As we reported on August 23, Danish vaccine researcher Poul Thorsen is set to plead guilty in Atlanta, GA, on Tuesday, September 1, to federal charges that he stole over $1 million in CDC grant funding.
Given the multi-millions of dollars of fraud uncovered by DOGE, HHS and others over the past year-and-a-half, one could reasonably argue that Thorsen is just a sideshow, a minor player in a drama with a cast of thousands.
But Thorsen, who avoided United States authority’s moves to extradite him for over fourteen years while living in Denmark, deserves top billing. He’s much more than a minor thief.
In the early 2000’s, Thorsen scammed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by manipulating Danish health data in a broad scheme to conceal the link between autism and vaccines. His research, cited repeatedly, was pivotal in shaping public perception that vaccines absolutely cannot and do not cause autism.
While it remains to be seen what additional shoes will drop after Tuesday’s expected ‘guilty’ plea, many of the facts of Thorsen’s law breaking are emerging – and troubling.
Let’s start with Thorsen’s romantic relationship with his CDC supervisor, Diana Schendel. On May 14, 2009, epidemiologist Marshalyn Yeargin-Allsopp, to whom Schendel reported at the CDC, sent her a reprimand.
“It was noted,” Yeargin-Allsopp writes in an email, “that information of a sensitive budgetary programmatic nature was shared by you with the grantee (Dr. Thorsen). In addition, intense advocacy to the point of impartiality and a lack of objectivity on your part for the Denmark project has been witnessed by others and reported to your immediate supervisor . . . .”
People at the CDC knew that Schendel was in a relationship with Thorsen for years. As Yeargin-Allsop notes in her letter, it was “witnessed by others and reported to supervisors.”
Emails between Schendel and Thorsen, dating back to 2004 and republished by Children’s Health Defense, confirm what colleagues saw. “Dearest Love,” writes Schendel in one, from 2007. “It’s a bright and sunny day and I’m trying to avoid any stressful work . . .”
However, Yeargin-Allsop’s reprimand wasn’t just about an inappropriate relationship. People at the CDC working around Schendel had other concerns. It appears that she was involved, to some extent, in Thorsen’s financial fraud. Why did they say and do nothing?
The reprimand should be considered in the timeline that author James Grundvig exposes in Master Manipulator: The Explosive True Story of Fraud, Embezzlement, and Government Betrayal at the CDC, the 2015 book on Thorsen and the CDC.
Grundvig tells us that Thorsen started a research organization called North Atlantic Neuro-Epidemiological Alliance (NANEA), which he ran out of Aarhus University in Denmark, where he was a professor. Starting around 2000, Thorsen brought CDC grant money into Aarhus and, for a while, everyone involved was happy.
While running NANEA, Thorsen made sure his researchers produced the papers that the CDC needed to exonerate vaccines as a cause in the autism epidemic.
Thorsen also used NANEA as a vehicle to fuel his extravagant lifestyle. He threw lavish, boozy parties in Denmark.
We tend to think of scientists and researchers as quiet, introspective people wearing white lab coats and running experiments.
That wasn’t Poul Thorsen. He was a lothario and a party animal.
What kind of scientist was he? According to Grundvig, Thorsen had a poor work ethic and was an incompetent scientist.
One fellow researcher reported Thorsen to Aarhus but nothing was done.
The money flowed. The booze flowed.
His relationship with Schendel continued. And then the wheels came flying off.
Aarhus noticed financial irregularities and discovered Thorsen was double-dipping by also, allegedly, working as a full-time professor at Emory the elite, private university in Atlanta.
After terminating his contract, Aarhus issued a statement distancing itself from Thorsen, making it clear that he no longer had any relationship with the university.
What was Thorsen thinking? Two full-time professorships at two different universities separated by the Atlantic Ocean; running NANEA; and managing CDC grants?
Getting a professorship at Emory, which has close ties to nearby CDC headquarters, is no cakewalk. It’s a prestigious gig, winnable for someone either with a stellar record or the right connections. Since Thorsen lacked the former, it’s fair to assume the latter came into play. But that someone was likely not a mid-level CDC grant supervisor like Schendel. It had to have been done by someone with stature and influence.
Did someone at the CDC also help Thorsen in his double-dipping scheme? Was the Emory gig part of a covert payment for the research Thorsen carried out that so perfectly ‘confirmed’ no causal link between vaccines and autism?
Aarhus, which was under financial stress at the time, reported Thorsen’s activities to Danish law enforcement. In the U.S., authorities found that Thorsen was skimming money into his CDC Credit Union accounts.
Thorsen was criminally charged in Denmark for not paying taxes on the money he had taken from the CDC grant. Although those charges did not result in a conviction, they caught the attention of CDC officials. In April 2011, those officials finally indicted Thorsen on 22 counts of wire fraud.
So why the delay in reeling Thorsen in to justice in the U.S.? Did the CDC turn a blind eye to Thorsen’s case?
Could it have been because they needed Thorsen’s access to Danish health data, to get them out of the legal difficulties posed by families filing lawsuits alleging that the vaccines CDC recommended caused their children’s autism?
Thorsen pitched a solution to a crisis that vaccine manufacturers, the CDC and other public health organizations faced in the early 2000’s: legions of families reported that their children had regressed into autism after receiving childhood vaccines. They filed lawsuits in ‘vaccine court’ against the federal government. If the government lost and the vaccine trust fund was wiped out, the biggest pharma companies, including Merck, Pfizer, Sanofi-Pasteur, Glaxo-Smith Kline, and Eli Lilly, would be on the hook for billions.
For Big Pharma, Thorsen was a white knight on a stead, carrying a solution. So argues Kevin Barry, author of Vaccine Whistleblower: Exposing Autism Research Fraud at the CDC. As he explains, the CDC “was desperate to absolve vaccines as a cause for the increase in autism.”
According to Lyn Redwood, former president of Children’s Health Defense, a secret meeting among members of the public health and vaccinology communities took place in Simpsonwood, Georgia. She believes the reason for the meeting was for attendees to devise a plan to underplay research showing an alarming association between thimerosal and autism.
CDC was indeed desperate. Epidemiological research conducted by a Belgian scientist, Thomas Verstraeten, revealed an astonishing association between thimerosal and autism and other neurological disorders.
Thorsen proposed using Danish health and vaccination data to get CDC and their vaccine company partners out of the jam that Verstraeten’s research uncovered in U.S. health data.
In its break-neck race to exonerate vaccines as a cause for autism, CDC needed data from outside the U.S. As a Dane, Thorsen had access to such data, the Danish health data that no American scientist could get. He pitched a plan for the CDC to use it.
The rest is history.
Scientist Brian Hooker, co-author, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., of Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak, has called for the retraction of Thorsen’s research – not because of his criminal activities – but because the research is flawed.
“With thimerosal, Thorsen used different inclusion criteria from year to year to create the illusion that autism rates were going up after thimerosal was removed (from Danish vaccines). Indeed, the rates went down, not up,” Hooker writes.
Regarding the MMR vaccine and autism, Hooker adds, “Thorsen merely fudged numbers in the right direction to abolish the relationship between the MMR and autism.”
Hooker also addressed Thorsen’s financial crimes. “There’s no way in hell that others at the CDC didn’t know exactly what he was doing,” Hooker writes.
Hooker is 100% correct.
Yours truly was responsible for managing federal criminal justice grant money when I worked in a county government back in 2000. The federal supervisors I reported to were top-notch. They emphasized that money was to be spent on approved business and every dime was accounted for. They were readily available to answer questions and were always helpful. Reports were submitted regularly and reviewed thoroughly.
Contrast this to what happened at the CDC. Thorsen bought a car, motorcycles, and a house and, somehow, no one sounded the alarm.
How was that even possible?
CDC has a chain of command, like many federal agencies. The people who also should have caught on were copied on a Yeargin-Allsopp email to Jose Codero – Catherine Murphy, Coleen Boyle, and Yeargin-Allsopp herself – all in the CDC leadership chain.
These people could have known and, indeed, should have known that Thorsen went on a blitzkrieg spending spree and diverted CDC research dollars into his own pocket. The Yeargin-Allsopp letter of reprimand to Schendel indicates that a lot of people at CDC knew what was going on and reported it.
At some point, someone in authority at CDC should have called Schendel in and asked, “What do you know about your lover’s financial affairs? Where is all the money going?”
But no one at CDC acted and by the time CDC administrators did, the damage was done and Thorsen flew the coop to Denmark.
There’s ample evidence to suggest Thorsen saved the CDC’s vaccine program and vaccine manufacturers billions of dollars.
CDC had the research – if one could call it that – needed to deny the link between vaccines and autism. The families who filed claims in the vaccine court saw their children’s cases dismissed.
While a fugitive, Thorsen lived comfortably in Denmark, without a care in the world. He never looked back at the wreckage he left behind. Vaccine promoters like Paul Offit still cite Thorsen’s papers as proof that vaccines do not cause autism.
To this day, the media repeats, endlessly, that vaccines do not cause autism, never realizing that the claim is built on flawed research produced by a criminal, now in custody, under the stewardship of a corrupt cabal of government apparatchiks.
James Grundvig describes Thorsen in his book as a master manipulator. Grundvig is spot on – as he is on the fact that Thorsen could not have acted alone.
Thorsen is more than a thief. It takes a certain kind of depravity to live the high life while fabricating science to conceal irreparable harm to innocent children and ensure that more children will be harmed.
For two decades, Thorsen’s fraudulent studies helped federal public health authorities shut down anything other than genetic research into autism causality.
In the 20+ years that have passed since Thorsen partied his ass off and flimflammed his way to infamy, millions of children have been diagnosed with autism. And, until recently, the government agency responsible for protecting the health of Americans has never probed why.
That is Thorsen’s real crime.
And, as further investigation will reveal, he did not act alone.
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Additional Reading:
Breaking: Danish Vaccine Researcher Poul Thorsen Expected to Plead Guilty on Sept. 1
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.
Yes every one think Denmark is such a nice little cozy place where no one ever is corrupt. There is just so man things that goes unpunished when you have the right position here - it becomes more and more clear -
I could name many -- funny about the university distancing them self -- but DTU Danish technological University - fired Henrik Svensmark because his research disprove the co2 climate doom the politicians use to milk us all -- as in stealing our money and giving them to corrupt **** -- and it goes on and on.
These people have blood on their hands but the cops go hard after the little guy but the politicians bomb, kill and maim.
DOGE didn't really uncover much fraud at all. And most of their 'finds' that weren't misinterpretations or complete falsehoods, were already under investigation and/or audit - by the IG's that Trump fired on his first day.
Other DOGE "discoveries" were just small "woke" sounding grants and expenses that were always public knowledge, available for all to see at usaspending.gov -
Meanwhile, someone's been pardoning healthcare frawdsters left and right.