Two US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”) studies of the autism rate in Denmark in the 90s: the first one, produced by admitted felon Poul Thorsen, says the autism rate increased from 1995 to 2000, which was then used to claim there is no connection between giving infants mercury in vaccines and autism; the second study found that the autism rate in Denmark not only decreased from 1995 to 2000, but was more than 10 times higher than the rate claimed by Thorsen. At least one of these studies is bogus.
Thorsen was a Danish researcher hired by the CDC in 1999 to do a series of studies, including several on the role of vaccines causing autism. He was indicted for embezzling more than $1 million from the CDC and other crimes by a US federal court in 2011. He lived openly in Denmark, where he was an instructor at Aarhus University, but was finally arrested and extradited to the US in 2025. Yesterday he pleaded guilty.
The first study, ‘Thimerosal and the Occurrence of Autism: Negative Ecological Evidence from Danish Population-Based Data’, a widely publicised and highly influential study released in 2003, claimed that mercury in vaccines played no role in causing autism because the rate of autism in Danish children increased after mercury was removed from Danish-produced vaccines in 1992.
Another CDC study, ‘Recurrence of Autism Spectrum Disorders in Full- and Half-Siblings and Trends Over Time: A Population-Based Cohort Study’, led by Therese K. Gronborg and released in 2013, however, shows the exact opposite: that the rate of autism in Danish children decreased after mercury was removed. And if the increasing rate of autism claimed in the earlier study showed that mercury had no role in causing autism, then logic would also require that the rate of autism going down, as shown in the current study, indicates that mercury in vaccines may very well have a great deal to do with causing autism.
Hellbound and Down 