Poul Thorsen Engineer of CDC Vaccine/Autism Cover-up Pleads Guilty Today. Poul Thorsen, the Danish researcher the CDC hired almost 30 years ago to prove that vaccines do not cause autism, is scheduled to plead guilty today in the federal courthouse in Atlanta to a variety of charges related to more than $1 million he stole from US taxpayers. Thorsen was indicted on embezzlement and money laundering charges in 2011 but continued to live openly in Denmark, working as a professor at a Danish university, and continued to publish medical research papers. He was finally arrested in 2025 while traveling through Germany and extradited to the US. Bad as his financial crimes are, Thorsen’s real crime was producing a series of bogus research papers for the CDC intended to absolve thimerosal, a mercury-based biocide used to prevent contamination of multiple dose vaccine vials, and the measles/mumps/rubella (MMR) vaccine of any causal role in autism. The key thimerosal paper will be discussed in this article, Thimerosal and the Occurrence of Autism: Negative Ecological Evidence from Danish Population-Based Data. In the following days we will look at the MMR paper, and more recent papers that contradict Thorsen’s papers. The research papers Thorsen and his crew produced are still highly influential in the autism/vaccine war and were cited by the CDC in a 2020 court stipulation among the 20 papers they relied upon to make unequivocal claims that vaccines have no association with autism, even though they only studied one vaccine, MMR and one vaccine ingredient, thimerosal. Google Gemini describes Thorsen’s thimerosal paper as, “highly influential and serves as a major foundational pillar in global public health.” Denmark, like most developed countries, stopped using thimerosal in 1992. The US stopped using thimerosal in most vaccines a decade later, but it is still found in multidose influenza shots that are legal in most states for infants and pregnant women. The thimerosal paper was commissioned in part as a result of the work that Belgian epidemiologist Thomas Verstraeten did in the late 90s on an internal CDC study that found that children who received thimerosal containing vaccines at birth, such as the hepatitis b shot, had 10 times more autism than children who did not. Verstraeten’s findings were the subject of a secret meeting of vaccine industry leaders held at the Simpsonwood Center in 2000 to decide what to do about the findings. The transcript was leaked, which you can read here. The premise of the paper is simple. They claimed to measure the autism rate among Danish kids who got thimerosal in their shots to those who did not. If the autism rate went up after they stopped using thimerosal, then it proved that thimerosal does not cause autism. They did their study and came to this conclusion: “The discontinuation of thimerosal-containing vaccines in Denmark in 1992 was followed by an increase in the incidence of autism. Our ecological data do not support a correlation between thimerosal-containing vaccines and the incidence of autism.” But the paper has several issues: The paper claims a real increase in the Autism rate in Denmark during the test period. Admitting a real increase in the autism rate is medical heresy in the United States. A real increase means autism is not an inherited disorder and that something in the environment has changed that is causing more autism. The US autism research program has spent almost three decades doing everything they can to avoid determining it there is a real increase in autism. No mention is made of changes in diagnostic criteria, nor better case finding, the standard excuses used in the US to evade admitting the rate has gone up enormously. But there it is, when useful the vaccine industry will admit the autism rate is going up. They compared apples and oranges At the beginning of the study, they counted only children who had been hospitalized with autism. Beginning with 1995, they included all children diagnosed as outpatients with autism in Denmark, a number the paper acknowledges is 4 to 6 times higher than the earlier period. Insufficient information is provided in the paper to determine what impact comparing two completely different populations has on the outcome. The study is not reproducible Denmark does not allow outsiders to access their database of children’s health records. Unreproducible studies are generally acknowledged not to have scientific validity. The CDC has not released the data used in the paper The data sets used in research paid for by the federal government are the property of the American people, and we have a right to see them. Despite many requests for the datasets, the CDC has never released them. The only data in the paper on the numbers of children affected are illustrated in the crude graph below. The year 2000 autism rate in the US is more than 10 times higher than Denmark The graph above shows an autism rate in Denmark for 7–9-year-olds of slightly less than 5 in 10,000 children or about 1 in 2000. The first numbers from the American Autism and Developmental Disability Monitoring Network (ADDM), the survey that measures the autism rate among 8-year-olds that is announced every two years, were released in 2000 and that showed a rate in the use of about 1 per 150 children. More than ten times higher than Denmark, how are these rates even comparable? Conflicts of interest Most of the Danish researchers were employed by the Statens Serum Institute, the for-profit, government-owned vaccine monopoly in Denmark that made the vaccines they were studying. The CDC itself is the largest purchaser and distributor of vaccines in the US with an organizational mission of maximizing vaccine use. The paper was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics; the American Academy of Pediatrics is the largest organization of vaccine retailers in the US. The paper makes no claims about the effect of higher doses of thimerosal The paper concludes, “Our data cannot, of course, exclude the possibility that thimerosal at doses larger than used in Denmark may lead to neurodevelopmental damage.” And we know that American children were on average exposed to much higher doses of thimerosal during the 1990s that were Danish children. Danish children received 125 μg of mercury in their vaccines from 1970 through 1972, according to the paper. According to the Institute of Medicine Immunization Safety Review Committee, “Under the 1999 recommended childhood immunization schedule, infants could receive a cumulative dose of mercury from vaccines as high as 187.5 μg during the first 6 months of life, depending on the specific vaccines and administration schedule used. A 2-year-old could receive as much as 237.5 μg of mercury. Also, in 1999, some high-risk children could have received the influenza vaccine, increasing the maximum cumulative dose to approximately 275 μg in the first two years of life.” Note that this does not include mercury exposures after age 2. Thorsen has far more to answer for than his theft of money. He was instrumental in the ongoing cover-up of the epidemic of serious neurological injuries caused by vaccine reactions. Hopefully, whatever deal he cut with the prosecutors will include complete cooperation with revealing who, what, how and why the fake research was produced.