This week’s g-oldie is a name in the antivaxxer conspiracy theory files from a decade or more ago. Poul Thorsen is a Danish fellow accused of funneling US government public health research money to himself for private expenditure. He also happens to be an author on a 2013 Danish study finding no link between autism and vaccines that sent longtime anti-vaxxer RFK the Lesser into a tizzy back in 2015, when the current HHS Secretary made these wild claims about the researcher, and the study itself [all sic, and I mean, all]:

The authors have acknowledged that the so called “Madsen Study” employed deceptive data to make it wrongly appear that autism rates increased after the Danes removed Thimerosal from vaccines in 1993. Poul Thorsen, the study’s principle investigator and CDC’s primary contact, was fired from his post at Andhaus University and is now on the run from Interpol, having stolen at least a million dollars in research monies from CDC.

Give you one entire guess as to why it’s called the “Madsen Study.” Yep. That’s because the first author – and thus one of two candidates for “principle investigator” on the author list (the other is the last-listed author) — bears the last name of Madsen.

Madsen, not Thorsen. As I noted at the time over at Forbes, Thorsen was not the study’s “principle” investigator but rather was the fourth of seven authors on the publication, which in academic publishing is the equivalent of being invisible, and definitely not a “principle” investigator on the study. At the time, amid a list of several ignorant or deliberately untrue things Kennedy the Lesser had said, I wrote:

Surely Kennedy, having written a purportedly scientific book, knows that the names of “principle investigators” on studies are listed either first (first author) or last (senior author and the person with the funding). This paper has not been retracted, and there is no note associated with it of the authors’ having “acknowledged” using “deceptive data."

More than 10 years on, and despite non-scientist, non-researcher RFK the Lesser’s outrage, the paper still has not been retracted and still bears no erratum or other acknowledgment of “deceptive data.”

Meanwhile, Kennedy’s claim that Thorsen was on the run from Interpol was silly, as I easily discovered Thorsen’s location through an online search that turned up reporters on his doorstep, as I wrote in a different piece for Forbes. Back then, Thorsen was “currently reported by the Office of the Inspector General, US Department of Health and Human Services, to be “in Denmark” and “awaiting extradition to the United States.”

Welp, at long last, the man’s been extradited. The Detroit Free Press reported May 9 that Thorsen had been arrested in Germany in May 2025 and was finally transported to Atlanta this past week on May 7. He’s charged with “allegedly [stealing] more than $1 million of the CDC grant money by submitting fraudulent documents to the Danish government, Aarhus University (not “Andhaus”), and a Danish hospital where scientists performed research under the grant.”

Thorsen allegedly lived it up in Atlanta on the funds he diverted, the government alleges, “buying a home in Atlanta, a Harley Davidson motorcycle, and Audi and Honda vehicles.”

If he’s guilty of these crimes, I hope he gets the consequences he deserves, and not just out of a sense of justice for theft of our taxpayer dollars. Thorsen’s allegedly criminal doings, committed while simultaneously reinforcing the lack of causality between autism and vaccines, supplied rhetorical ammunition to the likes of RFK the Lesser, and was one factor in making the latter currently able to waste millions of our taxpayer dollars on bullshit claims about vaccines and autism, with immeasurable negative consequences for public health and autistic people.

News you can use

• I’ve been writing for years that ABA is a self-perpetuating, self-aggrandizing industry with dedicated journals to publish ABA-supportive “research” and in-games with insurers to keep the money-making cycle spinning. They’ve infiltrated every aspect of growing up autistic in the United States, shoved into parents’ faces from the first hint of a diagnosis and typically the only kind of support insurance will cover. So color me whatever color “not remotely shocked” is to read this report that “a new study [has] found that 93% of conflict-of-interest disclosures in ABA autism intervention research were false.” The study, led by Kristen Bottema-Beutel at Boston College, is a follow-up on a previous study hinting at these conflicts. The new study shows that:

  Seventy-eight percent of authors held clinical or consultancy conflicts of interest:

  • They were paid ABA providers, paid ABA consultants, or both.

  • Ninety-three percent of studies had at least one such author.

  • Only 8% of studies disclosed any conflicts.

  • Of all statements claiming no conflicts of interest, 93% were false.

• As I wrote about extensively in my recent book on autism and adolescence, transition planning for autistic young people should be done with them, not for them. A new study bears out this emphasis on co-design: “Transition should be undertaken with, not for, young people by co-designing goals that matter with all young people, including those with ID. Planning should be structured and accessible, linking short-term goals to explicit future goals. Trusted relationships should be maintained throughout changes in support.”

• This just in, again: A systematic review published in BMJ finds that aluminum in vaccines isn’t associated with anything except doing the thing it’s intended to do as an adjuvant, which is to boost the immune response.

• The current sometime occupant of the Oval Office shows once again that he’s never been present for the vaccination of any of his children. This time, the big tell is that he thinks vaccines for infants are administered with big needles linked to a “vat … a big glass of stuff.” He also said “I would love to see much smaller shots, like four visits to the doctor. And I think you would have a much better result with the autism.”

  You aren’t allowed to make things up anymore, so I am also not making up that he said all of this to Sharyl “the government hacked my computers” Attkisson, who has descended from CBS back when it was a real journalism outfit to conducting interviews like this one for a show distributed by the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Attkisson is another blast from the vaccines–autism past that we’d rather not have seen again.

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People

• Samantha Aubrey Chipman is an autistic PhD candidate in English also pursuing a certificate in bioethics at Emory University. She has written a commentary for the American Journal of Bioethics on co-creating healthcare spaces for neurodivergent flourishing. Her commentary is related to a call in another paper in the journal for shifting to more outpatient, individualized, and community-based resources in these cases and away from inpatient hospitalization.

Thanks for reading, and let’s all be glad that not one of us has to be vaccinated with giant needles attached to vats.

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