The astonishing TRUE story of a CDC criminal conspiracy and the international fugitive from justice who faked vaccine research

If you don’t know the story of Poul Thorsen, CDC vaccine researcher, fraudster, con artist and international fugitive from justice, you don’t know the real story about the CDC at all. (And the vaccine industry hopes you never find out…)

The best book on this subject is called Master Manipulator – The Explosive True Story of Fraud Embezzlement and Government Betrayal at the CDC by James Ottar Grundvig. You can find the book at this Barnes & Noble link.

The book features a foreward by famed investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson and an introduction by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. from the World Mercury Project.

I strongly urge you to get this book. Amazon.com also has it available in hardcover or kindle editions.

Every member of Congress should be required to read this book. It’s that explosive. It tells the shocking but true story of deep corruption and criminality inside the CDC… a story the entire corporate-run media (CNN, NYT, WashPo etc.) deliberately covers up to deceive the American public.

Here, I’m reprinting the Foreward and Introduction to give you a taste of what you’ll find in the book. What you’re about to read here will astonish and anger you because it pulls back the veil on a criminal cabal known as the CDC that’s engaged in a felony racketeering operation that should be investigated under RICO Act laws.

Read on and decide for yourself… (if you cite any of the text below, be sure to give credit to the book called “Master Manipulator” by James Ottar Grundvig).

FOREWORD BY SHARYL ATTKISSON

Today fraudulent research and corruption are sadly becoming more commonplace. The case of Poul Thorsen, for example, stands out in terms of shameless audacity—stealing grant money meant for autism research. His actions only add to the questions of alleged corruption surrounding the Danish Studies designed to erase any association between vaccines and autism, sponsored by the world’s premier public health agency: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

One might expect fraud and corruption in government, but many Americans will be surprised to hear of it inside the CDC, the same agency that fumbled the arrival of Ebola virus on US shores in 2014. The fact that the CDC would contract with the likes of Dr. Thorsen on crucial research of vaccines and autism, and never consider setting aside his findings after his twenty-two-count criminal indictment, speaks to the waning credibility of the world’s premiere public health agency.

INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

Statistics don’t lie, the saying goes, but statisticians do. As an environmental lawyer and veteran of hundreds of legal battles with some of the world’s biggest polluters, I know that statistical—or epidemiological studies—are the go-to weapon of industry junk scientists. These hired guns—so called tobacco scientists—know that “fixing the science” or an epidemiological study is as easy as lighting up a smoke. For example, one could easily design an epidemiological study to “prove” that sex does not make one pregnant. The trick is simply to get rid of all the pregnant people before one analyzes the data. Now you have a study that shows lots of people having sex without consequence. Voila! That’s one of the many tricks CDC’s star biostitute, Poul Thorsen, used to deceive the public about the evidence linking mercury laced vaccines to autism. Prior to conducting his MMR study, Thorsen used “exclusions” to eliminate children with autism from the target population. Employing this and an inventory of other magician subterfuges, Thorsen authored a Danish study that CDC, for years, has been presenting as its gold standard evidence that thimerosal doesn’t cause autism.

This is a story of how CDC used a con man to gull the public and ended up getting conned itself! Poul Thorsen is 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. His story merits a book length expose because the fraud he casually helped orchestrate has had a monumental impact on the health of millions of children globally.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) most often cites Poul Thorsens crooked research as the final word on the controversy linking vaccines to autism. CDC rarely mentions that Poul Thorsen is the subject of a twenty-two-count, 2011 indictment by the U.S. Department of justice for wire fraud and money laundering in connection with more than $1 million in research grants that he pilfered from CDC while he ginned up fraudulent studies to “prove” that vaccines don’t cause autism.1 His crimes have won him a mug shot on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) “most wanted” list.2 Thorsen’s former employer, Aarhus University—Denmark’s university hospital system—permanently expelled him from practice in 2010.The fact that he is roaming free in Denmark and is easy to find, despite the federal indictment, indicates a lack of enthusiasm by HHS to file the necessary extradition papers and press for his capture. The agency has good reason to fear that a public trial would expose the pervasive corruption throughout CDC’s vaccine division and the fragility of the science supporting CDC’s claims about vaccine safety.

Dr. Thorsen is one of seven co-authors and the data manager for the two leading foreign studies offered by CDC as the foundation for its claims that vaccines do not cause autism. For nearly a decade, critics have pointed out that CDC’s Danish studies are thinly veiled flimflam.3 Besides employing the threadworm gimmick of manipulating exclusions to selectively eliminate kids, on some studies, with autism diagnoses from the study pool,Thorsen and his co-author used another novel dodge to “exculpate” mercury-laced vaccines. Thorsen’s trick was not even a sophisticated brand of junk science, but it was a devastatingly effective way to deliver the conclusion CDC wanted. Thorsen’s Madsen et al. 2003 (“Madsen 2003”),4 purported to exonerate thimerosal—the mercury-based vaccine preservative as the causative agent in the autism epidemic by showing that autism rates in Denmark increased after the Danish government removed thimerosal from vaccines in 1992.5 But even the most casual critic could see that the increase in Danish autism was illusory since it was not actually based on an increased incidence of the disease. It was simply an artifact of Denmark’s new reporting protocols.

Here’s how Thorsen and his cronies pulled off this fraud: In 1993, the same year Denmark removed thimerosal-containing vaccines from distribution, it coincidentally required, for the first time, that outpatient autism cases be reported on the government s national disease registry. Prior to 1993, only inpatient cases were reported. These represented less than 10 percent of the total. Denmark’s new reporting protocols increased the reported autism incidence cases by nearly 1300 percent. Dr.Thorsen and his pals took advantage of that artificial rise to suggest that real autism incidence had increased following thi-merosal’s ban.The authors also violated established peer-review scientific protocols by deleting the entire 2001-year class of seven-year-olds from the final published version.6 That deletion was flagrant research fraud. The 2001 cohort was the first to be entirely free from thimerosal exposure in their vaccines. The subsequent analysis (Gronborg et al. 2013) of that data showed a steady decline in autism rates over a ten-year period following the removal of thimerosal in 1992.

Emails obtained under the Freedom of Information laws show that Thorsen, his co-authors, and CDC officials were all aware of these frauds when they published the study. Responsible journals, including Lancet and JAMA, rejected the Madsen study. It took a letter from the CDC’s Jose Cordero, then director of its new National Center for Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities (NCBDDD),7 to strong-arm a lesser journal, Pediatrics, to finally publish the study. Pediatrics has earned notoriety as a frequent publisher of vaccine industry junk science. Pediatrics raises a substantial portion of its operating budget from vaccine makers. Pediatrics is the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is notorious for its conflicts with big donors. In 2016, the AAP was forced to drop its multi-million donor, Coca-Cola, as it’s only “gold sponsor.” In exchange for $3 million over six years, AAP had been shilling for the sugary drink maker, which it called a distinguished company due to Coke’s commitment to “better the health of children worldwide. AAP only ended the mercenary romance when published exposes disclosed that Coke had been paying hired scientists to fix the science to “prove” that sugary drinks were not the culprit in the obesity epidemic.

At the 2007 National Academy of Sciences/Institute of Medicine (IOM) meeting, “Autism and the Environment: Challenges and Opportunity for Research,” Dr. Irva Hertz-Picciotti, an internationally renowned environmental epidemiologist from the University of California, Davis, criticized the Madsen 2003 study for deliberately blurring outpatient and inpatient data sets: “The study, therefore is not a rigorous design, because you cannot compare the before and after periods because of artifacts in how the database was constructed, and specifically how it changed over time.” When CDC scientists finally took an authentic look at the Danish autism data a decade later, they demolished the conclusions in Madsen 2003. CDC’s subsequent study, Gronborg et al. 2013, published in JAMA Pediatrics8 directly contradicted Thorsen and Madsen. Gronborg and her co-authors found a 33 percent drop in autism spectrum disorder incidence in Denmark following the withdrawal of thimerosal in 1992.

Thorsen was also data manager for Kreesten Madsen’s companion study on the MMR vaccine, Madsen et al 2002.9 That study used similar deceptive statistical devices and flawed data to “prove” MMR safety.10 That study employed CDC’s trademark ruse of including many children who were too young to receive the autism diagnosis, which at that point usually occurred at age four in Denmark. CDC epidemiologists have consistently used this ploy in their phony autism research to dampen the autism signal in various studies.The 2002 Madsen MMR study also included a substantial number of unvaccinated children and employed a suite of other statistical gimmicks to mask the association with the MMR vaccine and dampen the autism signal.

Having trained in CDC’s sophisticated fraud during his apprenticeship with the two notorious Madsen studies, it’s no wonder that Poul Thorsen felt so at ease stealing more than $1 million that CDC had directed Thorsen to spend on managing data for those and other studies.

As James Grundvig brilliantly points out in the pages that follow, without Poul Thorsen, there would have been no Danish studies for the CDC to misuse all these years as the spear tip for its propaganda campaign on vaccine safety.

However, Grundvig gives us more; Thorsen was not a lone bad apple. Grundvig shows that CDC insiders, including Dr. Frank DeStefano (Director of the Immunization Safety Office); Dr. Marshalyn-Yeargin-Allsopp (Head of the Developmental Disabilities Branch); Dr. Diana Schendel, a CDC epidemiologist research scientist and Thorsen s longtime girlfriend, who in 2014 took a permanent position in the epidemiology department at Aarhus University, where Thorsen committed the theft of autism research money; and Dr. Coleen Boyle (Director of the National Center for Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities) fully supported and orchestrated Thorsen s fraud. Boyle made her bones at CDC as lead investigator of 1984-1987 Congressional investigation of Agent Orange. In that post, Boyle and her team reported “no association” between the jungle defoliant dioxin and the grim inventory of rare cancers and autoimmune diseases that sickened tens of thousands of U.S. troops who fought in the war. Her work allowed the government to deny benefits and treatment for sickened soldiers for five years. In 1990, the Pentagon admitted during congressional hearings that Agent Orange was indeed the culprit.Today, Boyle is the director of CDC’s National Center for Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. According to Dr. William Thompson, a seventeen-year CDC senior vaccine safety scientist and current CDC employee who recently filed for whistleblower status, Boyle and her team of researchers committed research fraud in a subsequent 2004 American study to conceal numbers suggesting that the MMR vaccine was associated with higher rates of autism in African-American children.

Poul Thorsen, the Master Manipulator, is the dark wizard of a federal agency that is steeped in corruption and compromised by financial entanglements with the pharmaceutical industry. Thorsen participated in a criminal conspiracy with his CDC bosses to distort science and fleece the American taxpayer. He then turned on his cronies and stole the money CDC paid him to conjure up his phony research. Thorsen’s greatest crime, however, is the epidemic of millions of children with developmental disabilities who are the legacy of his fraud.

Dr. Poul Thorsen should be arrested and brought back to the United States to stand trial and receive justice. If that happens, we might see those in the CDC who sponsored his fraud be held finally accountable.

1    “United States of America vs. Poul Thorsen” indictment, U.S. DOJ, April 13, 2011.

2    https://oig.hhs.gov/fraud/fugitives/profiles.asp

3    “Methodological Issues and Evidence of Malfeasance in Research Purporting to Show Thimerosal in Vaccines Is Safe,” Brian Hooker et ah, BioMed Research International,Vol. 2014.

4    “Thimerosal and the Occurrence of Autism: Negative Ecological Evidence From Danish Population-Based Data,” Kreesten Madsen etal., Pediatrics, September 1, 2003.

5    Dr. M. Hasse Letter to Commission of the European Communities, Committee for Proprietary Medicine Products, Re: “Organic Mercury Compounds as Antimicrobial Preservatives in Immunoglobulins,” January 22, 1992.

6    CDC internal email: “Application Tech Review” from Diana Schendel to Tom Horne, November 16, 2003.

7    CDC Letter from NCBDDD Director Jose Cordero to Jerold F. Lucey, Editor-in-Chief Journal Pediatrics, December 10,2002.

8    “Recurrence of Autism Spectrum Disorders in Full- and Half-Siblings and Trends Over Time A Population-Based Cohort Study,” Therese K. Groenberg et al,,JAMA Pediatrics, August 12,2013.

9    “A Population-Based Study of Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccination and Autism,” Kreesten Madsen et al., New England Journal of Medicine, November 7,2002.

10    “An Investigation of the Association Between MMR Vaccination and Autism in Denmark,” G. S. Goldman and F. E. Yazbak, Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons,Vol. 9, Number 3, Fall 2004.

Read more in Master Manipulator – The Explosive True Story of Fraud Embezzlement and Government Betrayal at the CDC by James Ottar Grundvig. You can find the book at this Barnes & Noble link.