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A former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) scientist who played a crucial role in research rebutting any link between vaccines and autism is expected to plead guilty next week to wire fraud and money laundering.
Poul Thorsen, 65, is finalizing a plea deal with prosecutors relating to charges stemming from a 2011 federal indictment, Nathan Kitchens, assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, told The Defender.
Thorsen, who began working for the CDC in the late 1990s, faces two counts of wire fraud and nine counts of money laundering related to over $1 million in CDC grant money. The funds were earmarked for autism and public health research, but Thorsen allegedly used them to buy a home, two cars and a motorcycle.
Kitchens declined to comment on whether Thorsen will plead guilty to all or some of the charges.
Thorsen has been held in federal custody without bail since his extradition from Germany to the U.S. in May. The case is being heard at a federal court in Georgia, where the CDC is headquartered.
Researcher James Grundvig, the parent of a child with autism who was vaccine-injured, called the expected guilty plea “a very big deal.”
Grundvig, who wrote “Master Manipulator: The Explosive True Story of Fraud, Embezzlement, and Government Betrayal at the CDC,” which focused on the Thorsen case, praised U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for extraditing Thorsen “in record speed.”
He said Thorsen likely understands that the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice have “all the goods” to prosecute him.
“I guess Thorsen’s realizing, since he’s in American jail already and has no chance for bail, he might as well make a plea deal,” Grundvig said.
Dr. Dave Weldon, a physician and Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives between 1994 and 2009 — and who President Donald Trump nominated to lead the CDC in late 2024 before retracting his nomination in March 2025 — welcomed the plea agreement but said it isn’t enough.
“It would be a miscarriage of justice if a plea deal failed to include a thorough investigation of allegations of scientific fraud,” Weldon said.
Danish independent vaccine safety researcher Vibeke Manniche, M.D., Ph.D., said some of the federal funds Thorsen is said to have misused may have been intended for vaccine-autism studies. Manniche said the guilty plea calls Thorsen’s research into question.
“An obvious question is whether he also has been cheating with data to achieve the results he sought,” Manniche said. “That we don’t know. A good rule in gold-standard science is replication, and it would be wise, for so many reasons, to replicate his work,” independently of the institutions Thorsen had been affiliated with.
Grundvig noted that the Thorsen indictment included unnamed co-conspirators, suggesting that the investigation may implicate more people — and also the controversial autism research that Thorsen helped publish in 2002 and 2003 that was cited as proof of no link between vaccines and autism.
“I think that’s going to be the second part of the story,” Grundvig said. “It could be an avalanche of bad news for both pharma and the CDC.”
Thorsen studies cited in dismissing over 5,000 vaccine injury claims
Despite questions around how those studies were conducted, the Madsen-Thorsen papers were used in 2011 to dismiss over 5,000 claims filed by the parents of autistic, vaccine-injured children. The claims were part of the Omnibus Autism Proceeding pending before the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.
In “Master Manipulator,” Grundvig — whose son’s case was one of the claims dismissed as a result of Thorsen’s research — described Thorsen as “a world-class villain whose manipulation of health data gave CDC and big pharma what they wanted: a report clearing thimerosal of any possible role in the autism crisis.”
According to Weldon:
“The real crime is not absconding with research dollars, but unresolved allegations around his research which served as the basis for the CDC and the U.S. government dismissing vaccine injury claims by thousands of injured children. These actions set back vaccine safety research by more than two decades.”
Grundvig suggested the Thorsen investigation and his guilty plea may call into question the dismissal of the omnibus cases, as it would “then make all of those vaccine omnibus proceedings completely fraudulent because it was based on a fraud, and that should reopen the cases.”
Hooker, whose omnibus claim for his son was also dismissed, said Thorsen likely didn’t act alone in misusing federal money or misrepresenting vaccine-autism research — and that the role of some of his key collaborators should be examined.
“There should be a separate investigation against Dr. Diana Schendel, who was Thorsen’s direct grant supervisor and lover and approved all of his invoices for expenditures from his CDC grant money. Dr. Schendel undoubtedly knew of Thorsen’s activities but did not report them to the authorities and could have spent some of the stolen grant money as well,” Hooker said.
Schendel maintained an inappropriate romantic relationship with Thorsen and later accepted a position at Denmark’s Aarhus University to lead autism research there. She remains employed at Aarhus University — and at Drexel University — today.
Thorsen continued to live in Denmark for years after the 2011 U.S. indictment. He worked there as a gynecologist despite an extradition treaty between the two countries and an INTERPOL warrant for his arrest.
Hooker added:
“Other co-conspirators who knew of the inappropriate relationship between Thorsen and Schendel over the seven-year grant history at CDC include Coleen Boyle, Ph.D., former director of the National Center for Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities), and Dr. Marshalyn Yeargin-Allsop, former branch chief of the Developmental Disabilities Branch at the CDC.
“These individuals at a minimum should be brought in for questioning. Both have also been implicated in the MMR-autism fraud from the DeStefano et al. 2004 paper, where data showing a strong relationship between MMR timing and autism in Black boys was illegally destroyed.”
Thorsen’s vaccine-autism studies full of ‘irregularities’
When he first joined the CDC as a visiting scientist, Thorsen’s research focused on birth defects and developmental disabilities.
However, by the early 2000s, Thorsen shifted his focus to autism research. His work in this area left a strong imprint, fueling future narratives that autism isn’t linked to vaccines.
According to a 2017 report by the World Mercury Project — predecessor to Children’s Health Defense (CHD) — Thorsen’s influence on U.S. vaccine projects and policies “is extensive” because his studies were used to dismiss a possible link between vaccines and autism.
One of the most influential studies became known as the “Madsen study,” a population-based study of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism.
Published in 2002 in The New England Journal of Medicine and co-authored by Thorsen, the Madsen study concluded that there is “strong evidence against the hypothesis that MMR vaccination causes autism.”
However, according to the 2017 World Mercury Project report, the Madsen study was “flawed” from the outset because the researchers reviewed clinical records of only 40 of the 316 children who had autism in the study’s cohort.
A peer-reviewed analysis published last year cast further doubt on the study’s conclusions.
In 2003, Madsen and Thorsen co-authored another influential study, published in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. The study did “not support a correlation between thimerosal-containing vaccines and the incidence of autism.”
Thimerosal is a mercury-based adjuvant used in some vaccines, which some scientists and advocates for people with autism have suggested may trigger autism.
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., CHD’s chief scientific officer, said there are “numerous data irregularities” in the Thorsen studies.
In their critique of the 2002 paper, Hooker and Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., CHD senior research scientist, found significant errors in the paper. They concluded the study’s unadjusted results “do not support rejecting the causal link” between the MMR vaccine and autism.
In a critique of the 2003 Madsen-Thorsen study, Hooker and researcher Jeffrey Allen Trelka concluded that the study’s findings “may have been skewed by participant selection and changes in diagnostic groupings.”
Other critiques of the 2002 and 2003 studies raised concerns about ethical considerations. Both studies relied on Danish population data. According to the 2017 World Mercury Project report, the studies bypassed ethical reviews required for this category of research, as required by federal law.
When the CDC discovered Thorsen hadn’t obtained the required ethics approvals, the agency didn’t report the errors, and the studies weren’t retracted. Instead, CDC officials engaged in a cover-up, the 2017 report states.
“Given these irregularities, Thorsen should also be under investigation for data fraud as he clearly withheld data and could have altered data” from Danish official sources, Hooker told The Defender.
Manniche said that if it is proven Thorsen tampered with the data in his studies, it would be a “terrible tragedy,” because “parents were told that the MMR vaccine was safe and sound and that it couldn’t harm the child.”
As of July 31, there were 1,931 reports claiming onset of autism or autism spectrum disorder following MMR vaccination contained within the federally run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
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Will Thorsen sing?
Grundvig suggested that, as part of his plea agreement with prosecutors, Thorsen may have an incentive to provide testimony or information targeting other CDC figures.
“Thorsen’s 65 years old, born in 1961 … does he want to die in an American jail?” Grundvig asked. “I don’t think so. So, I think he wants to make, and will make, a plea deal. The only way he’s going to make a plea deal is with someone like Kennedy and maybe others in the Department of Justice that look at a bigger case,” Grundvig said.
Grundvig suggested this “bigger case” may involve the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act or RICO Act.
“There’s a bigger fraud involved than just stealing money, and I think it goes back to the vaccines, it goes back to the studies that the CDC cooked up,” potentially implicating Schendel and Madsen.
“Will he be used as a star witness against the CDC old guard and all of the shenanigans that went on massaging of science, of science papers, influence on Pediatrics and other journals, in order to get all of this done back in the early 2000s in order to exonerate vaccines and erase the autism signal?” Grundvig asked.
Related articles in The Defender
- Former CDC Autism Scientist Extradited to U.S. on Fraud, Money Laundering Charges
- Fugitive Scientist Behind Vaccine and Autism Studies Arrested for Stealing $1 Million From CDC
- Study Claiming No Link Between Aluminum in Vaccines and Autism Riddled with Flaws, Critics Say
- ‘Numbers Literally Don’t Add Up’: New Peer-Reviewed Analysis Casts Doubt on 2002 Study Claiming No Link Between MMR Vaccine and Autism
- Breaking Up MMR Vaccine Will Benefit Kids — But It Could Be Years Before Single Shots Are Available
