CDC autism researcher Poul Thorsen extradited from Germany to face federal grant fraud charges

ATLANTA — Poul Thorsen, a 65-year-old Danish researcher once listed among the top ten most wanted fugitives of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, was arraigned May 8 in federal court here on charges that he stole more than $1 million from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention research grant, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia. Thorsen was flown into U.S. custody on May 7 and is being held without bail before U.S. Magistrate Judge J. Elizabeth McBath.

Thorsen was arrested in Passau, Germany on June 4, 2025, on an INTERPOL Red Notice tied to an April 2011 federal arrest warrant. Germany agreed earlier this year to extradite him on two counts of wire fraud and nine counts of money laundering. The case was the subject of an interview on The Kim Monson Show on May 13 with James Lyons-Weiler, the founder of IPAK, the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge.

The 2011 indictment

A federal grand jury in Atlanta returned the original 22-count indictment against Thorsen on April 13, 2011, charging him with 13 counts of wire fraud and 9 counts of money laundering, according to the original DOJ press release. The wire fraud counts carried a maximum of 20 years in prison each; the money laundering counts a maximum of 10 years, with a possible fine of up to $250,000 per count. Germany’s extradition this year was approved on a narrower set of 11 counts.

From 2000 to 2009, the CDC’s Division of Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities awarded more than $11 million to two Danish governmental agencies to study the relationship between autism and exposure to vaccines, the link between cerebral palsy and maternal infection, and the effects of fetal alcohol exposure on childhood development. In 2002, Thorsen, who had worked as a visiting scientist inside the CDC’s birth defects division while those grants were being solicited, became principal investigator responsible for administering the Danish portion of the money.

According to the DOJ, from February 2004 through June 2008 Thorsen submitted more than a dozen fraudulent invoices bearing the forged signature of a CDC laboratory section chief. The invoices, on CDC letterhead, claimed a CDC laboratory had performed work and was owed reimbursement. On the strength of those invoices, Aarhus University transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars to accounts at the CDC Federal Credit Union that the university believed belonged to the CDC. Prosecutors say the accounts were personal accounts held by Thorsen, who allegedly withdrew the funds to buy a home in Atlanta, a Harley Davidson motorcycle, an Audi, and a Honda, along with cashier’s checks. In the DOJ announcement, HHS-OIG Special Agent in Charge Kelly Blackmon called the alleged conduct “a serious breach of law and profound betrayal of public trust.”

Why this case matters beyond grant fraud

Lyons-Weiler argued on air that the indictment is only the surface of the story. He noted that Thorsen is listed as the fourth author on the 2003 Pediatrics paper “Thimerosal and the occurrence of autism: negative ecological evidence from Danish population-based data,” and as the sixth author on the 2002 New England Journal of Medicine paper “A population-based study of measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination and autism.” Both papers are routinely cited as evidence against a vaccine-autism link.

“There’s supposedly study after study that shows the vaccines do not cause autism. We’ve heard it in the media. We’ve heard it hundreds of times,” Lyons-Weiler told Kim Monson. He went on, later in the segment: “But what would happen if you turn state’s evidence? Is there a publication defense chain here? Are there other people involved?”

Lyons-Weiler argued that the same Danish research program that produced those papers is the program the DOJ now describes as the vehicle for fraudulent invoicing, and that the pattern raises questions about what colleagues at the CDC knew. He pointed listeners to Master Manipulator, by James Ottar Grundvig, that he said “names names of people who were involved.” The DOJ has not alleged that Thorsen’s published research findings were fabricated. ABC News, in its May 8 coverage, noted that “decades of research has found no link between autism and vaccines or any vaccine preservative” and that “Thorsen was indicted on wire fraud and money laundering, not for falsifying medical research.”

The CDC personnel Lyons-Weiler named

Lyons-Weiler named three former CDC officials he sees as part of what he called a “publication defense chain.” The first was Frank DeStefano, who directed the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office from 2009 to 2021 and was lead author of a 2004 Atlanta-area MMR study later challenged by CDC senior scientist William W. Thompson in a whistleblower statement. DeStefano joined the CDC in 1982 as a senior epidemiologist on the agency’s Agent Orange projects, part of the Vietnam Experience Study that produced a three-part series in JAMA on May 13, 1988. Lyons-Weiler argues that those CDC papers helped clear Agent Orange of harm, a finding veterans’ groups have contested since publication.

The second was Coleen A. Boyle, longtime director of the CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities and a co-author with DeStefano on the 2004 MMR study. The third was Walter A. Orenstein, who led the CDC’s National Immunization Program from May 1993 to January 2004 and later served as a deputy director of immunization programs at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Lyons-Weiler told Kim Monson that Orenstein “is on the record of telling the Institutes of Medicine that they should not find, no matter what they look at, no matter what data they found, that vaccines are associated with autism.” That characterization is contested. It is offered here as his analysis of the CDC’s posture before the Institute of Medicine’s Immunization Safety Review Committee, not as a documented Orenstein quotation.

Lyons-Weiler also alluded, without naming her, to former CDC Director Julie Gerberding, who led the agency from 2002 to 2009 and became president of Merck’s vaccines division in December 2009, according to her public record. “That’s regulatory capture,” he said, “where you go get a job after you do the bidding of your corporate masters in a government job.” Her CDC-to-Merck career path is a matter of public record; the inference that she influenced CDC science before leaving is his.

What’s next

Thorsen remains in federal custody in the Northern District of Georgia, facing two counts of wire fraud and nine counts of money laundering. The DOJ press release reminds the public that “the indictment only contains charges. The defendant is presumed innocent of the charges, and it will be the government’s burden to prove the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt at trial.”

Lyons-Weiler offered a prediction. He told Kim Monson he believes Thorsen will turn state’s evidence, framing it explicitly as “my understanding, my belief.” Whether prosecutors move in that direction will be tested in coming weeks. What is already on the record, after 15 years, is that the U.S. government has the man it indicted in 2011 inside an Atlanta courthouse.