Co-Author On Danish Autism Vaccine Study Pleads Guilty To $1 Million Wire Fraud

Paul Thorsen, a Danish researcher who co-wrote papers showing no link between vaccines and autism, has pleaded guilty to fraud more than 15 years after he was initially indicted. In April 2011, Thorsen was indicted on 13 counts of wire fraud and 9 counts of money laundering tied to $1 million in CDC grants that he used to buy a home, a Harley-Davidson, an Audi, and a Honda.

“Poul Thorsen ran a multi-year fraud scheme to cheat the CDC, diverting valuable federal grant money to service his greed and inflated lifestyle,” said U.S. Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg. “His fraud was especially reprehensible because he stole public funds that had been earmarked for research related to infant disabilities and birth defects. After evading justice for more than 14 years, Thorsen will finally be held accountable in a federal prison cell and ordered to pay full restitution to the CDC.”

Thorsen took $1 million of a total of $11 million in CDC grants, including funds earmarked for research on vaccines and autism. Between February 2004 and June 2008, Thorsen submitted more than a dozen fraudulent invoices with the forged signature of a CDC lab section chief. Thorsen pleaded guilty to wire fraud on September 1, 2026, and is scheduled for sentencing on December 1, 2026.

Thorsen was a co-author on two of the most prominent studies mentioned in the discussion of whether there is a link between vaccines and autism. The first was Madsen et al. (2002), a landmark cohort study tracking 537,303 children born in Denmark that found no link between the MMR vaccine and autism. It has been a key study in the 2014 Taylor et al. meta-analysis and the Cochrane Systematic Review.

Thorsen was also a co-author on Madsen et al. (2003), a Pediatrics paper that focused on thimerosal as an ingredient and found no association between the ingredient and autism. This study has been referenced in later work such as the 2014 meta analysis and the Cochrane/WHO reviews about the connection between vaccines and autism.

Science.org cited a 2010 Philadelphia Inquirer report that is no longer available, stating that the senior and lead authors of the autism vaccine papers dismissed any potential for Thorsen’s contributions to have skewed the study’s results. The researchers have made no other comments about Thorsen’s role in the widely cited research.

Mainstream media reports on the fraud case involving Thorsen are limited, from the 2010 and 2011 investigation and indictment to the 2025 arrest and the 2026 extradition and guilty plea. USA Today published a story in May discussing the extradition and the call to re-evaluate the work Thorsen was involved in. The article doesn’t suggest anything regarding the particular research Thorsen co-authored, but said the CDC prior to the current Trump administration maintained that there was “no link between vaccines and autism.”

USA Today also points out the current “controversial” investigation by the CDC into a potential connection between vaccines and autism while linking to an updated CDC page that does not counter the statement that “vaccines do not cause autism.” In November 2025, the CDC updated the page to add some key points, including “the claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”

The website also states “studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities” and that a comprehensive assessment of the causes of autism is underway, including plausible biologic mechanisms and potential causal links.

The CDC points out that approximately half of surveyed parents of autistic children believe vaccines played a role in their children’s autism and that reports from HHS and the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine have refuted the often stated CDC claim that “vaccines do not cause autism.” The current CDC website claims the CDC was in violation of the Data Quality Act (DQA) for making this statement without any specific studies to support the claim that DTaP, HepB, Hib, IPV, and PCV do not cause autism. IOM concluded in 1991 and 2012, while the HHS Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality concluded in 2014 and 2021, that there is insufficient evidence to accept or reject a correlation between the DTAP/TDAP/TD vaccine and autism.

The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 required the Secretary of HHS to complete a review evaluating potential links between pertussis vaccines and autism. That is why the agency has reported specifically about pertussis vaccines and no evidence to accept or reject a correlation with autism. HHS, under the leadership of Secretary Kennedy, has gone a step further to search for any evidence that supports a causal link for other vaccines on the childhood schedule. The agency has currently concluded there is insufficient evidence related to DTaP, HepB, Hib, IPV, and PCV.

Aaron Siri, lead attorney for the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), deposed the “Godmother of vaccines,” Kathryn Edwards, about studies supporting the statements about vaccines not causing autism. She affirmed that there has been no study to evaluate whether vaccines on the childhood schedule, other than MMR, cause autism. ICAN also sued the CDC in 2020 to obtain studies regarding the five vaccines referenced by the CDC website today – DTaP, HepB, Hib, IPV, and PCV. The CDC provided 20 studies, but they only referenced the MMR vaccine or thimerosal as a vaccine ingredient. None of the studies mentioned the five childhood vaccines in question.

In a 2016 panel titled, “Achieving Childhood Vaccine Success in the US,” Paul Offit said “you can never really say MMR doesn’t cause autism, but frankly when you get in front of the media you better get used to saying it, because otherwise people hear a door being left open when a door shouldn’t be left open.” Offit was explaining that a null hypothesis like “vaccines do not cause autism” cannot be proven, it can only be rejected. The absence of something cannot be proven scientifically under all circumstances, so it would always be false to claim that “X does not cause Y.”

Thorsen’s guilty plea for fraud is specifically for wire fraud and no specific fraud allegations have been made regarding the scientific studies he co-authored. Jablonowski and Hooker reanalyzed the 2002 Danish cohort study in 2025 and said the study’s “unadjusted results do not support rejecting the causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism.” The authors added, “The summary statistics and errors in the original publication warrant the release of the raw data. Madsen et al. is a cornerstone publication that forms the basis of the claim that vaccines do not cause autism, and thus, correctness and transparency need to be ensured.”

Jefferey Jaxen reported on The HighWire in May following Thorsen’s extradition that there is precedent for the retraction of scientific papers after individuals are involved in financial fraud schemes.