which is scheduled for September 1,” U.S. attorney Nathan Kitchens told Berlingske. “It is expected that Mr. Thorsen will plead guilty at this hearing.”
The guilty plea will be yet another chapter in the twisted story of one of the nation’s longest running criminal and fugitive investigations into a man who directed research that vaccine promoters have continued to defend – despite revelations of corruption by Thorsen, whose research organization produced the studies.
In April 2011, Thorsen was indicted by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General on 22 counts of wire fraud. He has been a wanted man ever since. The article details how the Danish government denied an earlier attempt by the U.S. to extradite Thorsen.
Thorsen, who had been working as a gynecologist at a medical practice in Middelfart, Denmark, for years dodged arrest until Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became Secretary of HHS in 2025 and re-invigorated efforts to bring him to justice.
Thorsen purchased a house in Georgia, two cars, and a motorcycle. He also used the agency’s money to build his organization, the North Atlantic Neuro-Epidemiology Alliance (NANEA). Thorsen is reported to have once rented a medieval castle in Denmark to throw a boozy catered party for NANEA staff.
As of this writing, it is not clear who in the CDC looked the other way on Thorsen’s extravagant expenditures. But it is known that he had an intimate relationship with a CDC administrator who was assigned to supervise his work.
The purpose of NANEA’s research was to take health data from Denmark – not the United States – to conduct studies to determine whether vaccines were behind the rise in autism in the U.S.
Under Thorsen, several articles claiming to exonerate vaccines in the rise of autism were published in scientific journals in the early 2000’s. The articles were used by the CDC and other medical organizations to support the claim that vaccines do not cause autism.
However, Thorsen’s studies have been described as ‘flawed’ by Dr. Brian Hooker in a recent Childrens Health Defense interview. “He [Thorsen] is a crook through and through,” Hooker said during the CHD interview. “All of his papers should be retracted, and all the research should be revisited.”
When it was released, Thorsen’s research was enormously valuable to the CDC because 5,000 families had filed claims against the Secretary of HHS in the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (the VICP, otherwise known as the ‘Vaccine Court’), alleging that vaccine injuries triggered their children’s autism.
According to author and investigator James Ottar Grundvig (Master Manipulator: The Explosive True Story of Fraud, Embezzlement, and Government Betrayal at the CDC), Thorsen traveled freely around Denmark and all of Scandinavia, despite his fugitive status.
On Sunday, Grundvig told The MAHA Report that Thorsen’s guilty plea is “a huge victory for justice in the generation-long controversy.” He continued, “CDC hired mercenary scientists, here and abroad, to cook data on MMR and thimerosal studies, to erase the autism signals in vaccine research. They were desperate to keep the trust in the myth that vaccines are ‘safe and effective.’”
Grundvig noted that Thorsen could be imprisoned for the rest of his life as each of the 22 Wire Fraud counts carries a penalty of one year of jail time.
Instead, he hopes Thorsen will make a deal “to expose the collusion and fraudulent science” for which he believes Thorsen and others were responsible.
“I suspect that more legal action is to be taken against his co-conspirators, later this fall,” Grundvig said.
While many questions remain unanswered, what’s clear is that research, cited by old school public health authorities to exonerate vaccines for the rise in autism, can now be considered tainted — in need of a full and transparent investigation.
Related Reading:
Danish Fugitive Poul Thorsen, a Vaccine Researcher, Is Extradited to the U.S. Will his Autism studies finally be retracted?
On May 7, 2026, Dr. Poul Thorsen was flown, wearing handcuffs and in federal custody, from Germany to the U.S. He’s the Danish scientist the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) employed in the 2000s to exonerate thimerosal-containing vaccines, and the MMR vaccine, from the rise of autism in the United States.
Diverted funds 2006 to 2008. Bought himself a house, a Honda, an Audi. Nothing to do with papers he coauthored back then. Whatever.
He did fraud so he'd be perfect for a high-level trump position. But it was like 17 years ago, so he's out of practice.