Guest: Nicole Bell, Galaxy Diagnostics CEO In this episode of Pathobiome Perspectives, we sit down with Nicole Bell — author of What Lurks in the Woods, CEO of Galaxy Diagnostics, and leading advocate for tick-borne and neurodegenerative disease.
This episode is a must watch for anyone suffering or suspecting that they may have Borrelia, Babesia or Bartonella. Nicole’s work sits at the rare intersection of cutting-edge diagnostic science and lived experience. Her family’s story—detailed in her memoir—began as a confusing neurological decline and ultimately became a lesson in how the pathobiome can masquerade as mental health and aging.
Nicole presented at the AlzPI & PCOM Symposium on the topic: “When the brain pathobiome becomes personal.”She shared new results from her late husband Russ’s donated brain including laboratory evidence of Borrelia burgdorferi, Chlamydia pneumoniae, and Babesia otocoli—the latter a parasite historically believed to infect only deer—detected in human brain tissue for the first time.
Elevated heavy metals (lead and mercury) were also identified, highlighting how polymicrobial infection + toxic exposure may fuel neuroinflammatory decline that looks like Alzheimer’s.
Inside the Conversation Nicole discusses:
How repeated “nothing’s wrong” neurology evaluations can mask a complex infection-driven process
The limitations of the standard two-tier Lyme test and why direct detection matters
Why patients with neurological, psychiatric, or cognitive symptoms should consider Bartonella and Babesia—not just Borrelia Bartonella red flags that are often overlooked: Striæ that mimic stretch marks (especially noticeable after heat exposure)
Mood and behavioral changes (irritability, OCD, anxiety, tics)
Visual disturbances and joint issues Fleas and household cats as major non-tick vectors
The need for diagnostic toolkits that identify not just exposure—but activity across pathogens
Looking ahead, Nicole imagines a future where memory loss or personality change prompts a comprehensive screening panel that includes pathogen burden, immune markers, and toxin load—allowing targeted treatment before cognitive decline takes hold.
Why This Conversation Matters Nicole’s voice bridges science and lived experience. Her family’s unimaginable loss is catalyzing a shift in how medicine approaches mystery neurological illness—away from symptom labels and toward precision diagnostics, pathogen-informed care, and early intervention. Her advocacy underscores a core truth emerging across pathobiome research: what looks psychiatric or “idiopathic” may, in fact, be biologically explainable—and treatable—when we look deeper.
Top Medical Journals Label Images of Human Cell Structures as ‘Coronavirus’—‘Misidentified Viral Particles Are Used by Others to Verify the Presence of Viral Particles’: CDC
Years after CDC microscopists documented the misidentifications, the papers remain, raising questions about the evidence used to establish SARS-CoV-2’s physical presence in the human body.
The researchers examined 27 reports that used electron microscopy to identify coronavirus directly in human tissue and found that 23 contained cellular structures misidentified as virus.
“In each case of erroneously identified coronavirus particles,” they wrote, “the structures mistaken for virus are common cellular organelles.”
More than five years later, several of the papers remain published without corrections withdrawing the disputed electron-microscope identifications, including studies claiming direct SARS-CoV-2 infection of the kidney, liver, heart, intestine, and other organs.
The development raises questions about how much of the historical record describing the purported virus’s physical presence and morphology rests on images that were never uniquely identifying. (See link for article and images)
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**Comment**
This is a BIG deal. If everything is built upon false/fraudulent data the entire COVID house of cards falls down. This is true in the case of ‘vaccines’ as well as many other issues.
Former CDC Scientist Whose Studies Were Used to ‘Debunk’ Vaccine-Autism Link Will Plead Guilty
Poul Thorsen, 65, is finalizing a plea deal with prosecutors relating to charges stemming from a 2011 federal indictment charging him with wire fraud and money laundering. Thorsen’s research was used to dismiss over 5,000 claims filed by the parents of children with autism who were injured by vaccines. An assistant U.S. district attorney confirmed that prosecutors are working with Thorsen on a plea deal, but declined to comment for The Defender on details of the deal.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website.
Poul Thorsen screenshot via the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Office of Inspector General YouTube page.
A former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) scientist who played a crucial role in research rebutting any link between vaccines and autism is expected to plead guilty next week to wire fraud and money laundering.
Poul Thorsen, 65, is finalizing a plea deal with prosecutors relating to charges stemming from a 2011 federal indictment, Nathan Kitchens, assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, told The Defender.
Thorsen, who began working for the CDC in the late 1990s, faces two counts of wire fraud and nine counts of money laundering related to over $1 million in CDC grant money. The funds were earmarked for autism and public health research, but Thorsen allegedly used them to buy a home, two cars and a motorcycle.
Kitchens declined to comment on whether Thorsen will plead guilty to all or some of the charges.
Thorsen has been held in federal custody without bail since his extradition from Germany to the U.S. in May. The case is being heard at a federal court in Georgia, where the CDC is headquartered.
Researcher James Grundvig, the parent of a child with autism who was vaccine-injured, called the expected guilty plea “a very big deal.”
Grundvig, who wrote “Master Manipulator: The Explosive True Story of Fraud, Embezzlement, and Government Betrayal at the CDC,” which focused on the Thorsen case, praised U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for extraditing Thorsen “in record speed.”
He said Thorsen likely understands that the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice have “all the goods” to prosecute him.
“I guess Thorsen’s realizing, since he’s in American jail already and has no chance for bail, he might as well make a plea deal,” Grundvig said.
Dr. Dave Weldon, a physician and Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives between 1994 and 2009 — and who President Donald Trump nominated to lead the CDC in late 2024 before retracting his nomination in March 2025 — welcomed the plea agreement but said it isn’t enough.
“It would be a miscarriage of justice if a plea deal failed to include a thorough investigation of allegations of scientific fraud,” Weldon said.
Danish independent vaccine safety researcher Vibeke Manniche, M.D., Ph.D., said some of the federal funds Thorsen is said to have misused may have been intended for vaccine-autism studies. Manniche said the guilty plea calls Thorsen’s research into question.
“An obvious question is whether he also has been cheating with data to achieve the results he sought,” Manniche said. “That we don’t know. A good rule in gold-standard science is replication, and it would be wise, for so many reasons, to replicate his work,” independently of the institutions Thorsen had been affiliated with.
Grundvig noted that the Thorsen indictment included unnamed co-conspirators, suggesting that the investigation may implicate more people — and also the controversial autism research that Thorsen helped publish in 2002 and 2003 that was cited as proof of no link between vaccines and autism.
“I think that’s going to be the second part of the story,” Grundvig said. “It could be an avalanche of bad news for both pharma and the CDC.”
Thorsen studies cited in dismissing over 5,000 vaccine injury claims
Despite questions around how those studies were conducted, the Madsen-Thorsen papers were used in 2011 to dismiss over 5,000 claims filed by the parents of autistic, vaccine-injured children. The claims were part of the Omnibus Autism Proceeding pending before the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.
In “Master Manipulator,” Grundvig — whose son’s case was one of the claims dismissed as a result of Thorsen’s research — described Thorsen as “a world-class villain whose manipulation of health data gave CDC and big pharma what they wanted: a report clearing thimerosal of any possible role in the autism crisis.”
According to Weldon:
“The real crime is not absconding with research dollars, but unresolved allegations around his research which served as the basis for the CDC and the U.S. government dismissing vaccine injury claims by thousands of injured children. These actions set back vaccine safety research by more than two decades.”
Grundvig suggested the Thorsen investigation and his guilty plea may call into question the dismissal of the omnibus cases, as it would “then make all of those vaccine omnibus proceedings completely fraudulent because it was based on a fraud, and that should reopen the cases.”
Hooker, whose omnibus claim for his son was also dismissed, said Thorsen likely didn’t act alone in misusing federal money or misrepresenting vaccine-autism research — and that the role of some of his key collaborators should be examined.
“There should be a separate investigation against Dr. Diana Schendel, who was Thorsen’s direct grant supervisor and lover and approved all of his invoices for expenditures from his CDC grant money. Dr. Schendel undoubtedly knew of Thorsen’s activities but did not report them to the authorities and could have spent some of the stolen grant money as well,” Hooker said.
Schendel maintained an inappropriate romantic relationship with Thorsen and later accepted a position at Denmark’s Aarhus University to lead autism research there. She remains employed at Aarhus University — and at Drexel University — today.
“Other co-conspirators who knew of the inappropriate relationship between Thorsen and Schendel over the seven-year grant history at CDC include Coleen Boyle, Ph.D., former director of the National Center for Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities), and Dr. Marshalyn Yeargin-Allsop, former branch chief of the Developmental Disabilities Branch at the CDC.
“These individuals at a minimum should be brought in for questioning. Both have also been implicated in the MMR-autism fraud from the DeStefano et al. 2004 paper, where data showing a strong relationship between MMR timing and autism in Black boys was illegally destroyed.”
Thorsen’s vaccine-autism studies full of ‘irregularities’
When he first joined the CDC as a visiting scientist, Thorsen’s research focused on birth defects and developmental disabilities.
However, by the early 2000s, Thorsen shifted his focus to autism research. His work in this area left a strong imprint, fueling future narratives that autism isn’t linked to vaccines.
According to a 2017 report by the World Mercury Project — predecessor to Children’s Health Defense (CHD) — Thorsen’s influence on U.S. vaccine projects and policies “is extensive” because his studies were used to dismiss a possible link between vaccines and autism.
One of the most influential studies became known as the “Madsen study,” a population-based study of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism.
Published in 2002 in The New England Journal of Medicine and co-authored by Thorsen, the Madsen study concluded that there is “strong evidence against the hypothesis that MMR vaccination causes autism.”
However, according to the 2017 World Mercury Project report, the Madsen study was “flawed” from the outset because the researchers reviewed clinical records of only 40 of the 316 children who had autism in the study’s cohort.
A peer-reviewed analysis published last year cast further doubt on the study’s conclusions.
In 2003, Madsen and Thorsen co-authored another influential study, published in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. The study did “not support a correlation between thimerosal-containing vaccines and the incidence of autism.”
Thimerosal is a mercury-based adjuvant used in some vaccines, which some scientists and advocates for people with autism have suggested may trigger autism.
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., CHD’s chief scientific officer, said there are “numerous data irregularities” in the Thorsen studies.
In their critique of the 2002 paper, Hooker and Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., CHD senior research scientist, found significant errors in the paper. They concluded the study’s unadjusted results “do not support rejecting the causal link” between the MMR vaccine and autism.
In a critique of the 2003 Madsen-Thorsen study, Hooker and researcher Jeffrey Allen Trelka concluded that the study’s findings “may have been skewed by participant selection and changes in diagnostic groupings.”
Other critiques of the 2002 and 2003 studies raised concerns about ethical considerations. Both studies relied on Danish population data. According to the 2017 World Mercury Project report, the studies bypassed ethical reviews required for this category of research, as required by federal law.
When the CDC discovered Thorsen hadn’t obtained the required ethics approvals, the agency didn’t report the errors, and the studies weren’t retracted. Instead, CDC officials engaged in a cover-up, the 2017 report states.
“Given these irregularities, Thorsen should also be under investigation for data fraud as he clearly withheld data and could have altered data” from Danish official sources, Hooker told The Defender.
Manniche said that if it is proven Thorsen tampered with the data in his studies, it would be a “terrible tragedy,” because “parents were told that the MMR vaccine was safe and sound and that it couldn’t harm the child.”
As of July 31, there were 1,931 reports claiming onset of autism or autism spectrum disorder following MMR vaccination contained within the federally run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
Will Thorsen sing?
Grundvig suggested that, as part of his plea agreement with prosecutors, Thorsen may have an incentive to provide testimony or information targeting other CDC figures.
“Thorsen’s 65 years old, born in 1961 … does he want to die in an American jail?” Grundvig asked. “I don’t think so. So, I think he wants to make, and will make, a plea deal. The only way he’s going to make a plea deal is with someone like Kennedy and maybe others in the Department of Justice that look at a bigger case,” Grundvig said.
Grundvig suggested this “bigger case” may involve the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act or RICO Act.
“There’s a bigger fraud involved than just stealing money, and I think it goes back to the vaccines, it goes back to the studies that the CDC cooked up,” potentially implicating Schendel and Madsen.
“Will he be used as a star witness against the CDC old guard and all of the shenanigans that went on massaging of science, of science papers, influence on Pediatrics and other journals, in order to get all of this done back in the early 2000s in order to exonerate vaccines and erase the autism signal?” Grundvig asked.
Nearly half of all continuing medical education in America is funded by the companies whose products doctors prescribe. IMA Academy is building the alternative.
Every year, the doctors we rely on are required to complete continuing medical education, or CME, to keep their licenses current. Every state medical board demands it. It is how new evidence travels from the journal to the exam room, and for most patients it is entirely invisible. Nobody asks their physician where they earned their last twelve credits, or who paid for the room.
But somebody pays for it, and a great deal of it is paid for by the companies whose products doctors prescribe.
$815 million in direct industry grants
$725 million in advertising and exhibit fees
Roughly $1.5 billion altogether, or 40 cents of every dollar
Taken together, more than 40% of continuing medical education funding comes from pharmaceutical and medical-device companies.
When medical education depends on that kind of money, we have to ask how it influences the subjects being taught, the speakers being elevated, and the treatments being emphasized. Could this help explain why oncologists overlook the potential of repurposed medicines? Or why psychiatrists often reach for the prescription pad before exploring alternatives?
Continuing medical education was once largely a profession teaching itself, led by medical societies, universities, and hospitals. Its purpose was simple: keep physicians current and improve patient care. By the mid-2000s, industry supplied about half its funding, and a Senate investigation found drug companies using educational grants to build markets and influence what doctors were taught.
We are building the long-overdue independent alternative: accredited courses taught by independent physicians, with no pharmaceutical or medical-device sponsorship.
Donors make that possible by funding course development, the accreditation work behind every credit, independent faculty who answer to evidence rather than sponsors, and free public access.
The World Health Organization (WHO) says evidence that a person is actually sick is not required for a “laboratory-confirmed” human influenza infection with “the potential to cause a pandemic” to trigger mandatory international reporting.
WHO says countries must “immediately notify WHO of any laboratory-confirmed case of a recent human infection caused by an influenza A virus with the potential to cause a pandemic.”
(See link for article)
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**Comment**
This ‘Laboratory-confirmed’ finding is based on PCR which doesn’t directly observe a virus.
Now, following in a similar ugly vein, the WHO says you don’t even have to show ANY evidence of illness for them to blow your world up by declaring a ‘pandemic,’ and shutting down businesses, schools, etc.
Have we truly learned nothing from the COVID experiment?
