By Brian S. Hooker, Science Advisor, Focus for Health and Board Member, World Mercury Project
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“These same officials have covered up the embezzlement of Federal funds by CDC grantee, Dr. Poul Thorsen as well as the romantic relationship between Thorsen and his CDC grant supervisor, Dr. Diana Schendel. As described by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., this agency is truly “a cesspool of corruption” and should be disqualified from protecting the health of our children.”
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Documents obtained by the Freedom of Information Act indicate that Centers for Disease Control (CDC) officials gave preferential treatment to the Danish grantees (including Dr. Poul Thorsen) at Aarhus University, and took no apparent action to evaluate the veracity of any of the study data when theft of over $1 million of grant money by Thorsen was made known. Furthermore, in 2009, when CDC officials including Dr. Coleen Boyle (Director of the National Center for Birth Defects and Development Disabilities [NCBDDD]), Marshalyn Yeargin-Allsopp (Chief of the Developmental Disabilities Branch), Joanne Wojcik (Public Health Analyst, Developmental Disabilities Branch), and Diana Schendel (former CDC NCBDDD senior epidemiologist) became aware that Thorsen failed to obtain legally required ethics permissions for the autism bio and genetic data projects, these CDC employees worked with the Danish grantees to hide this fact.
These officials have never made public that both the validity of childhood autism in the Danish Psychiatric Central Register (Lauritsen et al. 2010 Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders) and the population-based study of measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination and autism (Madsen et al. 2002 New England Journal of Medicine) studies were conducted and results published without legally-required ethics clearances. They knew that the psychiatric registry records were reviewed without required permissions, a serious ethical violation.
On the 30th of November 2009, Coleen Boyle, Diana Schendel, Joanne Wojcik, and Marshalyn Yeargin-Allsopp, along with Danish grantees, failed to report this serious ethical violation in previously published research, as well as a study near publication. They sought to cover their tracks on their failure to ensure Poul Thorsen had obtained all the needed ethical approvals for autism bio and genetic studies. Two studies were published in which legally required ethical permissions were apparently never applied for and granted, according to their notes. When repeatedly asked to provide them, Thorsen did not.